Ernest Hall's Blog

Week 6 2012 9.2.2012

2012-02-08T15:18:00.001Z

Tendring Topics........on line

‘Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you’

St. Matthew records in his Gospel that Jesus declared that single commandment summed up the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament. I hope that I am not being too heretical in saying that I wish he had gone on to state the corollary, ‘Do not do anything to other people that you would hate them to do to you’. Perhaps Jesus did say that too but it seemed too obvious to need recording. It clearly needed to be said though, because Christians have flagrantly ignored it through the centuries.

It could be argued that do not is even more important than the positive do. The things we like vary widely. George Bernard Shaw wrote in his Maxims for Revolutionaries that we should not do to others what we would like for ourselves. Their tastes may be different. I think though, that even Shaw would agree that while we may like many different things, there are dislikes that are shared by us all. I am quite sure that every single one of us would hate the idea of being tortured or burnt to death. We all would hate to be brought to a violent death, to be enslaved, starved, rendered homeless, or separated from those we love.

Yet, as Lord Byron pointed out; ‘Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded that all the apostles would have done as they did’ and Thomas Hardy wrote in his poem Christmas 1924 ‘After two thousand years of mass, we’ve got as far as poison gas’.

These thoughts came to me when I heard Barak Obama, an international leader whom I had greatly admired, defending the use of unmanned drones to find and kill in Pakistan individuals whom the CIA has decided are members of Al Quaida or some other similar terrorist organisation. The killing of these people, he said, was justified because they were a threat to the people of the USA. They were carefully targeted and ‘very few’ innocent civilians were accidentally killed at the same time!

It isn’t so very long ago that convicted, not just suspected, IRA murderers could find sanctuary from British justice in the USA. American courts refused to return them to Britain for trial and/or punishment. They were a threat to the people of the United Kingdom. What, I wonder, would have been the American reaction had British MI5 agents in the USA sought them out and assassinated them – even if they managed to do so without harming a single innocent civilian?

Assassination, without even the semblance of a trial, is abhorrent whether carried out by Al Quaida, by Mossad, the CIA or MI5. In human society there can be no licence to kill

Do not do to other people what you would hate being done to yourself!

‘In the bleak midwinter’

The sudden change in the weather from milder-than-normal to sub-arctic has come as an unpleasant surprise. Old people like me are warned to wrap up well and to keep at least one room in our homes warm at all times. I am very sorry for the increasing number of people, not necessarily all old, who have to decide whether to heat or eat. It was a choice that the unseasonably warm autumn and early winter had led us all to imagine no-one would have to make this winter.

My mind goes back to cold winters of the past, to the winter of 1962/1963 when the sea froze over. I was a Public Health Inspector at the time and took these two photographs near Clacton Pier. It was a bitter winter and a cold spring. I remember the cemetery staff complaining that when they dug graves, the frost followed them down, freezing the soil beneath their feet as they worked!

We were dressed for the Libyan Winter! No 4 Gun of B Troop, 231^st Medium Battery RA at Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass) on the Egyptian Libyan border, early January 1942. I am the one on the right – with a woolly hat!

During World War II I spent one winter in the Egyptian/Libyan frontier region, one in a PoW Camp in northern

Italy

and two in a small working camp (Arbeitskommando) in

Germany

. In North Africa it could be bitterly cold when the north wind blew in from the sea. Some South African troops experienced snow for the first time – a light dusting over the surface of the desert that disappeared as the sun rose.

The winter in a prison camp in Italy is one that I would prefer to forget. We were housed in unheated jerry-built huts, wearing totally inadequate Italian army uniforms (most of us had been wearing just shorts and shirt when captured) in which we tried to sleep, pulling our overcoats and two thin blankets over our heads to try to conserve what little warmth we had. We were permanently hungry, louse infested and bored out of our minds. Every day in winter we shivered on parade while Italian guards counted us – often miscounting and having to start again from the beginning. As a result I can still count in Italian uno, due, tre, quarto, cinque and so on as quickly as I can count in English! There were between 2,000 and 3,000 of us in the camp and deaths from cold-and-starvation related conditions were a daily occurrence.

Zittau Rathaus (Town Hall).

One of my more back-aching jobs was to carry filled sandbags to the roof of the town hall as a fire precaution!

My memories of the two winters in Zittau, eastern Germany are far less negative. We were wearing British army uniform and greatcoats (presumably supplied by the Red Cross) as our louse-infested Italian uniforms had been burnt on arrival. I was in a small working ‘camp’ (Arbeitskommando) of just 30 British PoWs. Our living quarters were palatial compared with those in Italy. We had a separate living room and dormitory with double glazed (as well as barred!) windows. There was a tortoise stove in the bedroom and a solid fuel cooker in the living room. We were very often unloading coal trucks on the local railway sidings – so we were never short of fuel, even if it was only inferior lignite (‘brown coal’) briquettes! We were never cold. Working every day (with just one ‘rest day’ in three weeks) we had no time to be bored and, from mid-winter 1944/1945 we could hear the gradually increasing thunder of artillery fire as the Soviet Army advanced inexorably across Poland and into Germany, and a constant stream of refugees from the battle front trudged wearily westward through the snow-covered streets of Zittau. Our time of captivity was hastening to an end.

A New Danish Invasion!

If any one had told me a year ago that I would get hooked on a tv serial in a foreign language about high level politics in a foreign country, with dialogue subtitled in English as in the silent movies, I would have thought that they were crazy. Goodness knows I find news reports of English party-political point scoring tedious enough! I can though at least understand what it is all about. Political manoeuvres in a foreign land and in a foreign language would surely be much worse.

Yet I have just watched the tenth and final hour-long episode of Borgen, a Danish political drama on BBC 4 tv, with real regret that it had come to an end. It was the third Danish tv drama with English-subtitles that BBC 4 had given us. The first two were detective thrillers, both with the unpromising title of The Killing, featuring the unsmiling but strangely magnetic police detective Sarah Lundt. I thought that the first, in which we were taken into the ‘real life’ of the family of the teenage murder victim, was the better of the two. I know that they were ‘only actors’ but it was difficult to believe that the grief, sorrow and anger of her parents and younger brothers were not real! Surprisingly, the strong intertwined sub-plot, about the election of Copenhagen’s Mayor, was equally gripping.

Borgen was quite different. It followed the fortunes of Birgitte Christensen, fortyish, married, mother of two, and leader of one of Denmark’s political parties. Very likeable, she was clearly highly principled – sacking her Public Relations Consultant for unfairly discrediting the then Prime Minister, one of her political opponents.

As a result of political manoeuvring she found herself Prime Minister of a coalition government of a number of political parties. At first we saw her clearly ‘on the side of the angels’. She stopped the use of a Greenland air base by United States planes engaged in the ‘rendition’ of political prisoners, thereby incurring the wrath of the White House and the cancellation of a Presidential visit to Denmark. She called the bluff of a Danish millionaire newspaper magnate who threatened to leave the country if she persisted with legislation promoting women's rights. She secured a contract to supply wind turbines to a former Soviet Republic with an appalling human rights record, outwitting the country’s president who would have liked to have made the deal conditional on the extradition of a dissident refugee who had fled to

Denmark

Then Birgitta’s halo began to slip. She allowed the use of a recorded remark made by a former friend many years earlier at a drunken party, to justify the bugging by the Danish Secret Service of the office of the political party which that former friend now led. Her friend’s reputation and political career were shattered. To help cover up the Defence Minister’s corrupt acceptance of gifts and hospitality in connection with the purchase of fighter aircraft, Birgitta persuaded her husband to refuse a very satisfying and lucrative job that he had been offered. She sacrificed the cabinet post of a trusted colleague and long-standing friend and adviser to keep the coalition government intact – and she agreed to a divorce and abandoned her marriage in the pursuit of her political ambition. At the end of the final episode we saw her after she had made on tv the most eloquent speech of her career, extolling Danish nationalism and earning the applause even of her victims! She was Denmark’s undisputed political leader – but she had lost everything that had made her the likeable, principled political leader that she once had been. 'What shall it profit a man (or woman) to gain the whole world and lose his/her soul?'

I am looking forward to the next tv offering from the land of the Vikings!

Week 5 2012 2.02.2012

2012-02-01T18:35:00.000Z

Tendring Topics.........on Line

A Matter of Priorities

Our Tendring District undoubtedly has its problems. We have, so it is said, fewer graduates and fewer folk with other qualifications than any other district in Essex. Our town centre shops are threatened with closure. Our unemployment rate, especially youth unemployment, is well above the national average – and rising! We have had four (or was it five?) murders during the past twelve months and a number of scarcely less serious incidents of knife crime. There are potholes in our roads, and our pavements, away from the town centres, are broken, uneven and positively dangerous. Oh yes – and there’s Brooklands Estate, Jaywick, Britain’s most deprived neighbourhood, still demanding urgent attention..

It isn’t one – or even all – of these problems though that has brought unanimity to the often-divided Tendring District Council. It’s the fact that they have been ‘snubbed’ by Whitehall in that the Olympic Torch, on its tortuous progress from its home in Greece to the Olympic Stadium at Stratford, isn’t going to cross the Tendring District’s hallowed soil. The Clacton Gazette records that The decision to leave the district out was unanimously condemned by councillors who tried desperately to make Olympic bosses change their minds.

A petition and pleading letters had been sent to Lord Coe, to the Prime Minister, and to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. They had even suggested ways in which, with just a little deviation, the Olympic Torch could be brought through part of Tendring – but answer came there none! ‘It was’, said Councillor Stephen Mayzes rather petulantly ‘very disappointing and I think just plain rude’.

Blog readers will remember Councillor Mayzes. It was he who, as Tendring Council’s Tourism Supremo, tried to prevent one of Europe’s most prestigious leisure organisations (the Camping and Caravanning Club of Great Britain) from holding a rally, during the school holidays, on the playing field of the Coastal Academy! He also decided that the Holiday Coast’s summer season ended on 31^st August and saved the taxpayers a few pounds by withdrawing the beach patrols and closing the Tourist Information Offices. You will recall that we experienced an Indian summer, with hundreds of visitors at the end of September and into October!

Not a man to admit defeat, Councillor Mayzes is now organising his own event, in which he hopes teams from local schools and athletics clubs will carry an imitation ‘Olympic Torch’ in a relay round the Tendring District. ‘We will create our own torch and a route round Tendring. I want to get all of our schools and athletes involved, and I think it could really get people excited about the Olympics and our local talents’.

Who knows? It might take off. It won’t achieve anything though, except perhaps soothe hurt feelings in the Weeley Council Chamber. I think it’ll also make the council look petty and small-minded, or perhaps just plain bonkers! It certainly won’t do anything to solve any of the very real problems with which Tendring Council is faced.

‘Be bloody, bold and resolute!’*

Oh dear – it’s supposed to be unlucky to quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth! Those words of advice to Macbeth from the three witches describe pretty well though our Prime Minister David Cameron’s advice to the world’s financial experts at Davos, particularly those of the EU and the Eurozone. They have to be bold and take urgent drastic steps to escape financial disaster.

Certainly David Cameron was following his own advice. It was only the day before that he had learned that growth in Britain’s economy was even lower than the already low figure that had been predicted, that unemployment – particularly youth unemployment - in Britain had reached its highest level for decades, and that the National Debt, the reduction of which had been the principal objective of his government, had risen to an unprecedented one trillion pounds! (It's a good job my laptop possesses a 'spell-check'. I have never before had occasion to type 'trillion'!) It must have taken real courage - the uncharitable might say ‘arrogance’- after that, to fly to Switzerland and lecture other governments about how to handle their financial affairs.

A couple of days earlier I had listened on Radio 4 to a BBC correspondent in Sweden, a country that resembles our own in many ways. It is geographically on the edge of Europe. It is a constitutional monarchy. It is a member of the European Union but, like us, is not within the Eurozone. It has however the great disadvantage of having a far more extreme climate than ours and, in particular, a much darker and colder winter season.

Yet Sweden seems to have been virtually unaffected by the European financial crisis. There have been no cuts in public services or in benefit payments to the poor and disabled, no great surge in unemployment and no talk of an uncontrollable financial deficit. There were no summer riots, no ‘Occupy Movement’ demonstrations in city centres - and no need to heap blame on the previous government or the Eurozone. From the correspondent’s report I gained an impression of a country at ease with itself.

There may be all sorts of reasons for this, but here are three that I am sure are among them. Sweden is a land of high taxation but the tax is levied fairly and, Swedes believe, is used wisely and to everyone’s advantage. There is no enormous gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor. They‘re not burdened with a ‘special relationship’ that drags them into illegal and unwinnable wars and results in their having totally useless and vastly expensive nuclear-armed submarines permanently patrolling the world’s oceans.

I believe that world politicians who would really like to know how best to run their country’s economies could do worse than to investigate the Swedish model.

*Those who are familiar with Shakespeare’s play will know that that piece of advice from the three witches was followed by Macbeth – and led to disaster.

An Awful Example

A friend of mine once remarked that no-one was ever completely useless. Even the most unpromising could serve as awful examples, to draw attention to the causes of their plight and to encourage others to avoid them. I am sure that my friend had in mind elderly human wrecks brought low by alcohol, drug abuse and general dissipation – summarised by Marlene Dietrich in her song in the classic ‘western’, ‘Destry Rides Again’ as, ‘cigareets, and whisky, and wild, wild women’!

They, of course, are the awful examples at the bottom of the social scale – but there are awful examples of the effects of greed and selfishness at the other end of the social scale too. In recent years wages and benefits have fallen behind inflation (have declined in value) while the profits, salaries and bonuses of the wealthy have increased in leaps and bounds. Those of us who have protested about this and sought to change it have been in a minority – though a growing one. Now, thanks to the well publicised awful example of the top officials and senior board members of the Banks, that minority has become a very vocal and increasingly influential majority.

It was neither the Eurozone nor the last Labour Government that created the current financial crisis (though the New-Labour Government didn’t take the steps that might have prevented it) but the greed and incompetence of the Bankers. That is not my judgement; I am not competent to make one, but that of the Governor of the Bank of England who is surely in a position to know.

Now it is the bankers, not necessarily the ones who caused the crisis but others with the same ethos, who are receiving (I can’t bring myself to say earning!) million-pounds-a-year-plus salaries and who are claiming even more enormous bonuses. It is as though they draw their enormous salaries just for turning up at their offices fairly regularly but expect a bonus for actually doing the job to the best of their ability!

I remember, in 1938 when I was a junior clerk (office boy really!) in Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department, hesitatingly telling the Medical Officer of Health after some minor blunder that, ‘I did my best, sir’. Glaring at me he announced ‘I am not interested in your best Hall. I want the best’. I suppose that had I been a potential successful banker, instead of creeping away wishing that the earth would swallow me, I’d have replied confidently that, ‘in that case sir, I would expect a substantial bonus at the end of the year’.

Public opinion has, quite rightly, been outraged by the bankers’ attitude. A public debate on the subject was threatened in the House of Commons. There’s little doubt that this would have resulted in a cross-party condemnation of the bankers’ greed. Rather than face that, both the chairman and the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, in which the government representing us taxpayers holds a controlling interest, have returned their million pound bonuses!

The government says that it has no right to interfere with salary negotiations between banks and other private enterprises, and their employees. Quite so – but they do have a responsibility for maintaining adequate public services and health and welfare provisions. These were part of the fairer, more peaceful world for which thousands of us thought we were fighting in World War II and for which we voted in1945, but which we have seen systematically whittled away by successive governments since.

The government does have the right and the duty to impose taxes upon its citizens to pay for these services, and has a moral duty to impose those taxes fairly upon us all. The simplest, most straightforward, and fairest way of taxation is by means of an income tax properly graded so that it takes from rich, the poor and the ‘squeezed middle’ about which we hear so much, an equal proportion of their income. None of us likes paying income tax but it is the only tax that is levied according to our ability to pay it. No-one has ever starved to death or been rendered homeless or destitute by having to pay income tax.

To be ‘fair’ (a concept to which the government pays continual lip service!) there needs to be many more income tax bands than the three – standard, higher and highest - that exist at the moment. The very poor would pay little or none and the very rich might be expected to pay as much as 90 percent (not of their entire income of course, but of income in excess of perhaps a million pounds a year) in tax. At the same time that the new properly graded system is introduced there would need to be watertight regulations preventing the tax evasion and – currently legal – tax avoidance that at the present time rob the Exchequer of millions of pounds a year.

Both private firms and public authorities could then have an absolutely free hand in rewarding their senior staff. We, members of the public would know that the greater part of any really excessive award would be coming back to us either in public services or in the reduction of our own tax burden.

……and an anecdote.

This was sent me by a blog reader:

The Chief Executive of a Bank, a Daily Mail reader, and a recipient of social security benefit are seated round a table on which there is a plate with 12 biscuits.

The Banker pockets eleven of the biscuits and then turns to the Daily Mail reader with a word of warning, ‘You’d better watch out – that scrounger is after your biscuit’.

Postscript - Gallant knights and Noble Lords

I am shedding no tears and wasting no sympathy over Mr Fred Goodwin's lost knighthood. I do have a couple of questions though.

Wasn't Fred Goodwin one of the greatest of those great financial geniuses who threaten to depart from Britain if we dare to increase their tax liability? What a pity we didn't think of doing that before he took control of the RBS. Who knows - we might have shaken out a few more very expensive supermen (and superwomen) whom we could well spare.

If Fred Goodwin, who has never been convicted or even suspected of any criminal activity, can so easily be stripped of his knighthood, how is it that the former leader of Essex County Council, a convicted criminal under further investigation by the police, remains the 'Noble Lord' Hanningfield?

Week 4 2012

2012-01-25T18:39:00.000Z

Tendring Topics..........on Line

‘When the Bon Marché was shuttered…….’

……..When the feet were hot and tired,

Outside Charringtons we waited, by the STOP HERE WHEN REQUIRED’

So wrote the late Sir John Betjeman in his poem Parliament Hill Fields, a graphic evocation of part of the London scene of days gone by. Sadly it seems that Clacton’s Bon Marché in Pier Avenue may soon be closing its shutters for good as its parent company Peacocks is threatened by the current financial crisis and is endeavouring to sell off its long-established satellite.

The Peacock Group, like the country as a whole and many of its inhabitants, is seriously in debt. A spokesman for the Group is quoted as saying that the board and its advisors have been discussing possible restructuring with its creditors. No agreement has been reached but discussions with other possible investors are taking place. He added ominously, ‘To protect the business while discussions with such investors are going on, the directors of the Peacock Group have filed a notice of intention to appoint an administrator’.

Compared with many other towns Clacton-on-Sea hasn’t done too badly during the past few years. The gap left by the closure of Woolworths and that left by the closure of the Co-op Departmental Store in Station Road have both been filled, though in each case with less prestigious enterprises employing fewer people than their predecessors. The much-criticised re-design of the town centre has, I think, been found attractive by visitors, though it was surely idiotic to move the Tourist Information Centre from its central position at the junction of Pier Avenue and West Avenue, to the Town Hall.

Could this now be changing? Pierre Oxley of the Clacton Chamber of Trade says, ‘If we do lose Peacocks and Bon Marché it would hit us hard. I always think that one empty shop leads to more appearing. It looks like it is going to get harder and harder for businesses this year’.

Other depressing local news is that the number of unemployed within the Tendring District has risen steadily for five consecutive months. There are 170 more people unemployed today than at the same time last year. Nationally eight percent of 18 to 24 year olds are unemployed. In the Tendring Area the figure is almost 12 percent, well above the national average. On the plus side, there have been more vacancies at Tendring’s Job Centres – the number has risen from 500 last November to 635 today. Cheering perhaps, but it still means that there are about six applicants for every job vacancy!

A day or two ago I listened to a young man who has never experienced employment being interviewed on BBC Radio 4. He has qualifications in gardening and regularly goes up to the local golf course where there is a half-promise of work some time in the future. He is, of course, the kind of young man whom local authority parks and gardens departments were once seeking. He would have started off on menial jobs like weeding flower beds and clearing them of rubbish, and gradually learnt his trade. Who knows? He could have been another Alan Titchmarsh in the making!

