29th November 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

'That’s the way the money goes…….'

        .  I was mildly surprised last week to get a communication from H.M. Revenue and Customs telling me, in some detail, how much money I had paid to the government in income tax during the last financial year and how that money had been spent. To make sure that I read it, the document announced in bold print This is for your information.  You do not need to contact us as this is not a demand for payment.   That was quite a relief.   

          It really was an admirable, easily readable and enlightening document and I understand that all income-tax payers will get one every future year.  On the one side was a summary of my taxable income during that year (state pension plus public service pension), how much of it was subject to income tax at the basic rate (20 percent), how much had been deducted from my total income and how much was left.

            On the other side was an estimate of how my contribution had been divided among fifteen sources of public spending.  The biggest was Welfare to which I had, so it seems contributed £513 and the very least (which must come as a surprise to Ukippers) was £24 for overseas aid and just £16 towards the UK’s contribution to the EU budget.  I don’t grudge a penny of it because I know that I’m extremely fortunate to have an income large enough to be liable for income tax.  By its very nature the payment of income tax, which is a relatively small percentage of total income, never has, nor ever could, result in homelessness or serious deprivation to anyone.

            But, of course, income tax is by no means the only way in which the government extracts money from our bank accounts, wallets and purses.  During the Thatcher years and continued by New Labour there was a shift from ‘direct taxation’ – income tax and death duties – to indirect taxation (they’re called ‘stealth taxes’ by political parties when in opposition!) such as VAT and customs duties.  They are regarded as ‘fairer’ by the wealthy because they do not depend on ability to pay.  The ‘rich man in his castle’ pays exactly the same amount of VAT on most goods or services and exactly the same customs duties on his petrol or bottle of Scotch as ‘the poor man at his gate’.  It will, of course, be a much larger percentage of the poor man’s income than that of the rich man – but that’s just his tough luck.

            Often we’re hardly aware that we’re paying 20 percent more on our bills for goods or services and that that 20 percent is going to the government in Value Added Tax (VAT).  When it’s a big bill though, we become aware of it.  A couple of years ago, for instance, I had to replace my existing central heating boiler with a new one.  Taking out the old boiler and fitting the new one cost £3,000.  Twenty percent of £3,000 is quite a lot of money and I bitterly resented having to pay the government for having carried out essential work on my home.  It would, of course, have been exactly the same had I paid for mending a leaking roof or repaired a car or a bike needed for work!  That extra 20 percent is just petty cash to the millionaire banker with his Rolls.  It’s a lot more than that to the workman with his car or bike

VAT is the most obvious indirect, or ‘stealth’ tax, but it is by no means the only one.  We contribute to the government’s coffers whenever  we fill up our car with petrol, buy a packet of cigarettes, some cigars or some tobacco, buy a glass, bottle or can of beer, cider, wine, whisky or any other alcoholic drink,  take a flight in an aircraft whether on holiday or for business, or are silly enough to buy a lottery ticket or a scratch card in the vain hope of winning the fortune that we know we’ll never acquire by hard work.  That’s how it is that someone who pays little or no income tax may in fact pay a bigger percentage of his or her meagre income back to the government than does a fat-cat higher-rate income tax payer.  I am not a teetotaller but I no longer drive a car and no longer fly away on holiday.  I don’t smoke and I have never bought, nor do I intend ever to buy, either a scratch card or a lottery ticket.  I don’t avoid indirect taxes altogether (that must be really difficult!) but I have reduced my payments to a bare minimum.  

Indirect taxation barely gets a mention in the Annual Tax Summary that I have received.  I am advised ‘For more information or for a list of indirect taxes such as VAT go to our web site; www.gov.uk/annual-tax-summary.  That yields little more information that the fact that VAT is currently 20 percent but that there is a lower rate for some items and other items, of food for instance, are VAT exempt.

One small piece of information on the Annual Tax Summary that particularly interested me is that the amount that I paid in income tax during the year was just 10 percent of my taxable income, so that for every £1 of taxable income I paid 10p in income tax.   That’s a tenth (or as they used to say ‘a tithe’) of my income – and that’s the proportion of everyone’s income that the medieval church expected to receive from from its members.  It is interesting to reflect on the fact that the medieval church then undertook many of the responsibilities that we now consider are those of the government – education, helping the poor, the provision of hospital services for instance – as well as, so it was believed, holding the keys of Heaven and Hell.