However local authorities no longer have their own Parks and Gardens Staff. They have to employ private contractors for the work that those departments once undertook. In any case, the kind of jobs that this young unemployed man is capable of doing in the first instance are precisely those that supporters of David Cameron’s Big Society are hoping will be done free by enthusiastic volunteers!

How much longer will it be, I wonder, before that young man is not just unemployed but unemployable?

Waste and Recycling Collections

I don’t think that I am likely to be accused of being an uncritical admirer of the current Tendring District Council and its policies. I had thought though that its members had reason to be proud of their waste and recycling collection service. Householders are all issued with a supply of black plastic sacks for unrecyclable waste and a green box for items that can be recycled. These, in our district, are paper and cardboard, metal cans of every kind, and plastic bottles.

Collections of both refuse and recyclables take place regularly, both on the same day each week. Our council has stayed with a weekly collection while many others changed to fortnightly to save money. I have been sorry that glass jars and bottles are not included among the recyclables. It isn’t easy for those without a car to take glass containers to the nearest bottle bank and, for those who do have a car, burning petrol by making a special car journey for that purpose is surely defeating its purpose.

Despite this reservation I was very surprised and disappointed to learn a month or two ago, that the Tendring District’s record for collecting recyclables was the poorest in the whole of Essex! It is presumably in an effort to remedy this situation that the Council and their contractors Veolia intend to introduce a restructured collection system within the next few months.

Every householder will be issued with a red recycling box for paper and cardboard only and two new green boxes, one large and one small, for cooked or raw food waste, in addition to the existing green box (which will then be used only for metal cans and plastic bottles) and the black plastic sacks used for residual waste. The small new green box for food waste is to be kept in the kitchen and is intended to be emptied into the larger one to be kept out outside.

The black plastic bag of unrecyclable waste will be collected and the large food waste container will be emptied ever week. The red box of paper and cardboard and the green one of cans and plastic bottles will be collected on the same day but on alternate weeks.

I realise that, now that I do no gardening and am living alone, I have virtually no food waste! I use mostly frozen or otherwise ready-for-cooking vegetables and prefer vegetarian dishes though I am only a somewhat half-hearted vegetarian. I never prepare and cook more food than I can eat in one meal! Mind you, even in my previous married life when I was a keen gardener I would have had no food or other organic waste for the Council’s bins – I had my own garden to keep productive and my own compost bins to feed for that purpose!

The Council’s new scheme seems a bit complicated but I hope that we’ll get used to it and that it will be a success. As I ride round Clacton on my ‘iron horse’ I notice that on ‘collection days’ there are a substantial number of homes with several black plastic bags bursting with rubbish on display and not a green recyclables box in sight. If Tendring is to move up the recycling ‘League Table’, dealing with these non-co-operating householders must be a top priority!

Just how ‘free’ is our ‘free’ Press?

If here is one thing about which all the witnesses at the Leveson enquiry into the behaviour of the press agree, it is that no-one wants a government controlled press. We have seen the results of that in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union. Our press must remain free and uncontrolled by politicians. Although the excesses of which a ‘free press’ is capable have been made clear for all to see, there remains strong opposition to any kind of statutory control.

But just how ‘free’ are our newspapers? Privately owned, they are subject to market forces like everything else in a market economy. For their survival they depend heavily on their revenue from advertising. The wise editor makes certain that he (or she) doesn’t upset too many advertisers too often.

This operates at even the very lowest level. As many blog readers know, this blog is a direct descendant of the Tendring Topics comment column that I wrote every week in the Coastal Express (it actually changed its name several times but that is how I always thought of it!) for twenty-three years. The Coastal Express relied heavily on advertising revenue from Estate Agents and from the sellers of new and used cars. Nobody warned me, but my reason told me that it would be foolish to be too critical of either estate agents or used car salesmen! So I wasn’t. Searching back through my memory I don’t recall a single occasion on which this thought affected anything that I wrote – but it could have done.

Similarly, one of the witnesses at the Leveson Enquiry commented that if a reporter saw that his employer was enjoying cosy tea parties with the Prime Minister and other senior Ministers, and that a former senior colleague had been appointed as the Prime Minister’s personal spin doctor, his reports were likely to be slanted accordingly.

Rupert Murdoch made no bones about the fact that he controlled the Sun for political purposes (‘It was us wot done it’, boasted the Sun after a Tory victory) but is proud of the fact that he gives the editor of The Times free rein. Very creditable – but surely the editor of The Times is well aware of Mr Murdoch’s general political philosophy and is unlikely to promote a point of view strongly opposed to it. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and if he doesn’t actually call it – well, the piper knows his general musical taste. As a modern proverb that I heard recently put it, ’If you must hide your light under a bushel, make sure everyone knows under which bushel it is hidden!’

By the promotion or rejection of news stories as much as by direct persuasion, the news media does sway public opinion and thereby influence the results of local and general elections. The BBC and the ITV set admirable examples of objectivity. Perhaps newspapers should be run by independent editorial boards on similar lines.

I would not like to see government controlled newspapers, but the government does at least comprise politicians whom we can influence and ultimately accept or reject. On balance I would prefer to read a newspaper run by people who are answerable to the electorate than by immensely wealthy individuals, answerable to no-one, who may not be British citizens and therefore owe no loyalty to our country; or Brits who have their fortunes stashed away in an overseas tax haven and who therefore escape our burden of taxation. It is one thing for the very wealthy, whether they be Russian oil oligarchs or British or Trans-Atlantic multimillionaires, to own football teams, luxury yachts and half a dozen palatial homes – but quite another for them to control the means of influencing our thoughts and our choices. They will inevitably serve their own best interests, which are very unlikely to be the same as ours!

An Early Learning Aid

A modern silent movie’s nomination for this year’s film awards took me back to my childhood when all films were silent! Poole’s Cinema in Ipswich’s Tower Street, favoured by my parents because I was a member of a national daily’s ‘birthday club’ that gave me free admission, ‘when accompanied by a paying adult’, continued to project silent films long after all other local cinemas had gone over to ‘talkies’. I well remember my first talkie – it was a ‘who-done-it’ called ‘The Argyle Case’ and I saw it at the Ipswich Regent Cinema (it’s still there I believe) in the late 1920s or early '30s.

It has been only fairly recently when failing hearing has made me glad to make use of the subtitles nowadays available on tv programmes, that I have realized what a valuable learning aid those silent films must have been. To really enjoy them you had to be able to read – and to read fast – before each caption disappeared and its successor appeared on the screen.

Kids who might have scorned to read a ‘boring old book’ were desperately eager to know what ‘Buck Jones’ or ‘Tom Mix’ had said to the crooked Sheriff before leaping onto his trusty steed and galloping off to save the heroine from ‘a fate worse than death’*. There was just one way to find out – learn to read!

That accounts for the fact that, while I understand there are plenty of illiterates and semi-literates around today, during the seven years I spent in the Army from 1939 till 1946, I met only one chap who couldn’t read battery orders and couldn’t communicate with his mum and dad, and his girlfriend. We had all spent our early childhoods speed-reading the subtitles of those silent movies!

*Yes, some of us were quite eager to find out what that was too!

Week 3 2012

2012-01-18T15:17:00.000Z

Tendring Topics......on Line

War Horse

One of the saddest things about being very old and living alone is the loss of shared pleasures that were once enjoyed; the many tv programmes that my wife Heather and I used to watch together for instance; the performance of Nutcracker at the O2 arena that she would have so much enjoyed, and my 90^th birthday celebration in Zittau. I can hardly believe that she never met the German friends who have been so much a part of my life during the past few years. Less often something happens that I wish my mum and dad could be with me to share. My dad, who died in November 1939, never saw a television. He would have loved those old Westerns that keep cropping up in daytime tv. I realize too, how much he would have enjoyed War Horse a film that I haven’t yet seen, about a horse and a young lad in World War I. He had been there, working with horses, throughout that war!

Trooper Hall F.C. aged 18 1900

My dad was born in 1882 in a little Hampshire village near Highclere Castle (better known to thousands today as Downton Abbey!) Orphaned at an early age he appeared to be destined to be a farm labourer but – he was ‘good with horses!’ He escaped the drudgery and poverty of a life on the soil in Lark Rise to Candleford

England

, by enlisting at the age of 18 into the 17^th Lancers, a very fashionable cavalry regiment with the motto Death or Glory. Less than half a century earlier it had taken part in the heroic (but idiotic!) ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ at Balaclava in the Crimea. It is only recently that I have realized why he chose that particular regiment. It had been a Lord Carnarvon of Highclere Castle who had led that famous charge! In the 17^th Lancers he served in South Africa in the aftermath of the South African War. I have to this day picture postcards that he sent to my Mum (they were then ‘courting’) from

South Africa

during that time.

Regimental Sergeant-Major Hall and family 1921

Once again the fact that he was ‘good with horses’ affected his career. He was transferred to the Royal Army Veterinary Corps where he rose steadily through the ranks. By the time World War I broke out he had become a Sergeant and was sent almost immediately with the British Expeditionary Force to France. In 1916 he was granted leave from ‘the Front’ to marry his fiancée Emily Clark (my Mum).

It took the Allied High Command a year or two to realize that World War I on the Western Front, wasn’t going to be a conflict of heroic cavalry charges but of a long and bloody struggle, with foot soldiers and artillery playing the major roles. My dad was posted to Egypt, on to Palestine and finally to Salonica in northern Greece, where British troops had originally been sent in 1915 to support the Serbs. I learn from Google that there was ferocious fighting there in the final months of the war, against Austrians and Bulgarians, with carnage comparable with that on the Western Front. Somewhere along the line he was promoted to Warrant Officer Class 1 (Regimental Sergeant Major). That was the rank that he held when the war ended and the rank he held when I was born in May 1921.

Staff-Sergeant Hall, Staff Instructor in the Territorial Army

Circa 1928

My dad completed his twenty-one years service and was discharged from the army shortly after my birth. He made a brief return to military life in 1926 when he was appointed Permanent Staff Instructor to a veterinary unit of the Territorial Army in Ipswich – which was to become my ‘home town’. He was happy and fulfilled in this job and I was proud when as an eight or nine year old, playing with my mates near Ipswich’s Broomhill Park, I would sometimes see him in uniform, on horseback and leading a group of ‘weekend troopers’, as they exercised their horses and learned the correct, military way to ride. It didn’t last. In 1931 the TA was downsized. My dad lost his job. He spent the final years of his life (he died of a heart attack in 1939 at the age of 57) as a clerk, dispenser, veterinary nurse and general dogsbody to a local vet who had been his commanding officer in the TA. His meagre pay for this job, plus the small pension he had earned by his 21 years of army service, kept us just above the poverty line.

He had six campaign medals and was particularly proud of two of them. One was the ‘Mons Medal’ (on the left) that marked him as a member of the original Expeditionary Force sent to France in 1914 and derided by the Kaiser as ‘General French’s contemptible little army’ (its members made ‘The Old Contemptibles’ a title of pride!). The other medal (on the right) of which he was proud was a French Medaille d’Honneur with crossed swords. It had been accompanied by a certificate signed by the French President. I was told, after my father’s death, that he had been presented with it by a French General ‘on the field of battle’. One of my deepest regrets is that I never, while I had the chance, asked my father how he had earned this award.

I couldn’t have had a more loving and supportive dad. I was – and still am – very proud of him though my own life has followed a very different path from his.

MEANS TESTING

How shaming that it should not be our elected representatives in the House of Commons, but members of the unelected and anachronistic House of Lords, who have delayed the passing of government legislation that would have cut the benefits of thousands of disabled people! Once again the government has chosen to select the poor and the vulnerable for sacrifice while leaving the conspicuously wealthy to enjoy their riches undisturbed.

Means testing individual benefits is a bureaucratic, time and money-wasting exercise. It often means that some people who need the benefit miss it because they have failed to apply or have filled in a form wrongly. Meanwhile while those determined to cheat the system can usually find a way of doing so. It would be far better to pay out the benefit to all those eligible for it – and then claim part of it back from those who don’t need it all, through one national ‘means test’ to which every one of us is – or should be – subjected; the Income Tax system.

This system works quite unfairly at the present time, claiming a far larger proportion of the income of the poorly paid than of the wealthy. In fact, the larger your income the smaller proportion you are asked to pay. Many more tax bands are needed, going well above the present upper limit of 50 percent for the highest earners. In the immediate post-war years there was, I believe, an upper limit of 90 percent – and civilisation as we know it didn’t come to an end! It would, of course, be essential for the government to reframe existing legislation and employ its own legal and financial experts to eliminate the tax evasion and tax avoidance that currently takes from the revenue far more than ‘benefit cheats’ could ever hope to achieve.

Think of the advantages. Currently graduate students are saddled with overwhelming debt – ‘because of the advantage that their degree gives them in the world of business’. Believe me, the advantage of having even a first-class honours degree in astrophysics is as nothing compared with that of having no degree at all, but a father who is head of a major business corporation! It may be argued that their circumstances are quite different. The advantage that the Astrophysicist obtains comes from us - as taxpayers. That of the multi-millionaire's son doesn't. Rubbish! The fortunes made in the private sector come from us too - not as tax-payers but as consumers.. We add to those fortunes every time we buy a packet of washing powder, a new car, a new laptop or a new push-bike. We add to it every time we turn on a tap, switch on the gas or electricity, or begin to pay back a loan from a bank or building society. Private fortunes grow every time the government, in our name, buys a bombing plane, a tank or a nuclear missile – or builds a new school or hospital. A properly graded income tax would level off every kind of unfair advantage. It would also narrow the gap between the poorest and the wealthiest in our society

I think we should abolish every means test, and every ‘special incentive’ to help the disadvantaged, and make sure that no-one is disadvantaged, by applying that single, simple means test of a fair Income Tax Assessment, to us all. Then, whatever crisis might arise, we really would be ‘all in it together’.

Safety in the Bathroom!

A fortnight ago I recounted in this blog a mishap that I had while staying in an hotel over Christmas. I slipped and fell in the bath and had to summon help by means of the alarm system in my en suite bathroom.

The layout and facilities in that bathroom were remarkably similar to those in my own home. I too, have an over-bath shower operated from a hot-and-cold water mixing valve within the bath. Slipping and falling at home could potentially be much more dangerous than in a hotel. There could be no alarm system for me to summon help and it might be many hours, perhaps days, before anyone was aware of my plight!

In fact, although I would claim no great credit for this, I have taken steps to make it far less likely that a similar accident will occur, and have also made it possible for me to summon help if it did. Here is a photo of a corner of my bathroom. A kind and very competent neighbour has made me a small portable wooden step, about 4in high, that can be pulled out and positioned immediately beside the bath as shown in the picture. There is a vertical hand-hold on the wall immediately above the bath and another hand-hold, that I bought at Argos and fitted myself, connected to the bath rim. I find that by standing on the wooden step and using the rim hand-hold and the vertical one in turn, I can step safely into and out of the bath. I also have a synthetic rubber mat on the base of the bath to prevent my slipping and falling. While under the shower I am always ready to grab that vertical hand-hold..

Summoning help if I should collapse or fall? If you look at the extreme left of the picture you will see part of a low shelf on which I place my Tendring Careline alarm pendant and my mobile phone while taking a shower. Help would be unlikely to arrive as promptly as it did in that hotel – but arrive it surely would!

No-one can foresee every possible future accident and take steps to prevent it. I think though that I have made my bathroom, potentially one of the most dangerous room in the house, as safe as is humanly possible. If you, dear blog reader, are similarly old and frail (or you have a friend or relative who is) you may wish to do the same.

Week 2 2012 12.01.2012

2012-01-11T18:30:00.000Z

TENDRING TOPICS………..ON LINE

A Nation of Debtors!

It was only a few weeks ago that I commented in this blog on the dangerous lure of ‘Pay Day Loans’; the offer – by a bank or other financial institution – to lend a relatively small sum of money ‘just till payday’ to deal with some sudden crisis (a burst pipe, a forgotten family birthday, an unexpected visitor) that may have arisen just at a time when you have nothing in reserve and only just enough money to see you through till payday!

It all sounds so very sensible and straightforward. It is a short term-loan ‘only till payday’ perhaps just a fortnight away. It is of a relatively small sum, possibly £300, possibly £500 and, before you accept it, you know perfectly well how much interest there will be when you pay it back. That too, will seem a very small sum and well worth the convenience of having the money when you needed it.

And it would be fine, except for the fact that having paid it back with its small amount of interest, you won’t have sufficient money left in your pay packet to see you through the expenses of the next month! The only answer may be to seek another payday loan, and another, and another, with that ‘small amount’ of interest becoming very large indeed. Because of all this I wasn’t in the least surprised to learn of the government’s concern about the very large number of 25 to 35 year olds were seriously in debt, many of them as a result of reliance on ‘payday’ or similar loans to get them through a crisis.

Nowadays being in debt has become regarded as the natural, the normal, even the expected human condition. In my childhood and youth things were very different. My parents had a horror of debt. They believed that if there was something that you wanted you should save up until you were able to afford it. Then, and only then, you could buy it. ‘Hire purchase’ was only just coming into common use. It was regarded with suspicion. My Dad worked out that buying ‘in instalments’ meant that in the end you were paying anything up to twice as much as those who bought it outright. He called it the Kathleen Mavourneen system (there was a song of that name containing the line ‘It may be for years, and it may be for ever’!) I do remember my parents, after hours of discussion, buying just one object on hire purchase – it was a rather good (for its time) Murphy wireless set!

I inherited their fear of indebtedness. I needed a car for my job. I bought a second-hand one for cash – out of my savings. Later I was able to buy a motor-caravan.

New Year, 1979 - My bungalow home and the Toyota Motor-caravan in which Heather and I spent many happy holidays.

Later too, my wife Heather and I took out a mortgage to buy the home I now live in. I was worried about the burden of debt involved, but at least I had a secure job (that was in the late 1950s – how many jobs are really secure nowadays). About that time I increased the spare-time freelance writing that I had started several years earlier. As well as freelance journalism I wrote several commercially successful books about domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage. To reduce our debt I paid every penny I earned from this source to the Building Society until my mortgage had been paid off – ten years earlier than the agreed completion date! Heather and I were debt-free!

What helped to pay for that bungalow and motor caravan!

It was during those years that debt became a normal and accepted thing. Do you remember when credit cards (Barclaycards were the first I think) were introduced. They encouraged us to get into debt. No more of that tedious ‘saving up’ before you could buy that new vacuum cleaner, that fridge, or that new lawn mower. Barclaycard, I remember, ‘Took the waiting out of wanting’. Wise credit card users paid off the debt quickly to minimise the interest payments. Unwise ones paid a little off and then bought something else that they ‘just couldn’t manage without’. They stayed permanently in debt, month by month helping to enrich the bankers with their interest payments.

Then came the Thatcher years - and government policies that I believe future historians will see as having done incalculable harm to the British way of life. There was the unrealisable dream of Home Ownership for All. It continues to this day. Quite recently David Cameron spoke of the pride and joy felt by those who held the key ‘of their own home’ in their hands for the first time. He didn’t mention the anguish and despair felt by those same home buyers when (possibly thanks to Government policy) they lose their jobs - and their homes - and have had to hand those keys back to the real owners, the money-lenders who provided the mortgage.

No doubt remembering what a successful vote-buyer the ‘right to buy’ legislation (compelling local councils to sell their housing stock to sitting tenants at knock-down prices) had proved to be in the Thatcher era, David Cameron is trying it again – this time demanding that councils offer up to 50 percent discounts (well, it isn’t his money that he is generously giving away!) I doubt if the idea will work a second time round but, if it does, yet more folk will find themselves in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds – and the reserve of affordable homes for letting will take yet another tumble!