I reckon that today, if everyone (including Richard Branson, Lord Sugar and the like) paid a tenth of their income to the government as I do, George Osborne would find that ‘deficit’ that causes him so many headaches, disappearing without the need to penalise the poor and the disabled.  I believe very strongly that all adults, rich and poor alike, should pay the same proportion of their income to the government as a universal tax (or annual subscription for citizenship of the United Kingdom).  Furthermore that tax should be levied on gross income, before the taxpayer has a chance to channel it into offshore accounts or charitable trusts or some other tax avoidance dodge.

It should also be levied on all state benefits and allowances.  Currently the state retirement pension is taxable but other state benefits like children’s allowances, winter fuel allowances for pensioners, the cost of free tv licences, an estimate of the cost of free prescriptions, attendance allowances, job seekers allowances and so on are all tax free.  Under the present system, if these benefits became taxable those who pay no income tax would continue to get all those services free and unchanged, while those who do pay income tax would pay just a little bit more – but certainly not enough to cause serious deprivation.  I personally would have to pay extra tax amounting to one tenth of my winter fuel allowance, my free prescriptions, my tv licence and the attendance allowance I get for my very limited mobility.  None of that would distress me if I could be assured that top bankers and their equivalent in other fields of activity were paying the same proportion of their gross incomes as I was.

Ideally, I’d like to see every British adult – the wealthiest and the very poorest – paying this universal tax of the same proportion of their income.   This would mean that the minimum wage, job seekers allowance and other subsistence allowances would need to be increased so that recipients could pay their proportion without their being rendered either homeless or hungry.

Then that shameful gap between the wealthiest and poorest in the land would be seriously reduced, we would be a true ‘commonwealth’ and we could truly claim, to quote George Osborne,  to be all in this together.  Yes, I know I have said all this before – and I’ll no doubt say it again because it is so important for Britain’s future, if Britain is to have a worth-while future.

'What's in a name?  That which we call 'a rose' by any other name would smell as sweet'

      So asked the love-lorn Juliet in one of Shakespeare's best-known tragedies.  Her family, the Capulets, thoroughly detested that of Romeo, the Montagues.  I am quite sure that neither family, dislike each other as they did, ever thought for a moment of sneering at them as 'Plebs'

I am astonished at the importance that has attached itself to the word 'pleb' in the long-running 'Plebgate saga'.  My trade is words.  The only real skill I have ever possessed is that of stringing words together to create a readable narrative. I thought too that, thanks to seven years as a gunner in the Royal Artillery including three as a POW in Italy and Germany, I was familiar with every word of abuse in the English language, and quite a few in Italian, German and Russian. I feel almost ashamed to admit that until I learned of the heated exchange between the government's then chief whip and the policeman on duty at the gates in Downing Street, I had never heard the word Pleb used by anyone.  It is presumably short for Plebeian the name given to the underclass in Ancient Rome; not much of an insult really.  After all, it was those Roman plebs who did all the hard work and the fighting that made Rome great.

Perhaps I'm just showing my age by suggesting that I would have expected one of the Eton-and-Oxbridge 'upper class' to display his anger and contempt for someone he regarded as of the ignorant lower classes by referring to or addressing him as 'an oafish Oick!'    Now had I been that affronted copper, that is a phrase that might have found me searching my mental vocabulary for an appropriately insulting response!

But 'pleb'?   Mr Mitchel really used much more offensive words than that during his fit of bad temper, but it's his use of 'pleb' that has cost him his job, lost him his libel action and is - according to press reports - going to cost him millions of pounds in legal fees!  In the 21st century there can be more 'in a name' than 16th century Juliet Capulet could ever have imagined possible.

!

           

           

24th November 2014

Tendring Topics…..on Line

Bankers Bonuses

          The previous Governor of the Bank of England said publicly on several occasions that the financial crisis in the UK and world-wide was not due, as Messrs. Osborne and Cameron would have us believe, to the policies of the previous government, over-generous welfare benefits, nor even the activities of immigrants and the machinations of ‘Brussels’.  Fairly and squarely to blame were the activities and incompetence of ‘the Bankers’, obviously not the management and staff of your local Barclays, Lloyds or what-have-you (they’re as much victims as we are), but the ‘super-brains’ at the top – and the Governor of the Bank of England really should know.

   Mind you, I think that a considerable measure of blame does lie with the previous New Labour government – not because they were too eager to spend money on social services, but because, blinded by billionaires, they were just as keen to seek the favour of the bankers, the money lenders and the financial fiddlers as the present lot at Westminster.   They should have spotted what was happening and curbed it.  I don’t recall that the present Bank of England Governor has ever publicly blamed the banking fraternity as had his predecessor – but then he has never suggested that his predecessor was wrong.