Then there are student loans. Every single graduate Member of Parliament received free tuition and, if he or she needed it, generous living allowances for their time in University. Since the Thatcher/Blair era though, Parliament has decreed that the most promising members of the younger generation leave university and enter the world of work (when they can find any!) with a burden of debt of between £20,000 and £40,000! What hope have they of ever getting their feet on the home ownership ladder? They are assured that they don’t even have to begin paying off that debt until they have a substantial income. Many of them will never pay it off completely though they will have the knowledge of that debt hanging over them throughout their lives.

Oliver Goldsmith wrote in The Deserted Village that ‘Ill fares the land to hastening woes a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay’. In Britain today men and women decay in enforced unemployment while nationwide, it is personal debt that accumulates!

A tv ‘Soap’ – and Real Life

Aficionados of the tv hospital ‘soap’ Holby City (yes, I am one of them) will remember that a month or so ago there was a strong story line about the development of a plastic surgery department that would augment the hospital’s finances by serving a number of private patients. A distinctly dodgy surgeon and his colleague carried out a number of breast enhancements using poor quality implants from a source in which the dodgy surgeon was discovered to have a strong financial interest.

Patients complained, the story broke in the press and (as happens rather more often in ‘soaps’ than in real life) the guilty surgeon was killed in a car accident leaving his innocent (well, comparatively innocent) colleague and the hospital to clear up the mess and suffer the consequences. The surgeon’s career seemed to be over and Holby City hospital threatened with closure. Just now though, as does happen in ‘soaps’, it looks as though both may be saved!

We Holby City fans are now seeing the same drama, but on a much bigger scale, being enacted in real life. A considerable number of women, in the UK, in France, in Germany and elsewhere have had surgery in which substandard implants from a now bankrupt French manufacturer have been used. Some of those implants have already ruptured and though their contents have not been proved to be harmful to health I doubt if all the victims are quite convinced of this.

The German government, typically incisive, has decided that the substandard implants will be removed and replaced and that the government will meet the cost of this. Our government, equally typically indecisive, has maintained that the substandard implants do no harm whatsoever – but now agrees that all implants carried out by the NHS will be removed and replaced at public expense. They hope that all the private enterprises that have carried out implant surgery will do the same.

Some, no doubt, will. Some can’t, because they are in administration. Others will remember their first duty is not to their patients but to their shareholders. They are in business to make money, not give it away. The NHS will ‘take up the slack’ and accept the responsibility of any private enterprise that cannot or will not fulfil its obligations. Their first duty, as a publicly owned body, is to the patients.

So, once again – as with the failing banks – the public sector (that means us taxpayers) will be helping out a greedy and incompetent private sector. We should beware of private contractors being invited to fulfil functions previously in the public sphere.

In ‘the market place’ the buyer is trying to get ‘the best at the lowest price’. The seller, on the other hand, is intent on getting ‘as much as he possibly can for as little as he can get away with’. In this instance the fact that those French suppliers were trying to ‘get away with’ substandard implants was discovered before any serious harm was done. Who knows what may happen next time?

‘Constant dripping wears away the stone!’

I am reminded of that proverb when I think of the way in which an increasing number of us have year after year protested, apparently in vain, about the enormous – and constantly widening – gap between the incomes of the wealthiest members of our society and those of the poorest. I originally drew attention to it for no other reason than that it seemed wrong that some of our fellow countrymen had no roof over their heads and didn’t know from where the next meal was coming, while others owned luxury yachts, national newspapers, football teams, and half a dozen palatial residences world-wide!

More recently a carefully researched publication (The Spirit Level’) revealed that levelling of incomes benefited everyone in society – not just its poorest members.. Investigation showed that those countries with the narrowest gap between the incomes of the rich and poor had less crime and violence, more stable relationships, fewer divorces, better health and better standards of education than those – like Britain and the USA – that had a wide and ever-widening gap.

For years the victims of this injustice suffered in silence but during recent months the constant dripping has produced world-wide peaceful protests (the Occupy Movement) particularly by young people. In the UK the ‘squatters’ at St, Paul’s Cathedral are the most evident, but by no means the only manifestation of a movement that has produced protests throughout Europe, in the USA (both in Wall Street and widely across the Union) and in Russia.

Could it be that David Cameron, our Prime Minister, is the latest convert to the ‘New Levellers’? Disturbed by huge rises in executive pay and bonuses in the private sector in the midst of government induced austerity, he is urging that shareholders should have more power to regulate executive pay, and that there should be no rewards for failure.

Predictably perhaps, these modest suggestions have produced outrage in the ‘business community’. It is quite all right (a good idea in fact) to complain that the Chief Executive of a local authority or a hospital board is earning more than the Prime Minister, but to criticise the fact that the annual income of the Chief Executive of an international corporation would be enough to hire six prime ministers smacks of Bolshevism!

I believe that compliance with the Prime Minister’s suggestions would have only a tiny effect on the income gap. Much more radical action than that is needed. However our cause is now being noticed at high level. I can only suggest that we ‘carry on dripping’.

Week 1 2012 5.01.2012

2012-01-04T19:09:00.002Z

Tendring Topics..........on Line

A Religious Revival?

I published my pre-Christmas blog with some misgivings. It was concerned with Christ’s Nativity. I knew that the majority of my blog viewers were unlikely to be Christian. Of those who were, there would undoubtedly be some who considered it to be blasphemous to question the historical accuracy of any part of the accounts of this event as recorded in St Matthew’s and St. Luke’s Gospels. It was possible that I had succeeded in offending everybody! On the 21^st December, after the first full day of publication, I checked on the statistics rather nervously. It would not have been surprise to find that viewer figures had fallen like a stone!

On the contrary, there were over 150 views – the highest daily number I had ever recorded! Each day until 25^th December, there were over 100 views, by previous standards an exceptionally high number. I concluded that the Nativity story had a cross-cultural appeal. Non-Christians, whether adherents of other faiths or having no faith at all, could relate to the story of a child destined for greatness, whose coming was heralded by angels yet was born of humble, temporarily homeless, parents in a cattle shed, with a cattle feeding-trough as a cradle. That lowly shepherds, despised by both the wealthy and by the country’s spiritual leaders, were the first to visit and pay homage to the baby Jesus, followed by wealthy Magi with magnificent gifts from a distant land, and that the Holy Family had then to flee for their lives, seeking asylum in the land of Egypt, added to the story’s appeal.

My blog has a scattered readership, world-wide. In the United Kingdom, where an aggressive secularism has been growing in strength in recent years, there was a reversal of that trend over the Christmas period. In Exeter people queued across the Cathedral Green to attend the Carol Service on Christmas Eve and several hundred had to be turned away. There were similar reports from Wakefield, York, St. Albans and from scores of other Cathedrals and humbler churches all over

England

. In Scotland the Episcopal Church (the equivalent of the Church of England) is not the principal Christian tradition yet for the midnight mass on Christmas Eve at St Mary’s Cathedral there was an unexpectedly high turn-out and extra chairs had to be brought in. The Provost, Very Rev. Kelvin Holdsworth said that, ‘the singing was so strong and powerful that it felt that we were going to raise the roof!’ I attended a Eucharist-with-carols at St Mark’s (‘high church’) Anglican Church in Enfield where I found a warm welcome and an enjoyable and rewarding service. I didn’t count heads but I am quite sure that there were at least twice as many worshippers as there had been at the same service in 2010.

Could it be that we are going to see a revival of the Christian Values for which Prime Minister David Cameron recently appealed? I hope so – but I also hope that they are the true Christian values declared by the founder of the Christian faith, not a hotchpotch of ‘thou shalt nots’ designed to keep the poor in their place so that the more materially fortunate can live in peace and comfort; ‘God bless the Squire and his relations. They keep us in our proper stations’. Such attitudes led to the Church of England being described as The Conservative Party at Prayer and inspired nineteenth century Anglican Priest Charles Kingsley, author of ‘Hereward the Wake’, ‘Westward Ho!’ and ‘The Water Babies’, to declare that, ‘We have made of religion an opium for the people’ (yes, I do know that Karl Marx said something similar. He and Kingsley were contemporaries and I believe that Kingsley said it first!)

If David Cameron really wants us all to adopt Christian values he could (as well as reminding us that we shouldn’t covet, steal, murder or commit adultery) recall that it is as hard for a wealthy man to get into Heaven as it is for a camel to get through the eye of a needle! He could perhaps urge the 17 millionaire members of his government to shed their wealth in their own long-term interest as well as ours, and perhaps make it easier for his friends among the bankers, newspaper proprietors and other super wealthy to attain heavenly bliss, by changing the income tax system to ensure that they pay at least as high a proportion of their income in taxes as the poor have to.

A Memorable Christmas

It was with younger son Andy, daughter-in-law Marilyn, granddaughter Jo and her partner Siobhan that I enjoyed my Christmas dinner.

I am more than blessed in my two sons (at times I can see something of their mother in both of them!), in my daughters-in-law and in my grandchildren. They all conspired very successfully to make sure that Christmas 2011 would be filled with happy memories for me to cherish throughout the year to come..

Elder son Pete and I in the 'Sword Inn Hand' in Westmill.

My very action-packed and enjoyable Christmas break included a traditional family Christmas dinner with all the trimmings (including a flaming Christmas pudding), several family get-togethers, a visit to a cinema to see the latest Sherlock Holmes release, a trip into the countryside to visit Westmill, a delightful Hertfordshire village that had been the scene of at least one episode of 'Foyles War', a visit to Kew Gardens where I was able to borrow an electric mobility scooter with which I could explore the enormous glass houses and - finally - a performance of The Nutcracker at what was the Millennium Dome but is now the O2 Arena. And, of course, there was the Christmas Eucharist mentioned earlier in this blog.

I enjoyed every minute of it but I have to say that
My most vivid memory (and the one that I can see giving me occasional future nightmares!) was of a near-disaster that occurred on Boxing Day. I stayed at the Marriott Hotel, Waltham Abbey. Just off the M25 it was relatively convenient for the homes of both my sons (I find the stairs in both their homes rather difficult and appreciate the fact that in a hotel my early rising habit doesn’t inconvenience anyone else)

Pete, Nick's girlfriend Romy, and I in the Tropical Glass House at Kew

However my early rising was one of the factors that led to near-disaster! On Boxing Day, despite having not gone to bed till after midnight, I was wide awake at 6.00 am and decided to go to the en suite bathroom for my usual wash, shave and shower. The hotel breakfast wouldn’t be available till 8.00 am so I had plenty of time.

I completed my wash and shave and prepared for my shower. It was an ‘over-bath’ one in which the user had to stand in the bath. I had used it the morning before without incident. This time I managed to get one foot over the rim and into the bath. As I was getting the other foot over, the foot in the bath slipped. I fell unceremoniously into it!.

I hadn’t hurt myself in the fall and all I had to do was to. get up and turn on the shower mixer. But that I couldn’t do. My 90 year old muscles were simply incapable of lifting me from a horizontal to a vertical position and allowing me either to get on with the shower or step out of the bath. Had I been able to get onto my knees I might have made it but the bath wasn’t wide enough to allow me to turn round to do this!

I was reluctant to pull the alarm cord, not because I am easily embarrassed – I am not. I do though have a firmly rooted dislike of looking ridiculous. I was well aware that lying naked on my back on the bottom of an empty bath, ‘ridiculous’ is exactly how I would look!

However, as I realized that my struggles to escape were getting feebler; I overcame my inhibitions and tugged on the cord. A light came on indicating that my cry for help had registered. With commendable promptness a young man from ‘Reception’ appeared at the door of the bathroom. He grasped the situation at once and tried to help me raise myself – to no avail! He summoned ‘back-up’!

Another young man appeared. This one promptly removed his shoes and climbed onto and astride the bath. He took my hands and pulled while his colleague pushed from behind. Together and with whatever strength I could still muster I slowly regained the vertical position. Shakily and with the help of my two saviours, I stepped out of the bath. No, I assured them, I didn’t want them to call an ambulance. I wasn’t even bruised. I had pulled a few muscles in my struggles but otherwise I was fine.

It was a happy ending – but it might not have been! When my younger son Andy had brought me back to the hotel the previous night, he had glanced into the bathroom. There he had noticed that the alarm cord above the bath had been wound round a high-level bathroom fitting, effectively putting it out of reach of anyone sitting or lying in the bath. He had methodically unwound it and brought it back into use.

I had thought that he was just being unnecessarily ‘fussy’ but by his action he may well have saved my life. Had the alarm not been available my predicament would not have been discovered until my other son had arrived to pick me up at about 10.00 am, or the cleaning lady had put in an appearance at about the same time – I would have been trapped there for at least three hours!

Progress?

Just before Christmas I received from a blog reader in his late fifties, a very gloomy assessment of the development of British society during his lifetime.

It’s the end of the year; one of the times when one looks back on what has changed. Perhaps it is just because I am getting older but I can see very few things to be pleased about, not just in the last 12 months, but in the last 30 years! I feel that in so many ways, society is poorer – even if we are better off financially.

Of all the changes I have seen, I would rate Central Heating, reliable motor cars and the reduction in smoking as the most positive ones since my childhood. Against that though there is the rise of gang culture, drug and alcohol abuse and anti-social behaviour – an unknown expression in my childhood. Internet and Out-Of-Town shopping are replacing local shops and high streets. A great many school leavers who are barely able to read, write or add up, spend a ridiculous amount of time watching hundreds of TV stations and playing Computer Games. No wonder they become overweight! Young girls are being prematurely sexualised by the new celebrity culture, overtly sexual advertising and semi-naked pop stars. There is a general move of the centre ground of politics away from the principle of welfare and public services available to all, to the principle of each for him or her self tempered with Victorian philanthropy.

When I think about the technological changes, I can’t help thinking that in the 60s no one was terribly dissatisfied with the fact that phones lived in phone boxes, or were bulky and expensive things in the house or office. I don’t think anyone had a big problem with music being stored on a disk the size of a dinner plate, and yearned for a time when the entire collection – and the player - would be the size of a match box. Maybe it’s just me!

Perhaps it is. I find that I do agree with every word written above (despite having been a car owner/driver in the 1950s and ‘60s, I had forgotten, until I read that email, how thoroughly unreliable most cars were in those days!)

However I am over thirty years older than my correspondent and my memory goes back to the late 1920s and the 1930s. My home was a happy one but my memories also include unremitting discomfort. Winters were cold and dark with unheated bedrooms lino-covered floors and smoky, and draught-inducing open fires. I don’t suppose that anyone today under about 80 has ever experienced chapped hands and chilblains! Summers, without fridges and with lots of still-horsedrawn traffic, were marred by continuous fly infestation. A sticky fly-paper, festooned with trapped and dying flies hung, usually from the light fitting, in every working class sitting room and kitchen. Storing perishable food and milk could be a nightmare!

Today, without my trusty iron horse (mobility scooter) I would be completely housebound. Without my mobile phone, my laptop and the internet, I’d be cut off from my scattered friends and family, and without a tv and reliable radio (in the 1930s ‘wireless sets’ were anything but reliable!) I’d be bored out of my mind. There’s a great deal that I don’t like about the 21^st Century but, especially for the old and disabled, it has its compensations. My correspondent may well remember nostalgically the days of his childhood and youth. I had loving and caring parents and I too have happy memories of my childhood years. In my old age though, I really wouldn't want to return to those days!

Week 51.2011 29.12.2011

2011-12-29T00:40:00.000Z

Tendring Topics........on Line

Paying for ‘Sid’s Free Lunch’

British children of the 1920s and ‘30s learned at an early age that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. We were all familiar with the politically incorrect nursery rhyme about Simon, a young man with learning difficulties, who encountered a seller of pies on his way to a fair.

Said Simple Simon to the pieman, ‘May I taste your ware?

Said the pieman to Simple Simon, ‘Show me first your penny’.

Said Simple Simon to the pieman, ‘Indeed I haven’t any’.

And poor Simon went hungry.

It was a message that in the ‘80s the then Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, would have whole-heartedly endorsed. If I close my eyes I can almost hear her well-bred but somewhat strident voice: ‘Wealth is a product of hard work and enterprise. There is no such thing as a free lunch’.

How strange therefore that it should have been during her period of office (in fact as a result of her initiative) that thousands of Britons came to the conclusion that there was such a thing as a free lunch after all. I was reminded of this a week or so ago when a radio programme announced that the year nearing its end had seen the twenty-fifth anniversary of the then government’s privatisation of British Gas, the first of a series of similar privatisations of state enterprises.

Towards the end of 1986 there was a brilliant sales campaign (do you remember it?) in which we were all asked to ‘Tell Sid’ about the forthcoming sale of British Gas shares. Well, thousands did, and resold their shares later at a very comfortable profit. This was repeated with other privatisations though resale didn’t always realize enormous profits.

It struck me as very odd at the time. I remember writing in Tendring Topics (in print) in the Coastal Express that I had been quite persuaded that wealth was the product of hard work and enterprise and that there was no such thing as a free lunch. Whose hard work and enterprise was it then, I asked, that had produced the profits realized by those who had been astute enough to buy – and then resell – those privatisation shares?

The fact is, of course, that no extra wealth had been created. Not a cubic inch of extra gas had been produced. It had all been simply a paper transaction. I believe though that it was those and similar paper transactions (the deregulation of financial services, the transformation of Building Societies into banks and so on), over which Mrs Thatcher presided in the avaricious ‘80s, that are at the root of our current financial problems. You can ‘tell Sid’, if you encounter him, that the poor, the old, the disabled and the unemployed are today having to pay for all those ‘free lunches’ of a quarter of a century ago!

Is ‘our Dave’ the only one in step?

Many years ago there was a magazine cartoon showing a mum and her daughter watching a platoon of soldiers marching past. The daughter was proudly pointing to one of the soldiers. ‘Eh Mum, look at our Jim. He’s the only one in step!’

I remembered that cartoon (I think it must have been in an old copy of Punch) when I read the press headlines about our Prime Minister being alone in declining to sign up to a new treaty of the willing to sacrifice a small part of our national sovereignty to ensure a united economic Europe in the face of the economic blizzard that we are all facing. He had already threatened to veto any amendment to the European Treaty to achieve the same end.

Mr Cameron had been urged by his Europhobic Conservative colleagues to ‘stand up for Britain’ and ‘show the bulldog spirit’. They had clearly forgotten (or perhaps were not old enough to remember) that Winston Churchill, the very epitome of British independence and the bulldog spirit’, had been a supporter of the idea of a United States of Europe in which Britain would play a leading role. He had wanted to inspire and lead our fellow Europeans – not turn tail and run away from them!

Whether we like it or not, Britain is part of Europe – geographically, historically and culturally. Our ultimate destiny, I have little doubt, is for us to fulfil Churchill’s dream and to become not the leader but a leader of a Europe politically and economically united. As it is the 26 participating European states form a powerful political and economic unit. It would have been that much more powerful had it included the United Kingdom as the 27^th. Before signing the American Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin is said to have declared, ‘If we do not now hang together then we shall assuredly hang separately’. It could be that the same is true of Europe today.

I hope, by the way, that the Parliamentary Europhobes do not imagine that that the ‘special relationship’ will ensure that the USA stands by us in our self-imposed isolation. The USA acts always in its own interests (why on earth should it do otherwise?) During the Cold War period Britain was the USA’s unsinkable aircraft carrier. More recently we have provided the USA with a foothold into Europe. I fear that, as far as the USA is concerned, Mr Cameron may well have made the United Kingdom redundant.

By ‘opting out’ David Cameron has certainly earned a place in history. Will it be as Britain’s liberator, who cast off the shackles of Brussels, secured the UK’s independence and led us on to financial security and prosperity? Or will it be as the bungler who drove the final nail into the coffins of both the European Union and the UK; the politician who sacrificed British industry for the sake of the very financial institutions that had led us to financial ruin, and sacrificed his country for the sake of the unity of his political party?

I am not at all sure that I want to live long enough to find out!