            What is particularly infuriating to the ordinary British citizen – the ordinary voter – is that throughout the period of recession top bankers have shed a few hundred junior staff; carried out mergers; effectively reduced the value of savings (including mine!) by paying savers an interest rate below the rate of inflation - and have continued to draw eye-wateringly high salaries for just turning up at their offices.   For actually doing their best at the job for which they are paid those enormous salaries, they expect to receive even more gargantuan bonuses!

            Quite apart from causing the world-wide financial crisis there have more recently been the muck-ups and illegal fiddles in which some of them have been involved.  Millions of pounds had to be repaid to bank customers who had wrongly been sold insurance.  For weeks I had regular phone calls from ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers assuring me that they’d get my money back for me despite my assurances that, as far as I knew, none of my money had been involved!   Then there was the fiddle with interest rates that led to huge fines – all passed on to customers I have little doubt.  Yesterday we learned that one of the biggest banking groups had been heavily fined for having a faulty IT system that resulted in customers being unable to access their own money for several days.    Rents, mortgage repayments and direct debit payments were not paid!  No doubt this was the fault of someone well down the line in the banking hierarchy – but the top people claim the credit for success, so they should also be prepared to accept the blame for disaster.

            Something should really be done to cut those huge salaries and abolish those enormous bonuses  but, so we are assured, market forces demand that we offer those rewards if we want the ‘best’ brains.  If we don’t they’ll just go elsewhere.  Well, we’ve seen the disasters that ‘the best brains’ can cause.  Who knows?  The ‘second best’ might be less successful – or they might just be less disastrous!

            One way that ‘the best brains’ could be discouraged from migrating in pursuit of a few extra millions would be to limit or reduce the number of places to which they could migrate.   The European Union probably had this in mind when they decided to put a legal limit on Bankers Bonuses.  Throughout the EU, they suggested, no banker should receive a bonus in excess of his or her annual salary.  They then added a rider to the effect that the bonus could be up to double the recipient’s annual salary if the Bank’s shareholders agreed.

            It doesn’t take a financial genius to see how utterly feeble that is.  It means that a banker with an annual salary of £500,000 (common enough among top bankers though at least ten times more than a salary that most of us would consider very high) he would be able to receive another £500,000 as a bonus.  He’d be receiving a million pounds for his year’s work!   But that’s not all.   If he could persuade a majority of the bank’s shareholders to agree, that bonus of £500,000 could be doubled, making his total pay for the year  £1.5 million. That’s nearly £29,000 a week!  You could hire quite a few doctors and nurses for that.

            Would you believe it? – pathetic as the EU’s decision is, Cameron and Osborne were determined to  oppose any limit to bankers’ bonuses on the grounds that it would only lead to their being offered even higher salaries!   I understand that they have now withdrawn their opposition, having been told they haven’t a leg to stand on.

            No wonder the UK electorate is sick of all the existing political parties!

UKIP triumphant?

          I concluded my comments about Bankers’ bonuses by saying that the UK electorate is sick of all existing political parties.  Their members in Kent demonstrated that distrust last week when they followed the ‘Clacton example’ and, in a by-election in Rochester, returned another defecting former Conservative  to the House of Commons as a Ukipper.

         Once again I see parallels between the situation in the UK today and that in Germany in the late 1920s, early 1930s.  In Germany too a dynamic and charismatic leader, first thought of as ‘a bit of a joke’, transformed a struggling political party into a dynamic, powerful and all-conquering force that struggled into shared power and then became a ‘cuckoo in the nest’, turning out members of all other parties and establishing the Nazi one-party state. ‘One People, One United Kingdom, one Leader!’  I can just imagine Nigel Farage acknowledging that Nazi acclamation when he and his party finally acquire the power they covet!

             A month or two ago, during the run-up to the Scottish referendum, I wrote in this blog that the worst-case possibility in the event of there being a majority YES vote, could be the creation of a Conservative/UKIP coalition government after the May 2015 general election; a coalition that the more ruthless and determined Ukippers would quickly dominate.   Well, there was a NO vote majority and the United Kingdom remains united.

            I now think though that, despite that NO vote, Ukips’s continuing success means that a very dangerous Conservative/UKIP coalition could emerge from the general election (I can’t tell you how fervently I hope that I am wrong!) and that Ukip members, with their vigour and ruthlessness  could dominate the coalition, so that the situation could end with Nigel Farage as a 21^st century Oliver Cromwell.  Conservatives proclaim that a vote for any party other than the Conservatives makes it possible that Ed Miliband will be the next Prime Minister.  I very much fear that a vote either for the Conservatives or Ukip will make it possible that, sooner or later, our government will be headed by Nigel Farage.