A Look Back at 2011

For Great Britain, Europe and the World, 2011 has been a pretty disastrous year. There have been earthquakes and tsunamis, devastating monsoon floods and, elsewhere, disastrous droughts. There have been nuclear contamination fears. The great depression, out of which we seemed to be slowly emerging before the last General Election, has again deepened. So far our government’s attempts to lower the financial deficit have only made things worse. Several Governments within the Eurozone are threatened with bankruptcy. Efforts to remedy the situation, plus the incurable Europhobia from which a great many of our MPs suffer, have resulted in a two-tier European Union, with the UK alone and isolated on the lower tier. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs, thousands have been rendered homeless. Meanwhile Climatic Change (progressing virtually unimpeded due to international failure to agree effective counter action) threatens to make our self-made financial crises look like Sunday-school picnics!

For me though, on a personal level, 2011 has been quite different. It has been the year in which I have celebrated my 90^th birthday and in which family events have made it a year to remember. It has been a year on which I can look back with quiet satisfaction.

First, on 23^rd April was the same-sex wedding of my beautiful granddaughter Jo to her partner Siobhan. It was an event to which I had looked forward with some trepidation – not least because I anticipated that I would be the oldest (probably by as much as 25 years!) of the hundred-or so guests and I had promised to say a few words during the course of the partnership ceremony.

It turned out to be a loving and dignified occasion of which I have warm memories. I shared with the other guests Shakespeare’s sonnet beginning, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment……’ and a piece of wisdom that I had acquired from a German daily tear-off calendar while I had been a POW. ‘Lieben und geliebt zu werden, ist das höchste Glück auf Erden’ (To love and to be loved in return is the greatest good fortune that there is on earth).

A month later was my 90^th birthday and I celebrated it with my two sons and daughters in law, two of my grandchildren (Chris – the third – lives and works in Taiwan) and my younger son’s girlfriend Romy; eight of us in all, together with my German friends in Zittau, the small town in Germany where I was POW from 1943 – ’45.

Highlights of the occasion were our champagne reception by the Mayor of Zittau in the Town Hall, my being presented with a splendid certificate confirming my honorary membership of the Fellowship of the Zittau Lenten Veils, and the celebratory dinner that I hosted at our hotel for my family, my German friends, the Mayor of Zittau (Herr Arndt Voight) and his wife and other local VIPs.

Accordion Orchestra.. In the background is the great Lenten Veil.

I remember equally warmly though, the spontaneity of the welcome I received from a local twenty-strong piano-accordion orchestra in the museum/church of the Holy Cross where the Lenten Veil, in whose history I played a tiny role, is on permanent display. They entered playing When the saints come marching in, and gave us a concert of eight or ten folk or light classical items beginning with the European Anthem, Schiller’s Ode to Joy, and ending with Happy Birthday To You played with real gusto!

I also remember with great pleasure a final celebratory family meal that we had together on the last evening of our visit to Zittau. It was in Zum Alten Sack, a character-filled hostelry in the centre of the town just a few yards from the site of the building (now demolished) where we had the temporary ‘POW Barracks’ in which I lived from October 1943 till May 1945. Younger son Andy is missing from the picture as he was holding the camera.

Towards the end of the year we also learned that my younger grandson Nick (almost excluded from the photo above!) had been appointed Acting Executive Director of the European Travel Commission, a non-profit making organisation that has the purpose of attracting tourists from the rest of the world to Europe. He is only ‘Acting’ Director. Whether he will apply for and be offered the permanent post, remains to be seen. In the meantime he is, while still only 28, gaining valuable experience at the top-most level of public administration.

For my family and I 2011 certainly had some memorable moments! What, I wonder, will 2012 bring?

Week 50 2011 20.12.2011

2011-12-08T18:56:00.045Z

Tendring Topics.......on Line

HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL BLOG READERS!

Next Sunday is Christmas Day. I decided that I wouldn’t write my usual blog this week but publish an article that I wrote for The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, last year. Three hundred years ago the first Quakers didn’t celebrate Christmas. Some Quakers still don’t, though for rather different reasons. I think that Christmas should be remembered and celebrated by all. I entitled my article for the Friend, ‘Christmas for Quakers’. This time I am calling it ‘Christmas for Nonbelievers*’ because even to those, of other faiths or of none, who may think that the Christmas story is ‘nothing but a myth’, I believe that the Christmas story conveys a truth about the nature of God far more clearly than historical fact or theological argument could ever hope to do.

It is the God revealed in that story who draws me to a celebration of an Anglican Mass every Sunday morning at 8.00 am followed by an hour of prayerful and expectant shared silence at our local Quaker Meeting for Worship at 10.30 a.m. This blog may help to explain why it is that, though I am ninety years old, and would be housebound but for my electric mobility scooter, I do so week after week.

*'Nonbelievers' in this context, means simply those who do not accept the nativity story in St. Luke's and St. Matthews Gospels as historical fact, though they may otherwise have a firm Christian, or other, faith.

Christmas for Nonbelievers

‘How will you your Christmas keep: feasting, fasting, or asleep? asks Eleanor Farjeon in her poem ‘Keeping Christmas.’

Early Quakers would have answered without hesitation, ‘We don’t keep it at all, nor do we keep any other Christian festival’. This was not because they doubted the virgin birth of Jesus, or that he was God’s Word made Flesh, or the accounts of his crucifixion and resurrection, but because they claimed to celebrate those events in their hearts every day of the year.

There are Quakers today who maintain the testimony against observing ‘times and seasons’ but very few, I think, for the same reason as those early Friends. It is likely that many believe that the Gospel accounts of the miraculous birth in Bethlehem, the shepherds’ angelic vision, and the visit of the Magi, are all a myth, invented to add some ‘magic’ to an otherwise prosaic narrative. It is no more literal historical truth, and of no more importance, than the story of Adam and Eve or, come to that, the Greek myth of Pandora and her box.

Nowadays, they say, no one really believes the Christmas story and it’s just an excuse for a spending spree, overeating and boozing! Best to forget the whole silly business and get on with daily life, as those early Quakers did some three centuries ago.

Like early Quakers, I do believe that Jesus Christ was God’s word incarnate (made flesh, personified – whichever you prefer). Unlike them though, I think that it is right to commemorate and celebrate his birthday.

Do Quakers who pay no heed to ‘times and seasons’ ignore their own children’s birthdays or their own wedding anniversaries? If they do, they must have unusually tolerant and understanding families. I think it unlikely that Jesus’ birth occurred exactly as recounted in the Gospels, but I do think that the Christmas story contains a measure of historic truth. I believe too that even if the whole thing were invented, it would be no less important because of the insight it gives us into the deepest convictions of the early Christian Church.

Think about it. The traditional Christmas story proclaims that the mother of the man who was human but also divine was Mary, an ordinary village girl born and living in Nazareth and engaged to be married to a carpenter. She was to bear her son under circumstances that would bring into doubt his paternity and could even have resulted in her facing an accusation of adultery. He was destined to grow up in an obscure village in the remote province of Galilee, far from Jerusalem and the Temple, the centre of Jewish faith and culture. The first reaction of Nathaneal, when he was told of Jesus, was incredulity; ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’

After having been told that she was to be the mother of the future Messiah Mary composed a triumphal revolutionary anthem that makes The Red Flag appear pale pink in comparison!

He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.

It can only have been thanks to the Grace of God that the Magnificat has survived generation after generation of rule by ‘the proud, the mighty and the rich’ to give hope to the poor and to inspire such martyred Christian leaders as Fr. John Ball of Colchester in the 14^th century and Archbishop Romero of El Salvador in the 20^th.

The birth took place in Bethlehem. The only inn in the town was fully booked. There was no room available. Temporarily homeless, the expectant mother and her husband found shelter in a stable. It was there that their child was born, a cattle trough serving as a cradle.

These were surely strange circumstances to have been invented by those trying to deceive the world into believing that the child was the long-awaited Messiah, destined to redeem

Israel

More, equally inauspicious, events were to follow. Those who were first informed of the newborn Messiah were not, as might have been expected, the prophets, scholars and priests of

Israel

. Nor were they the land’s temporal rulers. Rome was ignorant of, and would have been indifferent to, his birth. When King Herod heard of it he sought only the baby’s death!

It was shepherds, tending their flocks on the hillside near Bethlehem, to whom the news of the birth was first given. They were well down the social scale and would have been even lower in the estimation of the rulers of the Temple and arbiters of spiritual life. Shepherds couldn’t, by reason of their occupation, obey the Law of Moses to the letter. Sheep need to be guarded and cared for seven days a week.

Nature does not heed the Sabbath. Yet, they were chosen by God to welcome the baby who was to change the whole world.

The first to bring the baby gifts that were symbolic of his kingship, his divine nature – and his cruel and untimely death - were neither Children of Israel nor Jewish converts. They were Magi from a distant land, heathen idolaters of the kind that had been roundly condemned throughout the Scriptures. They were surely symbolic of the fact that Jesus was God’s gift to the whole of humanity, not to

Israel

only.

More was to follow. Within weeks, Mary and Joseph, with the baby Jesus, were political refugees, fleeing for their lives into the land of Egypt. How long did they stay there? No one knows. At least one apocryphal gospel suggests several years. Other authorities believe a matter of months only. Perhaps it didn’t happen at all and was just part of that meretricious ‘Christmas myth’. Perhaps – but early Christians (and early Quakers) believed that, at least in the first instance, the Holy Family was dependent upon ‘the kindness of strangers’ and that they lived for months, perhaps years, among the idolatrous heathen.

Those first Chapters of St Luke’s, St. Matthew’s and St. John’s Gospels tell us that when God’s ‘Word’ (‘that was with God and was God from the beginning and without whom was not anything made that was made’ – and is also the ‘True Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the World’) was ‘made flesh and dwelt among us’, he did not make his home and find his friends among the powerful, the most wise or the most outwardly religious. Throughout his life he made a point of his own lack of worldly possessions (‘The Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head’) and of his identification with social and religious outcasts, with the poor and the homeless, and with ‘foreigners’ dwelling in a strange land. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things (good or bad) to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me’. This, early Christians clearly believed, was the nature of their, and our, God.

I do not know how much of the Gospel stories of Christ’s Nativity is true. I have no doubt though about the truth of that summation. If the Christmas story is ‘just a myth’ what a magnificent myth it is! It is a myth that reveals fundamental truths more clearly than could any cold recounting of historical events! For Quakers (whether believing, half-believing or disbelieving the familiar Christmas story), this revelation of the nature of God deserves to be remembered and celebrated, if not every day of the year, at least at Christmas time.

The Magi bring their gifts. (St. James' Anglican Church, Clacton-on-Sea

The time draws near the birth of Christ,

A present that can not be priced,

Given two thousand years ago.

And if God had not given so,

He still would be a distant stranger

And not the Baby in the Manger.

'Advent 1955' by Sir John Betjeman

Every good wish for Christmas to all Blog Readers - and a New Year of Peace!

A few weeks ago I would have hesitated to write the words above. I had no idea how many – if any – people read my blog. It could have been only a few close relatives and friends.

Now, thanks to modern technology, I know that I have a substantial and truly international readership. Last month, for instance, there were nearly 2,000 ‘views’ and on several single days there were well over 100. What’s more – there are blog readers in every corner of the world!

To my surprise the biggest group of readers do not live in Britain but in India! Next come Britain and the USA, followed by Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Germany, Russia, France, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Singapore and

Australia!

I feel very proud (but at the same time humbled) that so many people, from so many different countries, traditions and religious faiths find my words of interest to them. They may not always be words that everyone wishes to read – but they are my own words. No-one tells me what to write and what not to write. Thank you for reading them.

The Next Blog

Next week, the final week of 2011, I expect to publish my blog a day or two later than usual - probably on Thursday 29th December instead of Tuesday 27th. I shall probably continue to publish my blog on Thursdays in the future.

Week 49 2011

2011-12-07T19:11:00.005Z

Tendring Topics......on line

A Career in Local Government?

There was a time when a ‘career in local government’ meant getting a job at the Town Hall when you left school, starting off as a junior clerk and studying in your spare time for a qualification appropriate to the department of the council employing you. That was my intended career path. In 1937, aged sixteen and armed with the London University School Leaving Certificate with Matriculation Exemption I obtained employment in Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department as a Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector.

I was to work in the general office for two years while, at evening classes, studying Typing, Shorthand and Building Construction and Drawing. I would then be transferred to the Sanitary Inspectors Office and spend two years gaining practical experience while travelling up to London once or twice a week for theoretical training. I would then take the exam for the appropriate professional qualification and would apply for the post of Sanitary Inspector when there was a vacancy either in Ipswich or elsewhere. The Council would lend me £100 (a pretty trivial sum today but far-from-trivial in 1937!) to cover my tuition fees and travelling expenses.

Myself as Housing Manager

Thanks to Hitler my own career took a totally different direction. I did my two years ‘hard labour’ in the Public Health Department General Office but in September 1939, when I was about to commence my practical training, I was called up with the Territorial Army and didn’t give another thought to public health for seven years!

And as freelance writer

Discharged from the army in 1946, I attended a special full-time course for Sanitary Inspectors at Battersea Polytechnic. I passed the qualifying exam in 1947 and was first employed as a Sanitary Inspector (to be renamed Public Health Inspector), later as a Housing Manager and finally as a Public Relations Officer in the local government service, before taking early retirement at the age of 59 and spending the next twenty-three years (until I was 82!) pursuing a second successful career as a freelance writer. A similar career path in local government was still available until the economic crisis and the savage cuts in public spending limited or closed altogether local authority training schemes.

Today though, there is another way in which to make a living out of local government without all that tedious business of studying for paper qualifications and enduring years of drudgery while ‘gaining experience’. It’s the political path.

Essential qualifications are an easy smile, a ready tongue and allegiance to whichever political party you think has the best chance of gaining a majority at the local elections. Firmly held political convictions are an optional extra (they can even be a disadvantage) but absolute loyalty to the leaders of the party you have chosen is a key to success, at least in the early stages of your career.

In my day elected councillors were unpaid. They presented themselves for election because they had strong political views that they believed should be represented when local decisions were made, or simply because they had plenty of the sound common sense and the local knowledge that they felt was needed. There was no question of personal gain, though they could claim reimbursement of travelling and other necessary expenses and loss of earnings. Councils made their decisions after considering the recommendations of committees comprising members of all political parties and those who had no political allegiance.

Nowadays councillors are paid just for turning up at meetings of the full council. The pay varies but Tendring District councillors get paid a basic £4,983 a year; not enough to live on but a useful addition to the income from ‘the day job’. That could be just the beginning. The old ‘committee’ system that I remember has been abolished at the insistence of central government. Each council now has its ‘cabinet’ of a handful of members of the majority party. These consider all the issues coming before the Council. Their recommendations can, of course, be amended or rejected by the full Council but – since the party that rules in the cabinet has a majority in the council chamber – they are usually accepted without too much trouble.

In Tendring, most cabinet members receive a special annual allowance of £10,738 on top of their £4,983. That, for some people, would constitute a living wage – but it need not be the end of the line. The Council’s political ‘leader’ gets additional allowances and there is no reason why a member of the district council should not aspire to being a county councillor at the same time – and county councillors, county cabinet members and their leader receive higher allowances! It isn’t quite true to say that ‘the sky’s the limit’ for the aspiring local politician – but the limit is certainly well up in the clouds!

Turkeys

voting for Christmas?

The ‘cabinet’ system of local administration combined with the government’s demand that local authorities cut their expenditure, has produced a situation within Tendring District Council’s Council Chamber which an opposition councillor described as comparable with ‘inviting turkeys to vote for Christmas’.

Tendring Council’s services had been organised in ‘departments’ with a portfolio holder (one of the ten members of the ‘cabinet’) presiding over each. In September a money-saving internal reorganisation cut the number of departments to five. At the last meeting of the full council, Labour councillor Ivan Henderson called for the number of cabinet members to be reduced to reflect the new structure, thus saving the council approximately another £40,000 a year.

This seems an entirely reasonable idea and the Council could have debated it and voted on it immediately. However the Council Chairman, needless to say a member of the ruling party, decided that the motion should be sent to the cabinet for consideration. That puts off the final decision at least till the next meeting of the full council, which won’t be till February next year! Ivan Henderson has calculated that the extra cost of four redundant cabinet members between September (when the number of departments was halved) and February, will amount to £20,000.

In any event what is the cabinet’s recommendation likely to be? Will the four members who could be made redundant vote to be deprived of over £5,000 each – and will the other members of the cabinet vote for the dismissal of their colleagues? I wouldn’t bet on it. Council leader Neil Stock is reported as saying, ‘I am planning to reduce the size of the cabinet, but it will be done in a calm and rational way when we have seen how the departments are working’. If it is just the Council’s political leader who makes decisions of this kind, perhaps we could dispense with the whole of the rest of the ‘cabinet’. Now that would produce a worth-while saving!

On a lighter note

The news news that two giant pandas from China have been loaned to Edinburgh zoo reminded me of happier days when my wife Heather and I used to write verses each week to amuse our grandchildren. You can guess how long ago it was from the fact that those grandchildren are now in their late twenties and early thirties! One of our early efforts was The Giant Panda. If you have young children or grandchildren it may amuse them too. Here is a photo of Heather with granddaughter Josie and, below it, The Giant Panda

The Giant Panda used to fight with every animal in sight.

He now looks like a cuddly toy, but once he was a bully boy.

He’d quarrel with the wolves and bears, and challenge tigers in their lairs –

And then he’d settle down to munch someone else’s stolen lunch!

One day he teased a kangaroo, (a very foolish thing to do).

After they’d fought for half a day, the Giant Panda ran away!

And now you’ll find he always hides on lonely, wooded mountain-sides.

His only food is now bamboo (It’s tasteless, tough and hard to chew)

And it will come as no surprise to find that he has two black eyes!

The Future of Afghanistan – and the Middle East

Last week an international conference on the future of Afghanistan was held without two voices that are likely to have an important – possibly decisive – influence on that country’s future. One was Pakistan, boycotting the conference after being understandably outraged at an attack by United States’ forces on one of their border posts that resulted in the killing of a score of Pakistani soldiers. Did they over-react? Hardly; imagine the outrage there would be in the USA if a score of their soldiers had been killed by Pakistani, or British – or any other – allied armed force. An apology, however abject, and condolences, would not have sufficed. Believe me, the wives, mothers and girlfriends of Pakistani soldiers killed by ‘friendly fire’ mourn every bit as deeply as would wives, mothers and girlfriends in New York State, Ohio, or California under similar circumstances.

The other ‘absent voice’ at the Conference was that of the Taliban. They know perfectly well what they want and are convinced that, in the fullness of time, they will get it. They are not prepared to compromise, so there was really nothing for them to discuss. Nothing emerged from that conference that persuaded me to modify my conviction that within months of the departure of the last NATO soldier, the Taliban will be back in control – and may Heaven help those Afghan who had thrown in their lot with the NATO forces!

Elsewhere it seems that there is little possibility of liberal and tolerant forces emerging triumphantly from the Egyptian general election or from the current post-Gaddafi turmoil in Libya. It is easy to overestimate the attraction of free speech and of liberal, parliamentary democracy as we know it in Europe, to people who have never known anything but autocratic government. In both North African countries it is likely that Islamic political parties will triumph and that they will be unable to curb the activities of jihadist extremists. This would be bad news for members of Egypt’s nearly 2,000 year old Coptic Christian Church, just as the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime proved to be bad news for Iraqi Christians. Even in ‘friendly and democratic’ Pakistan, Christians come regularly under attack and a woman is currently in prison facing the death penalty for allegedly committing the heinous crime of converting from Islam to the Christian faith.