            However, another – to me more cheering – future seems possible.  An  unexpected result of the Scottish NO vote has been the increasing popularity of the Scottish National Party that has, since the referendum, more than doubled its membership.  Alex Salmond, a dynamic and charismatic leader  has retired and has been followed by a forthright and politically experienced still-young woman who promises to be a worthy successor. She has taken his place both as Party Leader and as Scotland’s First Minister.

            Conservatives and Lib Dems. have been all but eliminated from the Scottish scene.   Ukip has never gained a foothold there – and the machinations of New Labour have little appeal.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Scotland, still part of the UK thanks to that No vote, returns a solid block of Scottish National Party MPs in the new Westminster Parliament.   It is possible that they might make common cause with MPs from Wales and Northern Ireland and join with Labour to create a formidable coalition that could well outnumber the combined Conservative and Ukip forces.  Who knows – the fervour of the Scots might inspire Ed Miliband at least to attempt to narrow that yawning gap (no, not the deficit) between the wealthy and the poor and induce the wealthy to carry their fair share of the burden of taxation.

            There's another quite different matter about the Rochester and Clacton by-elections that’s worth bearing in mind. In both by-elections (and in the earlier European Parliament elections) the Green Party Candidates received more votes than the Lib-Dems.   Nick Clegg in his urge to become Deputy Prime Minister has effectively finished off his once-great Liberal Party.  Gladstone and Lloyd-George must be turning in their graves.  Yet the BBC and other  tv channels are still inviting Nick Clegg, and not the leader of the Green Party, to take part in televised debates before the General Election.  The only conclusion that I can come to is that the BBC and whoever funds the independent tv channels doesn’t want Green Party policies to be considered by the public because the Greens are the only party working towards real change.  He who pays the piper calls the tune.

             

14th November 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Greed and Self-interest Rule – OK?

        When our two sons were children, my wife Heather and I never tried to indoctrinate them with our ideas and values.  On the other hand we did make our ideas known to them and made sure that they knew that there were values that were important to us.  Looking back over the half-century that has elapsed since then I am very pleased, as I know their mother would be were she still with us, that both of them have lived socially useful lives and that their outlook on matters of importance is much the same as my own.

                      Sons to be proud  of!  Left Andy, then aged 13; and Pete aged 15, on holiday in Cornwall 1968 

 Last week, for instance, I received an email from my older son Pete, who founded and runs a successful and expanding consultancy, about one his major concerns. He expressed thoughts that could well have been my own.  Here are a few paragraphs from it: 

            This week started with the most explicit and extreme warnings and recommendations from world scientists about climate change, clearly and unambiguously saying for the first time that we have got to stop burning fossil fuels by the end of the century and halve our output by 2050 and that means that much of the known resources of coal, oil and gas can never be burned.

 But the BBC, instead of making a feature of it, and trying to explain the gravity of the situation to the ignorant British public, gave it a five minute slot on the National News, with a weary tone, saying that we have heard all this before but politicians never deal with it and won't this time. That instead of reducing carbon emissions global emissions are actually increasing year on year.  And then there was the ‘feel-good’ information, Britain and Europe are doing their bit, but China and the USA are the biggest emitters. After that, we could move on to the next news item.

I just despair. The climate change debate really does seem to encapsulate the problem of human greed where we are actually prepared to sacrifice the quality of life of our grandchildren for the sake of short term financial gain for this generation. Also, that we measure quality of life by the Gross Domestic Product, not by the environment in which we bring up our children. From the big global issues to the small local ones you see the same mentality. In London doctors are saying that 4000 people every year die prematurely from breathing disorders directly caused by pollution from cars, which is far higher than agreed European levels in London's hot spots. Millions of children at school also have breathing problems and need to use inhalers. This seems shocking to me and surely demands swift and uncompromising solutions.

But - with general public support - Boris Johnson has dragged his feet, postponed and watered down measures to deal with this. Why? Because it might damage the London economy or the livelihood of Taxi drivers or the financial health of road hauliers or upset the motoring lobby to act too swiftly.  

While I can see the economic need for Delivery vans and Lorries to drive through central London, 50% of the traffic consists of private cars owned by people wealthy enough not to care about the Congestion Charge, who have a company car park to go to and "prefer to drive". How can that be justified or dealt with by a higher charge? It should just be banned!