Meanwhile ‘the West’ is becoming ever more threatening to Syria, torn by what has developed into a civil war, and to Iran because of its alleged nuclear weapon programme. I pray daily and with all my heart that the UK will not be dragged into yet another military adventure in the Middle East by that wonderful ‘special relationship’ with the

USA

! You think this would be impossible in our current financial situation? Don’t you believe it. We may not be able to afford proper pensions, homes for the homeless and generous help for the poor, the sick and the disabled – but governments can always find a few billion pounds for a small war, especially if they can be persuaded – as they were in 1914 and again in 1939, not to mention Afghanistan in 2001 – that, ‘It’ll be all over in a few months!’

Week 48 20.11.2011

2011-11-28T10:22:00.001Z

Tendring Topics.......on line

'All Hope Abandon......'

As 2011 draws towards its end,the thoughts of old folk like me inevitably go back to Christmases and NewYears of the past. I don’t ever beforerecall the year’s end being ‘celebrated’ in quite such an atmosphere of gloomand foreboding as it will be this year.

Isuppose that my life was at its very lowest ebb as 1942 came to an end. I had been a PoW for six months and was in alarge PoW camp in northern

Italy

. We were cold. We were hungry. Prolonged hunger showed in our faces, whichwere gaunt and hollow-cheeked! Almostevery week there was a death from hunger-related causes. We were louse-infested. We were dispirited and bored out of ourminds. We never lost hope though. Wewere all of us sure that Britainand its allies would win the war, andthat we would be liberated. By the end of 1943 (though by then transported to aworking camp in Germany) – and particularly by the end of 1944, when thethunder of gunfire from the ever-approaching eastern front daily became louder- that hope had become a certainty. We would soon be home again, and so wewere.

Theimmediate post-war years are often depicted by historians (how extraordinarythat a past that seems so close to me should now be ‘history’!) as a time ofprivation and hardship with continued shortages and rationing. Many of our towns (and those of most of mainland Europe) were in ruins. We had a housing shortage thatmakes today’s housing difficulties seem Lilliputian and, having had most of thepopulation engaged in non-productive war activities for the previous six years,we must surely have had a gargantuan national debt.

Heather, the ‘Essex girl’ who had waited for me, and I, never saw it inthat light. To us, the final years ofthe 1940s were a time of hope and expectancy. We were proud of the new Labour (not of course New-Labour!) government that we had helped to bring to power and wereally believed that we were entering a new age of peace and prosperity sharedby all. How naïve and innocent we were!

We had no worries about thefuture and were married just days after my discharge from the army in1946. Heather’s wedding dress was madeby a friend of her mother, and she carried a splendid bouquet of real flowers. The sports jacket and slacks that I had beengiven on my discharge from the army didn’t seem quite right for a wedding, so Iwore my khaki uniform. I had had thejacket of my battle dress tailored so that I could wear the top open, with acollar and tie. A couple of days beforethe wedding I strode into a posh men’s outfitters in Ipswich and bought a silkkhaki shirt and tie clearly labelled ‘Forsale only to officers of HMForces’. I was 24 years old and,with seven years army service behind me, I reckoned that I was as good as anyofficer – and that my bride-to-be was a lot better than any officer’s ‘lady’ Ihad ever met!

The weddingwas at Gant’s Hill Methodist Church,Ilford, and the reception - well attended by both Heather’s and my friends andrelatives – was in the church hall. Mybest friend, whom I would have liked to have been my best man, was stillserving in India. I asked a former colleague and former fellowPOW to do the honours. I knew that hewas a member of the Salvation Army and unlikely to embarrass me at a teetotalwedding reception! I don’t know how muchit all cost but it couldn’t have been very much because neither we, nor our parentshad very much to spend.

We weremarried for sixty years and we faced and survived most of the problems thatbeset all married couples and one or two (prolonged separation by illness forexample) that most avoid. In all ourtime together though, I don’t recall a single New Year that we entered withoutat least a shred of hope of better things to come.

As 2011 comestoward its end I have a warm and comfortable home. I have an income sufficientfor my needs. I have a mobility scooterthat prevents my being housebound, loving friends and relatives and, thanks tomodern technology, the means of keeping in touch with all of them.

One thing thatI lack is hope for the future; Not for my own future (there is unlikely to bevery much of that!) but for the future of my sons and grandchildren and,indeed, for our country as a whole. Forthe first time ever I don’t feel that there is a reasonable chance that nextyear will be better for us all than the one coming to an end. Nor can I see a future has any possible‘happy ending’. I don’t think thateither our present coalition government or the Labour opposition has a trueunderstanding of, let alone a solution to, our present woes – and I am quitesure that neither UKIP nor the BNP has!

I hope that Iam wrong and that my pessimism is just a product of old age. St Paul told us that when all else fails Faith, Hope and Love remain, and thatthe greatest of these is Love. Quite so, but Hope and Faith are not optional extras. We can’t live for long without them. Dante got it right when, at the entrance to Hell, he imagined a posted warning, 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here!'

Some later thoughts

Iwrote the above before the Chancellor of the Exchequer made his ‘AutumnStatement’ and I had wondered if it might contain anything that would persuademe to change it. It didn’t. It is clear that the outlook is every bit asbleak as it had appeared to be and that for those in the public service it iseven worse. There are to be more job losses, and pay rises capped at onepercent when the current wage freeze ends.

Thereis room for argument about who was responsible for the current economicsituation. The Government insists thatit was all the fault of the previous Labour Government (but then they would,wouldn’t they?) The Governor of theBank of England, who really should know and has no axe to grind, has told us –and reiterated – that the greed and incompetence of the bankers was toblame.

Ithink it likely that both are right. Thebankers were directly to blame but the New-Labour Government was guilty of failing to curbthem (but then I doubt very much if any possible alternative government wouldhave done differently). Nobody suggests for one moment that teachers, doctors,nurses, refuse collectors and other public servants were in any way toblame. Yet it is they who are beingpunished while the bankers continue to walk away with telephone number salariesand bonuses.

It should beremembered that with inflation at 5 percent, a wage freeze is in effect a 5 percent wagecut – and a pay increase of one percent is just a slightly smaller cut.Thousands of public servants are losing their jobs. Those who keep theirs areto suffer continuing pay cuts, and are expected to work longer and paymore for a smaller pension! Publicservants are overwhelmingly not soul-lessbureaucrats who spend their days sending each other memos. They provide the foundation on whichprofit-making private enterprise can function; the personal and public healthservices, the highways, the fire and police services, the social servicessafety net and, come to that, the armed forces. We neglect them at our peril. Yes – had I still been in the public serviceas I was for over forty years, I would, however reluctantly, have certainly joinedthe strikers last Wednesday.

Asfor the belated capital expenditure on the infrastructure that it is hoped willcreate jobs and lift us out of recession, it is too little, too late. Much of it is simply trying to put rightthings that the government got wrong in the first instance!

Inour region, for instance, much is being made of road widening on the A14 – aproject that obviously makes sense, generating jobs in construction andfacilitating the transport of goods from the Midlandsto Felixstowe for export.

Ablog reader points out that there is nothing ‘new’ about this initiative.Together with, for instance, the School Building Programme, this had beenagreed by the previous government, but was one of the first to be dropped bythe new Coalition Government when it came to power. Roads Minister Mike Penning said that thescheme was unaffordable and no longer offered acceptable value for money.

Mycorrespondent asks, ‘How manyconstruction jobs might have been saved, and how many manufacturing companieswould by now have had their exports streamlined if the scheme hadn’t beencancelled in the first place?’

‘Sing,Choirs of Angels!’

When,three weeks ago, under the above heading I wrote about choir-master GarethMalone’s success in creating a community choir from the residents of what Idescribed as a ‘New Town’ nearLondon, I little thought that a fortnight later we would be watching on BBC2his revisit there after two years – with lots of highlights from his earliersuccess.

Iwas glad to discover that my memory of the original programmes hadn’t been toofaulty. I hadn’t remembered the name ofthe ‘New Town’. It was, in fact, South Oxhey in Hertfordshire, less a ‘new town’ than anenormous and soul-less housing estate – until Gareth’s genius turned it into aliving community! As I wrote in myblog, he had brought his South Oxhey Community Choir up to a standard at which its members were able to sing very professionally the Agnus Dei (O Lamb of God) prayer, in Latin, to an appreciativeaudience in St Alban’s Cathedral!

Thatwasn’t the whole story. During the ninemonths that Gareth spent in South Oxhey he created not just one but threechoirs – the original community choir, a children’s choir from local schools,including one school for children with special educational needs, and a ‘malevoice choir’ from regulars of local pubs whose previous choral experience had beenlimited to Karaoke after having had a pint or two to dull their inhibitions!

Theclimax of his visit had been an open-air concert on a football field given bythe three massed choirs to an audience that must surely have consisted of mostof the population of South Oxhey!

Thatwas in 2009. On his revisit earlier thisyear Gareth Malone received an enthusiastic welcome from his friends in South Oxhey and was delighted to find that the CommunityChoir was still flourishing, with another enthusiastic choirmaster. It was still giving much-acclaimedperformances before large audiences and was still making its contribution tobinding the inhabitants of South Oxhey into aliving community!

Iwas reminded how, in my childhood and long before the advent of television,church socials had been one of the highlights of our lives. My dad, who could play any stringedinstrument, and two or three of his friends, had formed a small band for theseoccasions which always included a spell of ‘community singing’. We sang ‘Clementine’,‘Cockles and Mussels’, ‘There’s a Tavern in the Town’ and ‘Jerusalem’ with gusto (I remember their words to this day!) and afew songs both from World War I, of which many present still had sad memories,and of other earlier conflicts; Keep the Home Fires Burning!’ ‘There’sa long, long trail a’winding……’ and ‘Tramp,tramp, tramp the boys are marching’ (a prisoner of war song from the American Civil War) were particularly popular. I little guessed how prophetic of my ownfuture the last of these was to be!

Therewas a community spirit in those pre-television days that doesn’t existtoday. Perhaps community singing hadsomething to do with it. It would havebeen nice to have had a Gareth Malone to encourage us to keep it up!

'A damp squib?'

David Cameron is surely an authority on damp squibs. He has had plenty of experience of them.

However, when he uses that expression to describe a general strike of two million workers from every walk of life, which closed a majority of our schools and affected every one of us in one way or another, it makes me hope that we will never encounter a dry one!

Week 47 2011 29.11.2011

2011-11-23T19:18:00.001Z

Tendring Topics……on line

'What goes around, comes around'

Therewas a time – I remember it well – when the maximum loan for house purchase thatBuilding Society and Bank Managers would approve for house purchase dependedupon the income of the main wage earner in the applicant’s family. That was in the days before it was assumedthat both members of the marriage or other partnership would continue infull-time work even after a baby or babies arrived. Then, provided one of the couple, usuallythe male, had a steady job they could buy their new home with a twenty ortwenty-five years mortgage and a deposit of ten percent of the total cost. If the local authority were prepared to actas guarantor and the applicant’s job seemed very secure, then a five percentdeposit might be acceptable.

When,way back it 1956, my wife Heather and I bought our bungalow in Clacton (the one in which I am writing these words) wehad thought we could manage the monthly mortgage payments on the kind of homethat we needed (I had just been appointed Additional Public Health Inspector byClacton Urban District Council). Raisingthe deposit though was a major obstacle. We had been married for ten years but during that time Heather hadsuffered a life-threatening illness and had had a crippling operation. We had two young children, and a loan torepay on the car I needed for my work. My pay had been adequate but we had virtually no savings. The Council was prepared to act as guarantorand we had only to raise five percent of the value of the bungalow. It seems a totally piffling sum now but wewere able to raise it only by selling Heather’s solitaire diamond engagementring that I had bought eleven years earlier with a considerable proportion ofthe army back pay I had accumulated as a prisoner of war.

Therecame a housing shortage. It was destinedto be made much worse by Mrs Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ legislation that, withina short space of time, markedly reduced the amount of social housing availablefor letting. With rents prohibitivelyhigh in the private sector, young couples yearned to get their feet on thefirst rung of the home ownership ladder.

Itwas a time of low unemployment and relative prosperity. Married women, including young mothers,carried on working, leaving their children in day care. Banks relaxed their rules and made loansbased on the total income of the applicants – not just that of the highestearner. Many more became eligible formortgages. But, of course, there was nocommensurate increase in the number of homes available for purchase. The price of houses began to rise, and rise –and rocket! The housing boom had begun. Soon house price inflation soared well abovegeneral rise in prices.

Banks competed with each-other in makingtempting offers to would-be buyers. Ninety-five percent mortgages became commonplace. Soon there were one hundred percent, andeventually one hundred and ten percent loans to help prospective house buyerswith their legal costs and their removal and furnishing expenses!

Itcouldn’t, and didn’t last. The bubbleburst. Home buyers (they had imaginedthey were ‘home owners’ but they weren’t!) or their partners lost their jobsand half their incomes. They couldn’tkeep up the mortgage payments and either sold their homes at a loss, or weredispossessed by the Bank. House prices plummeted. The homes thus recovered bythe Banks were often worth only a fraction of the sums originally loaned onthem. Some Banks would have beendeclared bankrupt had they not been bailed out by us taxpayers.

Rightnow we have stagnation. Few new housesare being built. Skilled and experiencedbuilding workers – bricklayers, plumbers, electricians – are unemployed. Many people are homeless or inadequatelyhoused. There is an acute housing shortage and there is nothing like sufficientsocial housing available for rent.

Thereis, of course, an obvious solution – repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation andencourage local authorities and Housing Associations to build housing for letting, fund them adequately and leavethem to solve the housing problem in their own areas – as they did successfullyfor a century before the advent of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatism and itspale-pink New Labour shadow. That wouldhave been true ‘localism’.

Isthat what the Coalition Government is going to do? Not likely; they are going to encourageremaining council tenants to buy their own homes with discounts as high as 50percent (well, it isn’t their money they’regiving away!) and guarantee, withtaxpayers’ money, part of the mortgage on homes newly built for sale at affordable prices. This, it is hoped, will encourage Banks toreduce the level of that difficult deposit and bring home-purchase within thescope of ordinary people again. This, so they declare, will stimulate thebuilding trade and thus get the general economy moving. I hope that it will! It seems to me though to be offering to bailout the banks before they are even in trouble, and bringing us back to asituation similar to that at the beginning of the house price boom.

‘Erethe winter storms begin’

The harvest hymn tellsus that, ‘All is safely gathered in, erethe winter storms begin’. And so itshould be – but those of us who live in towns know that bringing in the harvestis not the only task that needs to be performed before the winter storms, theice and perhaps the snow are with us again. Among them are repair of the damagedone to our roads and footpaths by the last two hard winters.

Well, here are a couple of localexamples of road and footpath disrepair that need urgent attention. They are by no means the only examples ofhighway neglect in Clacton and they are almostcertainly not the worst, but they are examples that I see regularly. The footpath is beside Old Road and is regularly used bypedestrians (and mobility scooterists) on their way to Morrison’supermarket. It is a positive danger tothose unsteady on their feet or with impaired sight, and a source ofbone-shaking discomfort to scooterists. I speak from personal experience!

Thepothole is in Beaconsfield Road,near its junction with Skelmersdale Road. If itdoesn’t receive attention it will get much worse, and more dangerous, in thecoming winter. Unspectacular work likethis is far more worth-while than, for instance, the wholesale reconstructionof the seaward end of Pier Avenuelast winter – when the dust had scarcely settled on the preciousreconstruction!

The ever widening incomes gap!

Atlast – the gaping chasm between the incomes of the poorest and the wealthiestof us has received the attention of an official investigation and is beingbrought to the attention of the government. It seems that the average income of the staff of a top FTSE100 companyis £20,000 a year (for many people even that is wealth beyond the dreams ofavarice!) while the incomes of Directors and Chief Executives of thesecompanies is – wait for it! – more than three and a half million pounds a year.

ACBI spokesman explained to us on TV this morning why nothing could – or should– be done about this. It’s all becauseof that wonderful Global Market. Profit-making enterprises throughout the worldneed the very best brains to make them even more profitable. They are prepared to pay the best salaries,bonuses and other perks, to get them. If we lesser mortals were to attempt to limit the number of millions ourtop people receive (I can’t bring myself to write ‘earn’) they would simply up sticks and move elsewhere. How very convenient, for some, it is to havean economic system that demands that the pay of workers gets ever lower so thatwe can be competitive in the global market, while that of their bosses has toget ever higher, for exactly the same reason!

Despite theobvious absurdity of this situation and world wide protests about its manifestunfairness and injustice, the Global Market is welcomed by all three of ourmain political parties!

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Thegovernment’s policy of cuts in public services and benefits, and of taxincreases (in VAT and similar indirect or ‘stealth’taxes) that particularly affect the less-well-off are really beginning tobite. The provident, who have ‘nesteggs’ in savings accounts with banks and building societies are worse hit thanthe extravagant. Their savings decreasein value as inflation outstrips the meagre interest that they earn. Some have lost their homes, many more havelost their jobs and practically all of us are beginning to lose hope.

Therewould be one very simple and straightforward way of restoring our faith in theCoalition Government’s handling of the economic crisis and persuading us thatthe sacrifices we all (except the seriously wealthy) are having to make, havebeen worthwhile. Why not – perhaps quarterly or half-yearly – reveal by howmany (surely millions) of pounds the deficit has been reduced during that period? Then we would know whether or not the gainhad been worth the pain. As a formerpublic relations officer I am astonished that this isn’t already happening. Could it be that there has been nodecrease? Perhaps there has evenbeen an increase in that worryingdeficit; one that even the most accomplished spin doctor would have difficultyin attributing to the previous Labour Government, or to ‘Brussels’, or to whomor whatever is the latest popular scapegoat.

Thatis very possible. The cynical may see itas a reason why no such disclosure has been made. A blog reader points out that the government,in formulating its financial strategy must have been expecting the nationaleconomy to show modest (perhaps 2 percent) growth. This would have been expected to bring areduction in the number of benefit claimants, together with increased revenuefrom corporation tax, income tax and VAT. In fact the government’s austerity policy has killed economic growth,increased unemployment and suppressed demand.

Itis an unfortunate fact that we have to rely on their political opponent’sestimates of the effects that their policies, and those of their rivals, wouldhave on the deficit.

TheConservatives claim that Labour’s policy of reversing ‘the cuts’ to stimulatethe economy, would increase the deficit by £85 billion a year by the end of thepresent Parliament. They may well bequite right.

Labourhas considered Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts from November 2010together with the latest estimates from independent forecasters, They predictthat the coalition government’s borrowing could rise by £11 billion more thanplanned this year, £22 billion next year, £34 billion in 2013 – ’14, and £42billion in 2014-’15.

Votersat the next election will, it seems, have a clear choice. Vote Conservative, cut even deeper, andincrease the deficit, or Vote Labour, reverse the cuts and – though in aslightly different way – do the same thing!

Well,it isn’t all that likely that I shall still be around for the next GeneralElection to have to make a decision!

An Affront – or a Lucky Escape?

Acouple of weeks ago members of Tendring Council, together with the local press,were full of indignation at the fact that Tendring was the one district inEssex through which the Olympic Torch would not be carried next year as it makes its tortuous journey to theOlympic Stadium at Stratford.

NowI learn that the passage of the torch through Colchesteron July 6^th is expected to cost the district council£30,000 in road closures, crowd control and street cleaning. Our omission from the route may have been ablow to our local pride but I reckon that in every other respect it was a luckyescape!

Week 46 2011 22.11.2011

2011-11-17T09:03:00.001Z

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘Sing, Choirs of Angels’

Have you watched that extraordinary choirmaster Gareth Malone on tv, creating award-winning choirs from the most unpromising material? We first saw him produce a choir from a very ordinary comprehensive school that proved itself capable of competing internationally in Beijing,. Then came a choir from a tough rugger-playing school where pupils and staff were convinced that singing was a leisure occupation for girls only. He persuaded not only the pupils but the very macho sports master, to take part. The climax was a performance at the Albert Hall!