My sentiments exactly – and I couldn’t have put it better or more forcefully. This is not just a British or just a European problem. I watched last week a tv programme about the Mekong river, one of the greatest waterways in south-east Asia, that flows through the countries of Cambodia and Vietnam.  Along its course is an enormous freshwater lake, the level of which is raised several feet during the rainy season. Communities with homes built on stilts exist round this lake and for generations they have lived by harvesting the fish with which the lake teemed.

            Recently though both Cambodia and Vietnam have been introduced to free-market competitive capitalism.  Local fishing methods were anything but cost-effective.  Big corporations are now using modern mass-market fishing methods – reaping, for a year or two, a rich harvest and enriching their share holders. They’re also depleting the fish.  Tough luck on the lake-side communities!  They clearly have no future in the world of the 21^st century.

One of the verses in Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam says

Ah Love, couldst thou and I with fate conspire

To take this sorry scheme of things entire.

Would we not shatter it to bits, and then

Remould it closer to the heart’s desire?

 In 1945 our world had been shattered to bits by world wars.   I believe that with the welfare state, the foundation of the United Nations and the beginnings of the foundation of a united Europe, there was a genuine attempt in many countries, including our own, to create a world of peace and justice, closer to the heart’s desire.  This vision of a better, fairer, co-operative rather than competitive society persisted, in this country at least, through the governments of Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson and Ted Heath (I look back on that time as a golden age!) until the 1980s and the advent of Thatcherism and, the other side of the same coin, Tony Blair’s New Labour.

It was during this period of privatisation, of the development of the idea of a world-wide market free of bureaucratic regulation, that greed and naked self-interest took over. I like to personalise it as the triumph of the false god Mammon with his unholy trinity of profitability, productivity and cost-effectiveness.  I wonder how many well-meaning Labour supporters realized that in erasing ‘Clause 4’ of Labour’s constitution, they weren’t just voting that not everything should be nationalised but opening the door to the privatisation of all public services.   I remember being quite shocked when the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper for the ‘responsible citizen’ if there ever was one, carried as a keynote feature an article entitled A Defence of Greed!

I have been proud of my country but now I am ashamed. It is a land in which the gap between the wealth of the richest of us and the poverty of the poorest is the widest in Europe, in which conspicuous and flaunted wealth exist while many hard-working people have to rely on charity and food banks to keep their families from starvation; where an army of lawyers and accountants earn a parasitic prosperity by making sure the very rich pay nothing like their fair share of taxation; a form of ‘immoral earnings’ that is risk-free and richly rewarded!

I can only hope that our fellow men and women will come to their senses and repudiate Mammon and all his evil works before the unbridled greed and selfishness of a minority drag, not me at 93, but a future generation to disaster.

A fateful Decade

Writing about the decade that I think of as the ‘avaricious eighties’ has brought to my  mind the fact that it was during those fateful ten years that  Home Office files, that are said to have implicated members of ‘the establishment’ in child abuse disappeared – were lost or destroyed.  No, I am not suggesting for a moment that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in any way responsible for their disappearance. It unlikely that she was even aware of their existence.

I do think it possible though that someone with authority in the Home Office who was a fervent supporter of the ‘iron lady’ did glance through them, saw some of the names mentioned, and recognised their potential ability to hinder – or even halt - Mrs Thatcher’s revolutionary crusade of privatisation and removal of every trace of what she considered to be the taint of socialism.  The last thing that she would want would be a major public scandal possibly involving some of the government’s most enthusiastic and generous supporters.  

So, those potentially damaging files ‘disappeared’.  Who would have imagined that anyone would remember their existence over thirty years later?

‘We’re better together!’

I had never expected to get very excited about the progress of space exploration.  Much of it is really beyond my comprehension.  However, the fact that the European Space Agency has succeeded in placing a man-made object on the surface of a comet millions of miles away and travelling at breathtaking speed, really does deserve heartfelt congratulation. 

I am particularly pleased because it was achieved by fellow Europeans, working together.  Some components were manufactured in an Essex factory.  It is an achievement that neither the Americans, the Russians nor the Chinese have managed to accomplish – and you can bet your life they all would have if they could have!  This European achievement in the field of space exploration could be repeated in the fields of politics and economics.  Europe could, once again, lead the world!

This is no time for the United Kingdom to think of leaving the European Union.  As the leaders of all Britain's main political parties proclaimed on the eve of the Scottish referendum:

                                       We’re better together!

Dear Blog Readers,

When, a few weeks ago, I wrote that I would no longer necessarily publish this blog on Mondays I had in mind that it would sometimes be later in the week.  However, this week 'next week's blog' was completed and it seemed to me that I should get it published as soon as possible because it has important messages.  So here it is - published on Friday 14th November instead of Monday 17th.  I've no idea when the next blog will be published.  It all depends on what happens in the world!  

  

10th November 2014

Tendring Topics……on line

Two Social Events

            There was a time when I didn’t think of myself as a very sociable person.  Give me a quiet corner, a comfortable chair and a good book and I’d be quite happy with my own company for hours at a time.  That phase of my life has passed.  My interest in books – whether fiction or non-fiction – has waned (though I still enjoy reading letters and emails, newspapers and magazines) and there’s nothing that I enjoy more than the company of friends and family.  I am really extraordinarily fortunate in both.                                            

                                                                                  

  Dr Volker Dudeck, distinguished historian and Cultural Senator of federal state of Saxony, and  seven-year old  Maja Kulke, both from Zittau the small German town where I was  once a POW, with me on my 93^rd birthday.  Note the birthday cake-  a birthday present from the management of ‘The Bowling Green'! 

In May of this year, to celebrate my ninety-third birthday I invited my immediate  relatives  (sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren) and my best friends – from the UK and from mainland Europe – to a celebration lunch at The Bowling Green a licensed restaurant four or five miles from Clacton.  Twenty-two of us sat down to lunch.  There were seven Germans, two Austrians, one Belgian and the rest of us were Brits. The Germans and Austrians had travelled over a thousand kilometres to be with me on that occasion.   It was a wonderful birthday celebration.

Enjoying myself (clutching what’s left of a pint of Guinness!) at the family get-together on 25^th October.  On the right of the picture is a great-niece of whom I am very proud. .She graduated as a doctor over a year ago and is currently gaining experience in general Medical Practice 

Last month (on 25^th October) it was the turn of ‘the family’. I was an ‘only child’ but Heather had s sister thirteen years younger than herself.   Consequently I have a sister-in-law, four nieces, a nephew, five great nieces and a great-nephew.  The nephew and three of the nieces are married and my grand-daughter, younger grandson and two of the great-nieces have partners.   My older grandson lives and works in Taiwan and one of my nieces lives and works in Hongkong.   My sister-in-law, a nephew and one of the great-nieces were also prevented by circumstances from joining us..  Otherwise all came and there were once again twenty-two of us who sat down to a celebration lunch at The Bowling Green on 25^th October.

            Nick, probably the family's most experienced computer expert, had brought along a piece of IT wizardry with which, via Skype, he was able to contact  his brother Chris in Taiwan.    This gadget, by which we could see, hear and chat briefly to Chris, was passed round and meant that he too, became part of the celebration.  I found myself lost for words and probably mumbled nonsense to my grandson on the other side of the world! 

           

            It was a splendid occasion that I think everybody enjoyed as much as I did.  There were two  members of the family – Dani, Jo’s partner and Romy, Nick’s partner - who had not previously had an opportunity of meeting all of us.   Lunch began at 1.00 pm and the celebration didn’t end until 4.30 when, thoroughly exhausted but happy, I was driven home by my younger son Andy,and his family. It made me realize, not for the first time, how very fortunate I am in having a loving and caring family and wonderful friends.

The celebration breaks up.   I am clutching my recently acquired folding zimmer frame that helps me get about safely and folds up so that it can be transported in the boot of a car.

Noses in the trough

             Shortly after the event recorded above I spotted a headline in the local daily Gazette that made our modest family celebration at The Bowling Green, Weeley, seem positively Spartan!

Councillors scoff way through £20k of food headed a report of Essex County Councillors having consumed  no less than £20,000 worth of free meals in the restaurant at County Hall during the past year, .despite the fact that twenty-three councillors had no free meals at all and others had very few. Images from George Orwell’s Animal Farm came unbidden into my mind!  

It seems that the more important was the councillor, the larger – and the more expensive – was his or her appetite.  Leader of the pack was Councillor Rodney Bass who last year received £43,225 (that’s twice the average wage in Essex!) for his role both as a county councillor and cabinet member with responsibility for highways, presumably including pot-holes!   His food bill, paid for by us, amounted to just a fiver short of £1,000! Councillor John Aldridge, vice-chairman of the Council came close behind him with £986 and three other county councillors had had meals costing a total of over £700 each.  This information had become public on the insistence of the Green Party members of the County Council, who have boycotted the restaurant with its free meals for councillors.