Next he produced a choir from the residents in a new town on London’s outskirts populated by folk from London’s East End. I am quite sure that not one of his choristers had previously had even a passing acquaintance with Latin or Greek.. Yet the climax of Gareth’s efforts saw them singing the Agnus Dei (O Lamb of God) prayer extremely creditably in Latin at St. Alban’s (I think) Cathedral.

His latest exploit has been to produce a choir in a small garrison town from the wives and girlfriends left behind there while the troops were doing a six months stint in Afghanistan. Once again he worked a miracle and created a choir that performed in the open air in Plymouth for Armed Forces Day and at the Albert Hall for the British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance. While doing so he managed to weld these waiting-and-worrying women into a close self-supportive community.

Those programmes, transmitted over the Remembrance Day period, brought vividly to my mind the anxiety that mothers, wives and girlfriends must have experienced during World War II. We temporary soldiers went overseas, not for a fixed period of six months but ‘for the duration’. There was no home leave from North Africa or the Far East. Separated wives today know where their husbands are serving and roughly what they are doing. There is postal and internet communication and there are regular phone calls. Our wives, mothers and girlfriends didn’t even know for sure in which country we were serving. Our mail was addressed to Middle East Forces. When I was captured with the fall of Tobruk to the Germans, my mother was simply informed that I was ‘missing’. She imagined the worst (I realize that I am very like her in some respects!) and it was several weeks before she learned from a friendly Roman Catholic neighbour that my name had been among those broadcast over the Vatican Radio as being a Prisoner of War in Italy.

Our wives and girlfriends weren’t able just to wait and worry. They were part of the conflict. My girlfriend Heather Gilbert worked in central London (near the British Museum) in the office of a printer. One morning she arrived at the office to find that it had disappeared. There had been a overnight air raid and it was now just a pile of rubble. Nor did Ilford, where she lived with her parents, escape the Luftwaffe’s attention. She lived through the blitz, the pilotless ‘doodlebugs’ and the V2 rocket attacks. Her life in the early 1940s was scarcely less perilous than my own.

I once again thought how extremely fortunate I had been, not only to return home safely in 1945 (one in seven of the young men who volunteered with me in 1939 never came home) but in finding my girlfriend there, waiting for me. We were not married nor were we even engaged, but she had waited patiently for a reunion that might never have taken place. This photograph, taken when she was nineteen and sent to me in Germany while I was a PoW there, makes it obvious that she would have had no problem in finding a different boyfriend with a more predictable future had she wished to do so. I was particularly pleased to note that she was wearing the miniature Royal Artillery badge brooch that I had given her when we had said goodbye!

After my return to England I had to spend almost another year in the Army. We were married just four days after I had shed my khaki uniform for good!

That was another big difference between us and the soldiers and their wives of today. They are professional soldiers, who chose the life and everything that goes with it. We were citizen soldiers, civilians in uniform, who had volunteered for the army because our country was threatened by Nazism and Fascism, evils that we believed could only be eradicated by force of arms. We were not prepared stand by and let others get on with it. When it was over though, we couldn’t wait to get back into civvies!

We served the guns and did our duty as soldiers but most of us detested the spit-and-polish, the parades, the rifle drill and the barked orders that are an inescapable part of army life. We had a word for it that I prefer not to repeat in this blog.

Those of ‘The fallen’ whom I knew best shared my distaste. It is for that reason that I have reservations about attending British Legion ceremonies of remembrance. I don’t care for the quasi military berets worn by many Legionnaires, the clipped words of command, the ceremonial raising and lowering of the flags. I do appreciate the two minutes shared silence though and – irrationally perhaps – I am always deeply moved by the sounding of the Last Post before the silence and of Reveille with its message of hope, at its end.

The Murdoch Empire

Hardly had the enquiry into the dubious activities of our national press opened than there were fresh revelations. Phone hacking was by no means limited to the News of the World. It would have been astonishing if it had been. I confidently expect to hear more scandalous revelations – phone hacking, surveillance of celebrities to the point of harassment, bribery of the police and threats to whistle-blowers.

What concerns me most will probably not even get a mention. It is certainly not illegal and I really don’t see any way in which it could easily be made so. Yet it surely poses a real threat to our national sovereignty; a far more dangerous threat than that posed by ‘Brussels’, the pet hate of the Europhobes!

It is the way in which millionaire newspaper owners can influence and bend our political leaders to their will. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron all made a point of friendship with Rupert Murdoch, head of News International. I have no doubt at all that Tony Blair created ‘New Labour’ to obtain the approval of the News International Empire and thus to gain the support of the Sun. Thus he could, and did, make his ‘reformed’ Party ‘electable’ – though, in my opinion, not worth electing! I have no idea to what extent the other Prime Ministers may have changed their Party’s policies to bring them in line with Mr Murdoch’s ideas – but I am sure that they certainly wouldn’t have taken any steps that they knew might antagonise him. It is worth noting that the takeover of the whole of BSkyB by News International was destined to be approved on the nod – until the phone hacking story broke.

If we are to have a truly free press then we must somehow deprive wealthy and powerful men and women of their power to influence the will of the electorate. There is nothing new about this malign influence. Who can say how much damage to our preparedness to resist Hitler was done by the confident Daily Express headline in 1938 and early 1939, ‘There will be no war this year – or next year either!’ I was reminded of this a week or so ago when I watched on tv a wartime cinema classic, 'In which we Serve'. As a British vessel sank under submarine attack, a copy of the Daily Express with that infamous headline came floating by!
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In particular, I believe that we must never allow the British press, a powerful moulder of public opinion, to be controlled by those who are not British citizens and owe no loyalty to our country. This, I believe, should apply to American billionaires as much as to Russian oligarchs!

Black Clouds and Silver Linings!

Very often in my life, circumstances that have seemed to be totally disastrous have turned out instead to be well-disguised blessings. As a POW in Italy in 1943 I well remember my dismay and dejection when, after the collapse of the Italian Fascist government and the surrender of its successor to the Allies, German tanks surrounded our POW camp. We found ourselves locked into cattle trucks (just like the transports to the death camps!) on our way to further captivity in Germany.

To my surprise I found that at a small working camp in Germany conditions were far better than they had been in a large PoW camp in Italy. That was not everyone’s experience but it was mine. What is more, my quite unknowing and involuntary role as a PoW, in the ‘rescue’ of a nearly six centuries old priceless linen artefact (Zittau’s ‘Lenten Veil’) has assured me a welcome in the town where I was once a prisoner, and has provided me with an interest and a purpose in my old age.

I was bitterly disappointed when, as Clacton’s Housing Manager, I failed to secure the post of Director of Housing to the new Tendring District after 1974’s local government reorganisation. However, because of my experience as a spare-time writer and public speaker, I was appointed as the new authority’s first Public Relations Officer – an even more satisfying, though less well paid, job. I was again very apprehensive when, after seven years service as PRO, an internal reorganisation introduced by the Council’s new Chief Executive, meant that if I were to retain my self-respect I had no option but to seek early retirement. I knew that my wife and I would have had to struggle to survive on my far from gold-plated pension, and at 59 I was too old to find other congenial employment. My early retirement though, led to a far more satisfying second career as a freelance author and journalist, a profession that I was to follow for over twenty more years!

Nationally, sad to say, we seem to have lately been experiencing a reverse effect – directly a promised silver lining appears on the horizon a big black cloud pops up in front of it! That Royal Wedding for instance at the end of April; it was supposed to be going to bring us wealth from visitors to Britain eager to share in the pomp and ceremony of the occasion, and extra economic activity from the sale of souvenirs and the like. To untutored minds like mine that all sounded very reasonable. Ultimately though, the Royal Wedding was one of the causes put forward by the government as a reason for a disappointing economic performance during that period. Could it have been because it involved an extra public holiday when those fortunate enough to have jobs stopped their feverish ‘wealth creation’ for an extra twenty-four hours? Next year’s Olympic Games were also supposed to be bringing a great influx of visitors eager to spend their money in Britain. Perhaps they will – eventually. Right now though, 2012’s bookings for holiday and tourist accommodation are fewer than those for previous years. Potential visitors prefer to avoid the Olympics crush!

Locally, Tendring Council’s ‘Tourism boss’ (Councillor Mayzes) seems determined to wreck Tendring District’s development as a leading holiday resort area.

Our Coastal Academy School Governors were astute enough, during the school holiday period, to secure the interest of the Caravan and Camping Club of Great Britain, the largest and most prestigious holiday leisure club in the UK. For the first time ever, their members held a brief rally on the school’s spacious playing fields, patronising local businesses and clearing up the site meticulously on their departure. Was Councillor Mayzes delighted? Not a bit of it. He was furious that caravans should violate ‘a school playground’ (some playground!) and sought to invoke the planning laws to prevent it happening! Then again, after a largely disappointing summer season, we had a couple of weeks of ‘Indian summer’ towards the end of September and into October. Our holiday coast enjoyed a belated boom as visitors poured in from Colchester, Ipswich and London to enjoy the last of the late summer sunshine. What did they find? No safety patrols on the beaches and Tourist Enquiry offices closed. Tendring’s ‘Tourism Boss’ had decided that the summer season had ended on 31 August and (no doubt congratulating himself of having saved the council a few pounds) had closed these facilities down.

Christmas is coming – a time when many retail businesses in Clacton hope to make sufficient profit to help them through to the holiday season again. Don’t tell me that the Government is going to blame the Christmas and New Year holidays if there is disappointing economic activity in that period!

The Government has already blamed their predecessors for our financial predicament. They have blamed the EU and, in particular, the Eurozone. They have blamed ‘Public Sector’ pensions and they have blamed ‘benefit cheats’. Could they be about to add Santa Claus to the list?

Week 45 2011 15.11.2011

2011-11-15T04:04:00.000Z

Tendring Topics……..on Line

‘The road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions!’

A well-meaning piece of advice given on the BBC tv’s breakfast programme this (7th November) morning threatens to upset the equilibrium of scores of old people this Christmas and lead to many doctors’ phone-lines being jammed by anxious well-meaning callers in the New Year.

It seems that the early symptoms of dementia in the elderly are being missed and a great many of them are failing to get treatment and support that could help them endure their affliction and slow down (but not halt or reverse!) its progress. It was suggested that those who are seeing an elderly friend or relative this Christmas should look out for these symptoms and get in touch with his or her doctor to let them know.

The symptoms to look for are loss of short-term memory, anxiety, occasional confusion, and personality changes. It is, so we were told, all too easy to put these symptoms down to ‘old age’ when there may well be a more sinister reason. Well, I suppose that there could be, but I reckon that old age does have similar indications of its own for which there may be no other cause

None of us lasts for ever. Our bodies and our brains experience wear and tear as we get older. The results of this show themselves as ‘symptoms’ of what I believe is probably a natural progression for which the only remedy is to die young! There are, of course, lots of things that – with the help of medical science and possibly social services – enable us to make the best of it.

I no longer describe myself ageing or elderly. I am unequivocally old. No other member of my family has, as far as I know, ever made it to 90. I am in a position to confirm that old age is not ‘all beer and skittles. I am glad to say though that it isn’t either– at least isn’t yet – the extreme old age referred to by Shakespeare as ‘Last age of all is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’*. Mind you, without modern dentures, two cataract operations and two pairs of spectacles, hearing aids, on line access to my friends and relatives, and an electric mobility scooter to give me independent mobility, my condition might be approaching that. Much as we oldies sometimes complain about aspects of life in the 21st century, there’s no doubt that modern technology has made old age and disability a great deal more tolerable!

Yes – I do have an increasingly failing short-term memory (though I can remember, word for word, poems and short pieces of prose learned long ago!). I am absent minded, and any deviation from normality does make me anxious. I don’t think that my personality has changed much but perhaps I am not the best person to judge that!

I shall be visiting friends and relatives over Christmas. I know them all well enough to be confident that no one will be writing in a little note-book that ‘the poor old chap was anxious about leaving his bungalow empty for a couple of days’ and ‘He forgot to bring his reading glasses, fell asleep in his chair after Christmas Dinner and told us a story that I’m sure I’ve heard half a dozen times before’, all ready to be reported to my doctor in the New Year!

*From Jacques’ ‘all the world’s a stage…..’ speech in ‘As you like it’.

Age and Income Inequality

The fact that we are all living longer and those lucky enough to have a job are expected to work longer, has given extra urgency to the world wide demand for a more equal distribution of the world’s wealth.

A recent article in the Financial Times comments on a report by Sir Michael Marmot, professor of University College, London and former Chairman of the British Medical Association. Sir Michael forecasts that due to the inequality of health standards between rich and poor, two thirds of today’s population will not reach the new retirement age of 68 without chronic and debilitating illness. His report, based on the 2001 census reveals that the average difference in ‘disability-free life expectancy’ between people living in rich areas and those in poor areas is 17 years!

A blog reader points out that throughout Europe and North America we don’t have enough jobs for young people. We in the UK have 20 percent youth unemployment while in Spain no less than half of its young people are unemployed. Meanwhile the compulsory retirement age in Britain is being raised from 65 to 68 and old people are expected to work longer.

The reader asks, ‘How can it possibly be better for our economy to leave the strongest, fittest, child-rearing generation out of work while older people, many of whom are overweight, arthritic and suffering from mental exhaustion, are forced to carry on working?’ It is true that I was working – and earning – till I reached my eighties, but it was at freelance writing that I enjoyed, and from which I could take a break whenever I chose.

Have we already forgotten that a very high proportion of the rioters and arsonists of last August were unemployed young people. Satan will find mischief still for idle hands to do!

Signs of the times

There have been three items of news during the past few weeks that I have found profoundly depressing. They seem to me to exemplify everything that is wrong with Britain today. The first was the news that in a time of cuts in public services mainly affecting the poor, growing unemployment in both the public and private sectors and frozen or reduced salaries or wages for most people, the directors and chief executives of Britain’s most profitable enterprises have been awarding themselves salary increases of up to 50% - and 50% of a salary already nudging a million a year is a very large sum indeed!

I don’t know how they have the gall to accept it – but they have. I heard one of them interviewed on tv say that if an attempt were to be made to limit the salaries of top earners, they would all disappear to the USA or Asia. I’d say ‘Let them go – and the sooner the better!’ If, to stay afloat, Britain needs the support of those who have no interest in life beyond making money – then Britain deserves to sink.

Those who make such threats will be among the first to accuse public servants of holding the country to ransom when, very shortly, they go on strike because their jobs are imperil, their wages have been frozen, their savings are diminishing as inflation outstrips interest on savings accounts, and they are going to have to wait longer and pay more for their – in most cases – very modest pensions.

Then there were the pictures of long queues waiting up for hours to be the first to buy the very latest, most realistic and most violent and bloody video game on the market coupled with the news that creating the make-believe world of video games is one of Britain’s most successful industries. And to think that the writers of popular fiction used to be accused of encouraging ‘escapism’!

And the last item! It occurred on a day when the financial foundations of the world were shaking; on which we learned that an unknown number of terrorists may have entered the country because the Home Secretary had lost control of part of her Whitehall ‘empire’, and on which there appeared to be a real risk of the UK being dragged by its ‘special relationship’ into yet another Middle East conflict, this time against Iran. Not one of these matters was the lead story of BBC Breakfast, the first BBC News Bulletin of the day. Oh no – the first story was breathtaking news about who had actually administered the final lethal dose of a drug to an American Pop Star with a questionable life style who was already drugged up to the eyeballs. I had felt just a tiny amount of sympathy for the doctor who, it appears, was responsible – until I learned that he had been receiving a salary of 95,000 dollars a month as the pop-star’s medical attendant. That was in a country where, despite the efforts of its present President, millions live in poverty and thousands of the poor can afford no medical care of any kind!

A Damascene Moment!

This afternoon, as I was preparing a packet to send to send off to Germany by post, I had a vision of the future. Quite suddenly, I realized what global capitalism was all about, what was meant by preparing Britain to compete in a global market place – and the inevitable result of trying to do so.

My little ‘honorary’ German niece Maja had recently celebrated her fifth birthday. One of my British real nieces had thought that she would like to give the child a belated birthday present. She gave me a charming child’s shoulder and hand bag to send to her. I duly bought an appropriately sized padded envelope/bag at the Post Office and, with the help of Google Translate, wrote a suitable message in German to enclose with the present. I addressed it and took it to the Post Office for despatch.

It was as I sealed up the envelope that I had my epiphany (sorry about my Biblical vocabulary. It seems to go naturally with the nature of my vision). There was the envelope, bulging with its contents, with Royal Mail stamped proudly upon it, together with Maja’s address, an airmail label and – in small print in the corner - Made in China!

All became clear. Of course there are firms in Britain that could have manufactured and supplied comparable, perhaps better, padded envelopes. However, free competition and the global market insisted that even such a very British institution as the Royal Mail has to accept the lowest tender. A firm in China could manufacture them and transport them halfway round the world, just a little cheaper than any manufacturer in Britain, or in Europe, could manage to make them.

How then must Britain, or indeed any other European country, prepare itself to compete in the wonderful new Global Market, so beloved by both the Conservatives and New Labour? The only way that I can see is by reducing British wages to below the level of those of the factory workers of China and India, and increasing their hours of work, cutting public services, social housing and public transport to the level in those countries and by regarding the poor, the disabled and the homeless with the indifference that many in those countries regard them. ‘They’ve got families to support them haven’t they? Everybody knows that the poor breed like rabbits!’

Who knows, if we do it thoroughly enough we may one day be able to turn England’s green and pleasant land into a brave new world capable of obtaining contracts with the Chinese Mail Service to supply them with padded postal packets! Even then, of course, there’s still the chance that some country in Africa or South America will manage to undercut all of us.

It makes me wish that I were young enough and fit enough to join the protesters at St. Paul’s Cathedral!

Week 44 15.11.11

2011-11-08T01:52:00.000Z

Tendring Topics……..on Line

‘We will remember them!’

Next Friday, 11th November, is what we once called call Armistice Day, the anniversary of the day on which at 11.00 a.m. (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) in 1918, the guns of World War I fell silent and the daily carnage on the Western Front ceased. Next Sunday will be Remembrance Day on which Remembrance Services and Parades will be held throughout the UK. The fallen of two world wars, of the Falklands, of Iraq and Afghanistan will be honoured with a two minutes silence, the sounding of the Last Post and the recitation of a verse from Laurence Binyon’s poem '’To the Fallen’:

They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old,

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them!............We will remember them!

In Clacton (and I have no doubt in many other towns and villages) the British Legion continues also to commemorate the war dead on that original Armistice anniversary, 11th November at 11.00 a.m. on the Town Square.

I too have war dead to remember – 100 out of an artillery regiment of about 700. Some were killed in battle, others died in PoW camps in Italy or Germany. Fifty young men of about my age were killed by ‘friendly fire’. They were drowned in November 1942 when the Italian steamer that was transporting them to a PoW Camp in Italy, was torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine. One other, whose death I personally remember, was a young man accidentally killed while working as a PoW on the railway sidings of Zittau. I was less than three feet away from him at the time. It could have been me. The fifty have no grave save the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The one who died on the railway sidings was given a German military funeral. We, his fellow PoWs, slow-marched to the cemetery, We threw sprigs of yew onto his coffin in the open grave. A firing squad from the local Wehrmacht barracks then smartly ‘presented arms’ and fired a volley over the grave. It was a salute from those who were no longer his enemies. I think that we all found it a very moving occasion.

I am not a member of the British Legion but next Friday I intend to climb onto my mobility scooter (my iron horse) and make my way down to the Town Square where I shall stand in silence, observe the two minutes silence and listen, probably on the brink of tears, to the sounding of ‘The last Post’.

‘Wear your poppy with pride!’ says the British Legion. I shall wear mine with sorrow – and perhaps just a little bitterness – at the loss of young lives and good friends,

Is the Pope, ‘Some kind of a Commie’?

Surely not – but recent pronouncements from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and statements from the Pope himself have made right-wing American Republicans (supporters of Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Movement and the like) think that he, and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, may be heading in that direction.

Writing in the Church Times, Paul Vallely, associate editor of The Independent, says that the Pope’s opposition to abortion and gay marriage had made right wing Republicans imagine that the Pope, ‘was one of us’. To discover that he took a radical stance on economics came as an unpleasant shock.

The Pontifical Council, supporting the aims of the hundreds of thousands of people world-wide (not just the handful camped outside St Pauls Cathedral) protesting against the inequalities and injustices arising from unfettered Capitalism, called for a more ethical approach to finance, the redistribution of wealth, an end to rampant speculation, the establishment of a global central bank to which national banks would have to cede power. This statement, says, Paul Vallely has been branded quasi-Marxist on Wall Street! The Pope himself calls ‘for everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural moral values at the basis of social coexistence’.

Paul Vallely says that this call is valid and timely. He adds that those who say it is impossible to constrain a free market are as wrong as those who say that if we don’t sell our arms to oppressive regimes, someone else will. ‘The continued ruthless arrogance of the bankers, who with their effective state guarantee against failure, are still paying themselves obscene bonuses, shows that the system has learned nothing’.

I am reminded of a time (I can’t be sure whether it was in the 1930s before World War II or in the early 1950s after it) a number of prominent Anglican clergy were both very High Church and very left-wing. It was said of them as a jibe that the Church of England was The Conservative Party at Prayer – except, of course, for the Anglo-Catholics, who were the Communist Party at Mass!’

Nowadays, I think that throughout the Christian Church – Roman Catholic, Anglican, Non-conformist and Quaker, there is a growing realization of the evils of our current economic system (the Rule of Mammon) together with a firm rejection of Marxism as a possible remedy for them. A poster displayed by the St. Paul’s protesters reads WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY? I think it possible that he would say, as he said 2,000 years ago: 'Treat other people exactly as you would like them to treat you. This sums up the whole of the moral teaching of the Scriptures.

If we all, as individuals, as communities and as nations, really strove to obey that commandment, there would be no wars, no arms trade, no inequalities and injustices – and no budget deficit!

They’re at it again!

The more the Government insists that its aim is to divest central government of power and responsibility and to pass these over to ‘local communities’, the more its actions have the precise opposite effect. I wouldn’t suggest that this is necessarily always a bad thing. We are all keen on local people deciding local issues - until it affects us personally! However, when one street has a fortnightly refuse collection and the adjoining one, that happens to be within the area of a different local authority, has a weekly one, it is hardly surprising that the residents in the former street begin to complain about a ‘post-code lottery’!

The extent to which adults receiving social care are expected to contribute to its cost, is currently decided by the local welfare authority, usually the County Council or Unitary Authority where there is one. The Government is said to be considering making these charges uniform throughout the country and imposing a cap, possibly at about £30,000, on the total sum that recipients can be required to pay. Thus, folk needing expensive care who have to sell a home that they have bought with a lifetime of hard work and saving, would be able to retain at least a proportion of the fruit of their labours. It seems eminently sensible and humane that this should apply nationwide.

Very different, I think, is the government’s determination to dictate the conditions of the tenancy of Social Housing, the erosion of Local Authority control over primary and secondary education (nominally to give them more independence but actually they’ll be controlled by Whitehall, who will hold the purse-strings), and the weakening of local planning control leaving, as a correspondent to the Clacton Gazette put it, local communities with the power to say YES but not to say NO!

The latest field into which the Central Government’s ‘Nanny knows best dear’ policy has strayed, is that of Child Adoption. This, like adult social care, is currently the responsibility of the County Council or, where there is one, of the Unitary Authority. The Government believes that adopting a child should take no more than 12 months and has decided to name and shame authorities who consistently take a good deal longer than that to arrange this.

Two authorities that have earned the government’s disapproval are the London Boroughs of Hackney and Brent. I know nothing about Brent but both my sons worked at one time in Hackney’s Housing Department and one of them lived in the Borough. I do know therefore, if only at second-hand, a little about that corner of London’s East End.

I know for instance that it probably has as thorough a racial, cultural and religious mix as any in England. The political correctness of social workers who block the adoption of a black or mixed race children by a loving all-white families has been much derided. It is, of course, absurd to refuse adoption simply on the grounds of skin colour. I could well understand though, objection to the adoption into a practising Christian family of a child of Muslim or Jewish parents. I would be sorry to see the adoption of a child from a Christian background (whatever might be the colour of the child’s skin) into a devout Muslim family or, for that matter, into a family of proselytising atheists – disciples of Professor Dawkins.

Ultimately, of course, adoption – or refusal – should be made in the interests of the child, not of the prospective parents, or of the local authority - or even of a government at Westminster eager to be able to claim credit for speeding things up. A wise decision cannot and should not be hurried.

‘A child is for Life – not just for Christmas!’ Rather than naming and shaming local authorities who take their time about making adoption decisions, they should name and shame those where, due to hasty action, there has been the greatest number of failed adoptions within five years of them taking place.

Week 43 1.11.2011

2011-10-31T07:42:00.000Z

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘You read it first….here!’

That may not be quite true. The idea of narrowing the gap between rich and poor has been around a long time and blog readers may well have seen and been attracted to the idea long before I became an enthusiast. Many years ago though, when I was writing Tendring Topics (in print) in the Coastal Express, I recall saying that my idea of a good Budget was one that narrowed that gap and a bad Budget was one that widened it. It follows that I have seen many more bad budgets, even during the reign of New Labour (now there’s something for which Ed Miliband should have apologised!), than I have seen good ones.

Over the years I have changed or modified my views on a great many issues, but the desirability of levelling incomes throughout the United Kingdom is a cause from which I have never wavered. For a long time I seemed to be one of a tiny minority, but within the past few weeks tens of thousands world-wide have shown their support in the only way open to them – in mass demonstrations. They started in Greece and Spain but have spread throughout the world, one of the largest and most vociferous taking place in New York, the very heart of the capitalist world. There have been few or none in Scandinavia – a prosperous corner of northern Europe where that gap between rich and poor is already narrow. We have had them in Britain too, and very peaceful and well mannered they have so far been. Their best-known manifestation has been the tented camp at the entrance of St Paul’s Cathedral. A headline in the Daily Mail announced the ‘The portrait of a very middle class protest: A poet, a mother and even an extra from Downton….just who is at the Tent City demo?’ Goodness, was the voice of Middle England going soft on Loony Lefties?

Daily Mail aficionados will have been reassured by Richard Littlejohn’s feature in the inside pages. It began in unwontedly conciliatory mood, ‘It would be understandable if the crowd demonstrating outside St. Paul’s was comprised of self-employed small businessmen and women’, but went on, ‘Predictably, though, it was the usual gormless rent-a-mob you always find on these anti-globalisation demos – Toytown Trots from Mickey Mouse Universities, social workers, lecturers, full-time mature students and Swampy wannabes’. He seems to have visited a different demo from whoever wrote the news story!

Mr Littlejohn’s most offensive rant was reserved for a member of the clergy, ‘None of these demos is ever complete without a daft vicar from central casting. Playing the Derek Nimmo character on this occasion was Rev Giles Fraser, who asked the police to move off the steps of St Paul’s and declared his support for the protesters’.

George Bernard Shaw once remarked that the Daily Mirror was for those who couldn’t read, and the Daily Mail for those who couldn’t think. That was before Mr Littlejohn’s time. The Sun may have replaced the Mirror as the choice of the illiterate but it’s nice to know though that at least one pre-war British tradition is unchanged!

Later News

I am very sorry that, as a result of the demo outside St Paul’s, the cathedral has closed to the public. I suppose that the Health and Safety reason must be that the presence of the demonstrators, even if they tried to co-operate, could prevent fire or other emergency workers gaining ready access to the building in an emergency, and could hinder a rapid evacuation if required.

I am sorry not only because I think it wrong for the public to be prevented from attending any place of worship, but because I support the cause of the demonstrators. Preventing free access to the Cathedral is unnecessarily alienating folk who might otherwise be expected to support those protesting against the rule of Mammon.

Since writing the above, the Cathedral has been at least partially opened to the public and the Cathedral Authorities and the Bishop of London are holding discussions. I do hope that it isn't all going 'to end in tears' - or in violence.

The Money-Lenders

Everyone tends to watch more daytime television after retirement than they ever did while going out to work. I am no exception. Six or seven years ago it seemed to me that daytime commercial tv was largely financed by ambulance chasing ‘no win, no fee’ lawyers, and by financiers eager to lend large sums of money to folk who, in their own interest, should never be allowed to borrow it! ‘Never mind’, the adverts insisted, 'if you’re old, haven’t got a job, have a low credit rating or have been refused a loan elsewhere, we may be able to help you.'

Times have changed. No longer do we see the adverts from those benevolent moneylenders eager, so it seemed, to throw good money after bad. Nowadays they offer only relatively small ‘payday’ loans. It is all so simple and straightforward. You are getting along nicely until, half way through the month, there’s a sudden crisis; a problem with the laptop, a leaky pipe or water storage tank, a blocked drain, an unexpected – and important – visitor. It is a crisis that can easily be solved with two or three hundred pounds but, alas, you’ve only just got enough money to last until payday, still a fortnight away.

An easy-to-arrange payday loan will see you through! £300? – no problem; it’ll added to your bank account within the hour. You’ll know how much interest you have to pay right away. It will seem quite a small sum though, expressed as an annual rate of interest, it could be very large indeed. Payday comes, you repay the £300 plus interest, and all is well.

Except, of course, that you had needed the whole of your month’s pay for the rent or the mortgage, the fuel bill and the food bill for that month – and you have just got rid of £300 plus a bit extra, of it. The solution? You could apply for another payday loan, perhaps from a different lender, - and another, and another! Of course, if you have a few hundred in a savings account, you can pay off your debt and that’s that. But if you had a few hundred in the bank you wouldn’t have needed to borrow in the first place. It seems that the only people who can safely apply for a payday loan are those who don’t really need one!

Learning that millions and millions of bail-out euros are being poured into the Greek economy while, at the same time, unemployment in Greece gets steadily worse, hundreds of thousands of Greeks are reduced to abject poverty, some scavenging restaurant kitchen waste to find thrown-out food to feed their families, made me realize that on a much bigger scale, Greece is in the same position as those domestic borrowers who need a little financial help just till payday.

Not a single euro of those millions of the bailout money extracted from the wallets, handbags and bank accounts of ordinary working people throughout Europe, goes to help the Greeks. Every single cent goes straight back to the French and German bankers who made the loans, and thence into the pockets of their shareholders. When Ireland had similar, though mercifully smaller, problems, British taxpayers made a very considerable contribution to bail out the Irish Republic. This was not out of friendship and fellow feeling for our Irish neighbours, but simply because it had been British banks that had made rash loans to Irish enterprises. It was British bankers and their shareholders, not the Irish, who benefited from our apparent benevolence.

Our contribution to these bank bailouts together with the cost of wars in Iraq and Afganistan and of our support for the revolution in Libya, make a very considerable contribution to the size of the budget deficit for which the Government prefers to blame their New Labour predecessors.

A puzzled viewer wrote to the BBC recently pointing out that when a ‘rogue trader’ speculated with money with which he had been entrusted and lost it, he was arrested and prosecuted and punished. However, when banks do much the same thing with money with which they have been entrusted – nobody is prosecuted and punished. Instead we have to bail them out!

Under-occupied Properties?

A few weeks ago I commented in this blog on the bright idea of regenerating Brooklands Estate, Jaywick by encouraging retired folk to move into the township’s properties, described as ‘rabbit hutches’ and quite unsuitable for families but fine for elderly retired singles or couples. I thought that it was a stupid and insulting suggestion, and said so.

Now a similar idea has surfaced and appears to have gained some credence. It has been noted that some such elderly couples and singles (often widows or widowers like me) selfishly continue to occupy three-bed-roomed properties after their children have grown up and left home, thus denying bedrooms to the needy. They should be encouraged (no-one has yet suggested compulsion!) to move into one-bed-roomed homes, quite adequate and much more appropriate to their needs.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that when grown-up offspring leave home they usually do so to get married (or these days, I suppose, to find a partner!) and start a family. Most of them from time to time come back, with their families, to visit Grandpa and Grandma. Are they really to be told on these occasions that as their ageing parents are now living in a one-bedroom flat (a kind of ‘pending file’ as they await the grim reaper!) they’ll have to find themselves an hotel or bed and breakfast accommodation when they visit for more than a day?

88 Dudley Road, Clacton. New Years's Day 1979

My wife and I certainly welcomed and accommodated our sons and families when they visited us for the weekend or longer. Nowadays, old and living alone, I can cope only with ‘day’ visitors. However the smaller former bedroom of my small – but three bedroomed – bungalow is now my ‘office’ where at a desk, surrounded by a printer, a scanner and book-cases, I am writing this blog.

The other ‘spare’ bedroom is now a store-room, used for the storage of items which – if I were still capable of climbing a ladder – would be up in the roof space. There is no inducement that would make me voluntarily leave the home in which I have lived for sixty-five years, in which five years ago my wife’s life came to an end, and in which I hope that my life too will end.

I suggest that before looking for unused bedrooms, those who are keen to remedy the housing shortage look for all the empty houses, the second and holiday homes unused or used only occasionally. In 1947, when I was undergoing my practical training as a Sanitary Inspector (nowadays they are Environmental Health Officers!) in Battersea, we would look out for empty houses and report them to the Council’s legal department with a view to commandeering them to solve an even worse housing situation than exists today.

That surely would be a possibility worth exploring. Empty houses are rather easier to spot than empty bedrooms!

Degrees of Wickedness

It was quite wrong to kill Colonel Gaddafi after his capture. That is unquestionable. However I don’t feel that his murder, carried out it seems by a young irregular soldier just after the heat of battle, was quite as wicked as:

The massacre, again by anti-Gaddafi militia, of 50 pro-Gaddafi fighters whose bodies were found in Sirte with their hands tied behind their back.

The deliberate killing rather than capture, of Osama Bin Laden.

The computer assisted assassination, by unmanned ‘drone’ aircraft controlled from a base thousands of miles away, of individuals believed to be leaders of Al Q’aida.

There must have been sighs of relief in Whitehall when, thanks to Colonel Gaddafi’s murder, it was realized that there would now be no risk of the former Libyan leader making public exactly how much help his torturers and death squads had received from MI6 and its political masters in the days when Tony Blair and Gaddafi had been photographed warmly embracing each other.

Week 42 2011 25.10.2011

2011-10-25T08:02:00.000+01:00

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘Oh no – not again!’

Pete with his dog Zoe in the Scottish Highlands

I reckon that that is what Ms Lynne Featherstone Lib.Dem MP (and coalition government member) says when she sees another letter from my son Pete. He is one of her constituents and voted for her in the General Election hoping that, by so doing, he would help bring in a Liberal Democrat Government under its new dynamic leader Nick Klegg.

Instead, he was rewarded with a coalition in which the Conservatives are the dominant party but in which Ms Featherstone secured a government (though not a cabinet) post. Since then, as our country has gone steadily down hill, Pete has written to her on a number of occasions reminding her of the Lib.Dems’ broken promises.

This time as you’ll see, he has written her a letter of congratulation though, since it is congratulating her on opposing a suggestion that could become government policy, it is possible that they are congratulations she’d prefer not to receive. Here is the letter:

Dear Lynne,

Having voted for you at the last election, I have since been critical of the Coalition and your role in it.

I therefore thought I should express my appreciation and total agreement with your stand – as reported in today’s Observer – that you are totally opposed to proposals, outlined in a White Paper which originate from Adrian Beecroft, venture capitalist reporting directly to the Prime Minister, that flexible arrangements over maternity and paternity leave should be shelved, and even that maternity pay should be scrapped altogether.

I am a small business owner, employing seven staff, one, of whom has just returned from maternity leave, another is about to go on maternity leave. I have had good notice and found it possible to provide for these upheavals. I am very conscious that balancing work and family responsibilities and budgeting for child care is a very big issue for my staff. If reasonable provisions were not available, they would not be able to cope, and might have to leave employment altogether, leaving me with a much larger problem. The business has been negatively affected by “the cuts”, and no elimination of red-tape, or freeing up bank lending, will undo the damage caused by the impoverishment of our customers. This must be true of so many small businesses at the present time.

I am dismayed that you appear to be surprised that such proposals are being made to and have the ear of the Prime Minister.

The same faction of our society has eloquently proposed in recent weeks, that the 50p tax (for people earning over £150K pa) should be scrapped to improve competitiveness and create jobs, while the minimum wage (for people earning £12K pa) should also be scrapped (lowered) for the same reason. It is becoming clear, that the more the economic problems bite (the root causes of which no one on the Left or the Right cares to address), the more the Right Wing will seek solutions from extreme policies which are essentially designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. I believe the day will come when people of conscience within the Liberal Democrat Party will be unable to support such polices and the Coalition will cease to exist.

Peter Hall

Heather - as Andy and Pete knew her

I couldn’t have put it better myself! From time to time both my sons, by their actions and attitudes, make it clear that they haven’t discarded the Quaker values (though they’re by no means exclusive to Quakers) that my wife Heather and I had tried to instil in them in their childhood. Their Mum – who had much more to do with it than I had – would have been very proud of them.

Another 'Bridge too far'?

Quite early in the saga of the former Defence Secretary Liam Fox, there was mention of a Charity called Atlantic Bridge, claimed to have been created to further the ‘special relationship’ between the USA and the UK. The British end of the bridge, so it was said, had been run from Liam Fox’s official office – but was so no longer.

I found that Atlantic Bridge’s web site was temporarily closed. It did however yield the information that it was an organisation that had the aim of bringing ‘conservatives’ from the UK and USA together to discuss policy and other mutual interests. Remembering that Amnesty International had been refused Charity status because of its political associations, it seemed strange that this obviously political organisation should have been successful. It also seemed strange that an obviously ‘political’ organisation should have been run from a Government, rather than a Party, office.

I then heard William Hague, our Foreign Secretary, interviewed on BBC Radio 4. Asked about the Atlantic Bridge he said that he believed it to be a means of exchanging ideas between the UK and people of every shade of opinion in the USA – that was surely a good thing. And so, I suppose it could have been – had it been true.

I dug a little deeper (how did we manage before Google?) and found out a great deal more. The founder and chairman of Atlantic Bridge had been none other than our former Defence Secretary, Liam Fox. Its Chief Executive, and its only paid employee, was Adam Werrity. It had an Advisory Council consisting of William Hague, George Osborne, Chris Grayley and Michael Gove. A great many other leading Conservative politicians had been closely associated with it. Could William Hague, a member of the Advisory Council, really have been unaware of the Bridge’s real nature? It seems hardly likely.

Perhaps even more disquieting, I discovered that Ms Gaby Bertin, David Cameron’s Press Secretary, had worked for Atlantic Bridge and, until Adam Werritty had taken her place, had been its sole employee on this side of the Atlantic.

Finally, I learned that only last month the Charities Commission had declared the Atlantic Bridge to be a wholly political organisation (goodness knows why they had taken so long to discover that!) and stripped it of its charitable status. I wonder if the Government, keen as they are on hunting down benefit cheats and tax dodgers, will pursue those who – for a number of years – have fraudulently claimed tax relief and other benefits by virtue of this false claim to charitable status?

I find the thought that Atlantic Bridge may have been providing the members of the most bigoted and bellicose faction of the USA easy access to the very heart of British government, extremely disquieting. Have some of our top politicians forgotten that, despite a shared language and some common objectives, the USA is a foreign country with interests that do not necessarily coincide with those of the United Kingdom?

And there’s UKIP – and our own MP – worrying themselves to death about the EU robbing us of our sovereignty!

A Damp Squib!

Some people, I have little doubt, had great hopes about the meeting of our Prime Minister with the representatives of the UKs gas and electricity suppliers. He was the champion of Middle England – a twenty-first century Cromwell. He had tackled the red-tape-bound bureaucrats of Britain’s town and county halls. Now he was going to take on and tame the lords of the power supplies. Reductions in fuel bills were confidently expected

Judging from the results of the confrontation, his performance resembled more closely that of the timid policeman in Doc Martin than that of the iron man of the 17th century.