            Councillor Rodney Bass feels that he has been unjustly criticised by the Gazette.  The money, he claims, just shows how hard he works.  He told a Gazette reporter that, ‘These are nominal meal costs that are supplied by the county council canteen. My day can start at 8.00 am and finish at 10.00 pm. Am I supposed to exist on no victuals at all?’

The fact that Mr Bass’ working day can start at 8.00 am and finish at 10.00 pm doesn’t mean that it often – or even ever – does!  And of course no-one expects him, or anyone else, to work all day without food.  It may, indeed, be a good idea for the County Council to run a restaurant for the benefit of both stall and councillors.  What council-taxpayers do expect is that he, and all other county councillors, should pay for their meals like everyone else.

As Mrs Thatcher, not really one of my heroines, used to say:  ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’.   Someone has to pay for it.

Those EU Immigrants!

            What a problem they’ve been causing!   Nigel Farage says the only way we can stop them flooding into our country is to leave the European Union.  Our Prime Minister is determined to reduce and control their number even if by doing so, he breaks EU rules.

            Now – Surprise! Surprise! It turns out that they’re a blessing, not a curse.  Far from being ‘benefit tourists’ they’re ‘paying guests’, generously paying guests in fact;  handing over to the government in taxation billions of pounds more than they receive in benefits and services.

            I suggest that the reason that they are still regarded by some as a drain on us is that the services under pressure are the education service, the NHS and other public services.  The billions that immigrants pay out, are paid directly to the government which is continually squeezing those public services and/or privatising them.

            The government has far more interesting and important things to do with those extra billions than hand them over to health, welfare, education and highways authorities.. They’d only fritter them away on services to the public! Our rulers at Westminster have much more important priorities. They have NATO membership and a ‘special relationship’ to maintain, and a totally useless and very expensive nuclear submarine fleet to keep at sea; not to mention having to make sure that they don’t inadvertently increase the tax 'burden' on any of their multi-millionaire financial supporters.

3rd November 2014

Tendring Topics……….on line

Westminster’s Robin Hoods…….in reverse!

            For the seven years I have been writing and publishing this blog I have been banging away about the way in which successive Chancellors of the Exchequer have acted like Robin Hoods in reverse, for ever widening the gap (already the widest in the EU) between the incomes of the rich and the poor, and using the taxation and benefits system to punish the poorest people in Britain in order to reward the very richest.  Now we learn that George Osborne’s austerity programme has failed.  Instead of reducing the national debt he’s managed to increase it.  I have little doubt that it is the poor who will be expected to pay for his failure.

            Last week London Evening Standard columnist Armando Ianucci made all the points that I have been trying to make, but much more effectively than I have, in a feature article on the subject of Punishing Poverty, a practice of which he accuses politicians of all the main parties. Below are the introductory paragraphs: 

It’s now a rite of passage for any aspiring political leader to state that he or she is keen to cut the welfare budget; it’s a mantra as regular as putting a penny on tobacco or vowing to protect the NHS. That’s why it drew no real howls of outrage when George Osborne got up at his party conference last month and declared that to cut the deficit further he needed to find another £25 billion of savings, and that he’d get them from cuts to welfare. You don’t have to be a Harvard-trained economist to know that the last people to have a  spare £25 billion sloshing around are the poor. Yet no one seemed that bothered by the Chancellor’s economics. 

           Similarly Ed Miliband, who has spent the past few years putting his party through intensive social policy reviews, seems to be restricting his public pronouncements to “tough” decisions to limit child support payments and to put a cap on welfare spending.

There’s nothing “tough” about kicking someone when they’re down. In fact, it appears to be the easiest job in British politics. So, even though benefit fraud itself is dwarfed thirtyfold by annual tax fraud by companies and individuals, headlines express more contempt for the shirker than for the City’s creative accountants and financial experts who caused the economic crisis in the first place. There are no poster campaigns asking us to snoop on tax fraudsters; but it’s become a common trope in any portrayal of benefit culture that it’s peopled entirely by women banging out babies to get better housing, and men claiming sickness benefit while out ten-pin bowling.

  

The passage that I have printed in bold type should be written in letters of fire on the walls of the House of Commons and in every newspaper editorial office!  The article in the Evening Standard goes on:

The true picture is a much more sobering one: it’s of an increasing section of society working or trying to find work while living within touching distance of poverty. We may be through the worst of the Great Recession but many have had to drop down in pay level, endure frozen salaries, move to find work at great personal cost, or take themselves off the unemployment register by entering the fickle world of self-employment. This weekend’s figures that show there are now a record 5.2 million workers in low-paid jobs point to a significant section of the community being pushed to the margins.

Meantime, those claiming benefit are evaluated by firms such as Atos and Maximus, charged with keeping welfare costs down. Claimants are subjected to an undignified, demoralising series of tests and conditions which, if flouted, result in a sanction, an automatic suspension of payment.  Fair enough, you might think, were it not that these firms are under pressure to hit targets. There are thousands of examples of claimants sanctioned for missing interviews when they’re incapacitated, or in hospital, or receiving notice of the date after the event, or being sent it on line even if they’ve said they don’t have wi-fi.   You can appeal against a sanction, in case you’re wondering, but the process can take six months, and benefits stay suspended for the whole of that time. 

Even claiming disability benefit draws suspicious looks. The suggestion by welfare reform minister Lord Freud that certain disabled people were not worth the minimum wage can only reinforce a current unspoken prejudice against disabled claimants. There are more and more accounts of people in wheelchairs receiving verbal abuse and worse on the streets.   

We are now in the middle of a shocking rise in poverty in all its forms, most shocking of all being hunger. Since 2012 both Save the Children and the Red Cross, institutions set up to provide charity overseas, have been busy working in Britain. Meanwhile, the number of food banks has grown tenfold in the past four years, with around 1,400 food bank centres distributing food around the UK.

The experiences of volunteers there are not of dealing with skivers or cheats, but with vulnerable people whose dignity has been washed out of them by austerity and who are embarrassed by their situation. Some come admitting they skip evening meals so they have enough to feed their children. Some are children bringing fathers or mothers who are too proud to make the trip on their own. Many are working, sometimes with two jobs, but on low pay.

          

            I think that that is a pretty damning article and one that goes against the policies of most politicians and most of the popular press.  I can only congratulate and thank the author of the article and the editor of the Evening Standard for swimming against the tide.  I hope that this blog will be instrumental in gaining it a wider publication both at home and overseas.  In the UK today hard-working tax payers do not support an idle and feckless poor.  On the contrary, it is the labour of poor people, the majority of whom work hard for long hours for meagre pay (who pay, through indirect taxation, a far greater proportion of their income back to the state than even the richest income-tax payer)  that maintains and increases the wealth of the richest fraction of our society.

           

  Why do you imagine that multi-millionaires contribute so generously to traditional political parties?  It’s to keep them acting as Robin Hoods in reverse!

Some unquestionably Good News!

         

            One has to look hard for unequivocally good news in the news media today.  Murders, child abuse, uncontrolled epidemics, wars and rumours of wars fill the newspapers and the tv and radio news bulletins.   I have to keep telling myself that what is newsworthy is the exception and that most of my fellow men and women are friendly, law abiding and peace-loving.  No-one is going to buy a local newspaper with the headline No-one was assaulted, robbed or murdered in Clacton-on-Sea Yesterday!  It’s the occasional violent crime not the much more usual boring old peace that makes the headlines!

            Yet during the past fortnight we have had what was at least to me, a completely unexpected piece of good news and the possibility of more to come.  Surgeons in Poland (yes, that’s the same country that produces all those unwanted migrants!) had performed an operation on someone whose spinal cord had been severed and who had been told he would never walk again!  The basis of the surgery seems to have been the removal of some tissue from the back of the nose and its transplant in the area of the broken spinal cord.  The British consultant who had carried out the research that had made this possible commented modestly that he felt this was equivalent to ‘A man walking on the moon’.  I think it is far more important to human-kind than that. It offers hope where, in the past, there had been none.  

            Nearly half a century ago, when I was Clacton’s Housing Manager, we had a young newly-married couple in one of our Council Houses.  The young man was very keen on 'keeping fit' and went for a jog and a quick plunge into the sea every morning.  One morning he plunged head-first into what he had thought was 6ft depth of water.  It was actually little over 18 inches – he was rescued and survived, but with a broken neck that left him paralysed from the neck down, and with no hope of ever recovering movement in his limbs.

            The Council moved him into a bungalow specially adapted for his restricted life but, of course, he needed twenty-four hour care.  I felt desperately sorry for his young wife; still in her early twenties. The prospect of being a carer for 24 hours a day 7 days a week had not been in her mind when on their wedding day, only a few months earlier, she had promised to love and support him 'for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health' as long as they both should live.

            Nowadays, thanks to British research and the skills of those Polish surgeons, such a young couple could be offered at least the hope of an eventual happy ending.  Dante knew what he was doing when, at the entrance of his imagined Hell, he put the notice 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here'.  We humans need hope to make our lives worth living.