Clearly he was persuaded that the suppliers were without blame for the massive above-inflation increases in the price of gas and electricity. It is up to us consumers to put up with them and make the best of them. We must, as Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit might have put it, stand on our own two feet or perhaps to leap onto our bikes and find our own solution.

First, we must shop around to make sure that we are on the fuel tariff that is best for us. There are only six main fuel suppliers so that shouldn’t be too difficult. Except of course, for the hard-up single mum or the pensioner who doesn’t own a laptop and certainly wouldn’t know how to use one. I’d be very surprised anyway if there is very much difference between suppliers’ tariffs. I use E-on myself because they have an arrangement with Age UK that gives me substantial benefits in frosty weather. Perhaps – for all I know – other suppliers do the same.

In any case, many of us oldies simply don’t like ‘shopping around or haggling’. We feel that there is a right price and that is the price that we should be charged. It was because folk came to realize that they would never overcharge and would never haggle, that such 19th Century Quaker enterprises as Cadbury and Fry (not to mention Trumans and Charringtons!) thrived and prospered.

The other thing that we consumers are advised to do is to conserve the heat that we have purchased so expensively. To be fair to the government, they do have very worthwhile schemes to help pensioners and others to prevent heat loss from their homes by insulating the roof space and infilling cavity walls. My wife and I had our cavity walls infilled at our own expense many years ago, but I have found free improved roof space insulation to be well worth having. Also, it is suggested, we should use our heating sparingly and economically.

All very sensible advice, but it hardly needed a conference of the Prime Minister and the bosses of the energy companies to produce it. I would have been happy to pass on all those ideas to David Cameron had cared to give me a ring – and so would thousands of other people!

A Cheerful Note on which to end

Doesn't she look happy!

This hasn’t been the cheeriest of blogs, so here is a photograph that warmed my heart when I received it from friends of mine in Germany. Their little daughter Maja (my ‘honorary German niece’) celebrated her fifth birthday during September. Here she is on that auspicious occasion:

I won’t live to see it, but I hope most sincerely that by the time she is in her mid-teens, she and my great-grandchildren, if any, will be living in a truly united Europe in which the most easterly part of Germany where she lives will seem no more remote and ‘foreign’ to East Anglians than the Lake District or the coves of Cornwall do to us today. May you have many, many more very happy birthdays Maja, my dear child!

Doesn't she look happy!

Week 41 2011 18.10.2011

2011-10-18T07:19:00.002+01:00

Tendring Topics……..on line

A trip into the Past

They don’t possess a Tardis or a Wellsian ‘Time Machine’. Nevertheless, my younger son and daughter-in-law took me for a trip into the distant and the not-so-distant past last week. Andy and Marilyn, whose home is in Enfield, are regular visitors. We usually lunch at the Bowling Green in Weeley and visit one of Tendring’s coastal resorts or inland beauty spots. This time though they were coming earlier than usual and had asked me if there was anywhere further afield that I would like to visit. I thought that I would like to go to Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge where there was the site of a seventh century Anglo-Saxon Ship Burial that had been excavated and had revealed a great deal about the lives and culture of our early ancestors.

So – to Sutton Hoo we had driven. To get there we had to bypass or drive through Ipswich. We took the opportunity of visiting the place where Heather and I had spent part of our early married life in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. Still further back in time, we visited places where I had spent my childhood and adolescence eighty years ago.

First we found the bungalow, just off the Norwich Road in Barham, where Heather and I had had our first real home and where our older son, Andy’s brother Pete had been born in 1953. It had been one of four one-storied buildings that had formerly been an isolation hospital and had been converted into homes for members of Gipping Rural District Council’s staff. Our bedroom, where Pete was born, was the room on the right of the picture. The middle section had been the quite large kitchen. On summer days Pete would be in his pram on the lawn just outside while Heather worked in the kitchen. Just below the sash windows, one of which would be wide open, we would place a low stool so that Heather could step out of the window and be with the pram in a second!

Driving back into Ipswich we passed the spot, in Bramford Road where when I was about ten, climbing a tree in search of bird eggs I had fallen (served me right!) and grabbed a piece of barbed wire as I fell. The scar is on my right hand to this day! The house to which Andy and Pete’s mum, then a schoolgirl of 15, had been evacuated, just before the outbreak of war in September 1939, and where I had first met her, had been demolished and replaced with a modern home. We passed the church that I had attended and had been first a choirboy and then a server, and drove to Valley Road, along which I had cycled to and from the Northgate School for six years.

On to Sutton Hoo, a couple of miles from Woodbridge, on a hillside overlooking the river Deben. It didn’t disappoint. There had in fact been two ship burials as well as many other interments on the site in the first half of the seventh century A.D. This was before the conversion of East Anglia to Christianity though the faith was gaining ground in Enland. The occupants of the ship graves had been military men, perhaps royal, of great power and wealth.

Excavations had been carried out throughout the 1930s but it was not until July 1939 (I well remember that feverish last summer of peace!) that the real treasures were found. I quote the official guidebook:

‘They included silver bowls and spoons, fragments of clothes and textiles, weapons, armour, buckets, chains, cauldrons, fine Celtic enamels and many other wonderful things. Most impressive were the many large gold ornaments of early Anglo-Saxon workmanship, elaborately inlaid with bright red garnets. These, finer than anything else of their kind, came from the ground as bright as the day they were buried. It was among the richest graves ever excavated in Europe’

Much of the treasure is now safely in the British Museum where Andy and Marilyn visited it that same weekend and sent me back this picture of an excavated warrior’s helmet. We found the museum on the site of great interest. Exhibits included a reproduction of the burial chamber, examples of the treasures found and a model of part of the structure of the ships, which were 27 metres long, clinker built, with boards carefully shaped and held together with iron rivets.

You may be wondering how I managed to get round the museum and the quite large Sutton Hoo site. I could I suppose have managed to walk round the museum, but it would have exhausted me. Andy though was good enough to push me round in one of the wheelchairs freely available for visitors. I certainly enjoyed the visit more that I would have had I tried to walk. As for getting round the site – there are three electric mobility scooters, just like my own familiar and friendly ‘iron horse’. These have to be – and mine was – booked in advance. There is also a welcoming licensed buffet restaurant on the site where we were able to obtain a more-than-adequate lunch and, before we drove back to Clacton, a welcome cup of tea. It had been a very enjoyable excursion into my own past and the past of the English people. Perhaps there had been rather more light and colour in those dark ages than we may have imagined.

Myself at Sutton Hoo - burial mound in the background

A Piece of Good News
It is pleasant to be able to record a little good economic news in our Tendring District, in contrast to the gloom that seems to deepen by the hour!

In the face of strong competition from other European enterprises a Brightlingsea boat-building firm, CWind, secured the contract from Siemens, the giant Munich based global engineering corporation, to build three specialised catamarans to work on the London Array offshore wind farm being built in the Thames estuary.

The first of these catamarans CWind Alliance has now been completed, launched, and is off to work. Its equipment includes an amphibious rescue pod, capable of carrying out rescues on sand.

Cwind first came to the attention of Siemens London Array project manager when he had worked with them on the Gunfleet Sands wind-farm off Clacton-on-Sea. There he had had been impressed by the company’s approach and attitude. He said, ‘It’s important for us to have confidence in the skippers, their crew and the quality of the vessels’.

At a recent international conference held in Clacton to discuss the regeneration of deprived areas like Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate, it was suggested that servicing the growing number of off-shore wind farms could be our area’s best hope of reviving its economic prospects. CWind has clearly shown the way.

A Public Correspondence

Several weeks ago I mentioned in this blog that when picking up a local or national newspaper, after a quick glance at the front page headlines, I go straight to the Readers’ Letters. Whether wise, misguided or just plain stupid, each one expresses ideas about which someone feels sufficiently strongly to ‘write to the paper about it’. It is a pretty safe bet that for every letter written and published there will be dozens? hundreds? thousands? of other people who feel exactly the same way as the writer.

A regular contributor to the local daily Gazette is a David Brown who, possibly inspired by the Daily Mail, the Daily Express – or even by the expressed views of our own Clacton MP – attributes most of the United Kingdom’s ills to our folly, as he sees it, in joining the European Union and remaining in it. I always read his letters with horrified fascination.

His latest (though I am sure not his last) contribution to the Gazette’s letters page described the Euro as a ‘car crash’ and said how grateful we should all be to the Eurosceptics who kept the UK out of the Eurozone.

I was pleased to see a prompt reply from Roy Procter of Thorpe-le-Soken, a fellow Quaker who is much more knowledgeable about financial matters than I can ever hope to be. It must be said though, that one doesn’t have to be an economics whiz kid to follow the points that he made.

His letter was sadly abridged, no doubt unavoidably, by the Gazette subeditor and thereby lost some of its impact. I thought that blog readers might like to see the original unabridged and unexpurgated version, so here it is:
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David Brown (Letters 3/10/2011) describes the Euro as a 'car crash' and how good it is that the Eurosceptics kept us out- I suggest he should look a bit further than the Daily Mail's leaders for his information - In 1999 a Euro would have cost 64p, in 2003 70p, in 2007, 69p and today 86p.- how exactly is increasing its value against other currencies (and not just Sterling) a 'car crash'?

Those in the Eurozone can trade with each other without paying the banks an extra percentage to simply pay bills and tourists can get at their own money in a large area for free.

The Euro would be even stronger with UK participation, and UK businesses and tourists would pay less in fees to the bankers - so the losers would be banks and the city, and the gainers - everyone else. How is that a bad idea?

I hope that Roy is right. I note that despite the gloomy predictions, the Euro continues to maintain its value against the pound. Of one thing I am certain. The United Kingdom's best future lies with the European Vision rather than the American Dream!

Cause – and Effect

There were two apparently unconnected news stories on BBC Breakfast tv this (14th Oct.) morning, that I believe have a close association. The first was the shocking revelation that nationwide young children are being tricked, bullied or blackmailed into the hands of criminal gangs whose members sexually abuse them and/or force them into prostitution. Sometimes the victims are first ‘groomed’ with generous hospitality and lavish gifts, and then kept in subjection by blackmail or by threats of physical violence to themselves or members of their families.

The other piece of news was that, in the future, part of the child benefit of single mums will no longer be paid once their youngest child reaches five years – the age for starting school. It will be assumed that they will then be in a position to get a job to supplement their incomes. Only oldies like me will remember with nostalgia the time when it was usual for the man-of-the-house (he was always, of course, a husband in those distant days!) to be the breadwinner and for his wife to be the home-maker and primary child carer. The few 'single mums' in those days were most likely to be widows. Nowadays women with partners are expected to go out to work and, according to their financial circumstances, either help pay the rent or the mortage and help feed and clothe the family or, for the better off – make possible the second car, the yacht and the annual holiday in Bermuda. Those without partners are deprived of their benefit to force them into work.

In the ‘bad old days’ when at least one parent reckoned to know where the children were after school, there was far less risk of teenagers joining criminal gangs or of young and innocent children being trapped, groomed and abused by them.

Week 40 2011 18.10.2011

2011-10-11T07:29:00.000+01:00

Tendring Topics……on line

The European Travel Commission’s new Acting Director!

Jo. AKA Ms Josephine Hall M.A., B.Sc

Chris is nominated Teacher of the Year

All three of my grandchildren are sources of great pride and satisfaction to me. There is Jo, my only granddaughter who is both an M.A. and a B.Sc. and has a socially valuable job as Social Worker with the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital Then there is Chris, her cousin and my elder grandson. He graduated in art but has found his vocation as a teacher of English to both children and adults in Taiwan.. A couple of years ago he was nominated ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the educational enterprise that employs him.

Nick, Chris’ brother, is the youngest of my grandchildren, but by no means the least! He has always been a great traveller and many years ago won a Guardian competition with a prize of £5,000 with which to travel cheaply all over Europe, sending a weekly report on his adventures to the Guardian Travel Supplement. This inspired him, in his last year at University to retrace my travels sixty years earlier as a POW, from Tarranto in southern Italy to a POW camp in the north of the country. Thence to a working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Germany and finally, after the war ended, through Czechoslovakia to Prague. As he did so he created a video diary that helped to earn him a good honours degree in photography at Westminster University.
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Student Nick on his travels

This experience, plus an unrivalled knowledge and experience in IT (it was he who organised the blogspot and web site on which I am publishing these words!) ensured the success of his application for the post of On Line Sales Manager, with the European Travel Commission in Brussels. The ETC is a non profit-making international organisation which encourages, co-ordinates and facilitates tourist travel to Europe from the rest of the world. Its members are the national tourist offices of 33 co-operating European states, many of them members of the European Union but others (Norway, Switzerland and Serbia for instance) that are not. ETC has an elected President (currently a German lady) and an executive committee of national representatives.
The ETCs permanent staff have a headquarters in Brussels and are headed by a Director (in effect the Chief Executive and head of paid staff). Nick’s duties as On Line Sales Manager took him all over the world. He was also personally involved in the development and launch of www.visiteurope.com ETC’s own publicity web site, invaluable for all visitors to any part of Europe.

Now Nick has risen to the very top of the organisation. Last week the President and Executive Committee confirmed his appointment as Acting Director. Nick’s achievement is all the more remarkable for the fact that the United Kingdom is not one of the thirty-three members of the ETC. Among the membership you’ll find large countries like Germany, tiny ones like San Marino and Monte Negro, island states like Cyprus, Iceland and the Irish Republic – but no United Kingdom. I suppose that if there are many British ‘Tourism bosses’ of the calibre of Tendring District’s, and many MPs as stubbornly Europhobic as Clacton’s, we shouldn’t be surprised.

Nick in Zittau with myself and our friend Ingrid Zeibig.

It does demonstrate very clearly that Nick’s promotion was owed entirely to recognition of his own merit and not as a result of pressure from national representatives. There were none. It also demonstrates that European Union rules, that permit citizens of any member state to live and work anywhere within the EU, do not work only in one direction. It is possible for a Brit with determination and the necessary skills, to find and hold down a worthwhile job on the continent.

I am proud and very pleased that a grandson of mine has done so.

Late News!

Hardly had Nick been appointed to his new post before he was required to accompany ETC's President and Vice-President to a meeting of European Union Tourism Ministers in Krakow, Poland, last Thursday (6th October). He says that he was given VIP treatment, sharing a car with the Vice President and racing through the streets of Krakow with a police escort. He had, of course. helped the ETC's President to prepare for the occasion and was very pleased to hear almost universal praise and support from the EU Ministers for the work of ETC and for the www.visiteurope.com web site. He feels that he has made a good start

Buying Votes…….with other people’s money

That was how I described the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation when it was enacted during Mrs Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister. I make no apology for doing so. It might more accurately have been described as ‘Compel to sell’ legislation, as it compelled local councils (as democratically elected as our rulers in Westminster!) to sell off to sitting tenants at bargain basement prices, council houses that had been provided and paid for by earlier generations to house the homeless, alleviate overcrowding and make possible slum clearance in their areas. The same privilege was not of course, offered to tenants of privately owned homes. Their owners were, for the most part, loyal supporters of Mrs Thatcher’s political party.

It took a few years for the baleful effects of that legislation to take full effect. Almost immediately though the best homes in the most desirable locations were sold off. Many were sold to tenants who could ill-afford the mortgage and insurance repayments, the cost of maintenance and the separate rate bills for which they became responsible. Many grown-up children of elderly parents spotted their opportunity to cash in on already steadily rising house prices. They provided the small deposit required and in some cases even offered to pay the mortgage on their parents’ home. Naturally it was understood that they would inherit it in due course.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, while they waited to inherit and for the time to expire in which the house couldn’t be resold, house prices didn’t just rise. They rocketed. Former council houses were sold at a handsome profit. In rural areas houses that had been built to house members of village communities were snapped up as second homes or as bases from which to commute to the nearest big city. Councils were unable to build houses for affordable letting and Housing Associations were unable to satisfy the resulting need for social housing . House price inflation meant that young families, whose forebears had been part of the village community for generations, were unable to find a home. Villages ‘died’, no longer having enough daytime round-the-year residents to keep going a pub, a church, a village hall, a post office – or even a well-stocked village store.

Particularly in urban areas, council estates deprived of their former not-too-badly-off tenants, took the first step on the road towards becoming drug ridden, crime-infested slums. A further step was taken recently when the government dictated (so much for localism!) that in future, council tenancies should be short-term only. Tenants whose financial circumstances improved would be expected to buy their own homes or rent privately. I can think of no better way of ensuring that the interior of council houses are never redecorated and the gardens never cared for!

For all of the above reasons I was absolutely astonished when, in the midst of an otherwise inspiring speech at the Labour Party Conference, Ed Miliband apologised for the Labour Party’s opposition to Right to Buy, way back in the 1980s! He should, on the contrary, have apologised for New Labour’s failure to repeal that Act and to encourage local authorities to build homes for letting in their areas, when they were in a position to. Had they done so it might have put a brake on out-of-control house price inflation and avoided today’s nation-wide housing shortage.

Now I see that David Cameron, possibly dazzled by his Party’s success in buying votes with other people’s money in the 1980s, is trying to breathe new life into Right to Buy. I think that he’ll be unsuccessful this time round. There is no longer the spiralling house price inflation that made home ownership such a profitable investment 30 years ago. The policies of his government are ensuring that the occupants of council houses are increasingly limited to the very poorest of society, those least able to aspire to ‘home ownership’. As for the equivalent of those who helped their poor old mums and dads to own their own homes in the ‘80s – with incomes failing to keep up with inflation, plus government cuts and the threat of unemployment, they are struggling to survive themselves these days. They are also well aware that eventual home ownership no longer offers the prospect of wealth-to-come that once it did.

‘Can do?’ – Yes, you can add the final straw that breaks the camel’s back

Thank goodness that the Conference season is over for another year. Most of us, I think, have really seen enough of posturing politicians!

I am not sure whether it was Ed Miliband’s apologies for New Labour policies that were right (goodness knows that there were plenty that were wrong) or David Cameron’s constant reiteration of that idiotic trans-Atlantic mantra ‘can do’, that I found the more irritating. It was because greedy, irresponsible and incompetent bankers thought that they ‘could do’ anything that they thought would make a profit, that we are in the current financial mess. They ‘did’ us! I think that our Prime Minister would do better to consider a few of the things that can’t be done either by him or any of us. It was an American President who remarked that you can fool some of the people all the time and all the people part of the time but - no matter how loudly and how often you say, ‘can do’ - you can’t fool all the people all the time.

Nor can you indefinitely assert with apparently total conviction and sincerity one thing while doing the exact opposite. In his Churchillian final speech to the Conservative conference David Cameron asserted the importance, to the individual and to the nation, of paying off debts promptly and not adding to them. Yet this is the same Prime Minister whose government is piling tens of thousands pounds worth of debt on students and saying, in mitigation, that that debt doesn’t have to be paid off for years, in fact. in many cases it may never need to be paid off. Only a few days earlier he had been encouraging council house tenants, who haven’t already done so, to incur more debt by buying their homes.

While urging that local people should make decisions about local matters Mr Cameron’s government is systematically stripping democratically elected local authorities of their powers particularly, in relation to planning matters and to the letting of their own social housing. While stripping the armed forces of both personnel and equipment and, so many believe, reducing their ability to deal with any emergency that might arise – he has declared that those enormously expensive and totally useless Trident nuclear submarines that prowl the world’s oceans are sacrosanct.

As the government continues cutting services and pursuing policies that penalise the poor, the weak and the vulnerable, while having minimal impact on the wealthy and privileged, Mr Cameron may care to reflect that among things that top politicians can do is to add the final straw that breaks the camel’s back!

Week 39 2011 4.10.2011

2011-10-04T07:45:00.000+01:00

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Financial Crisis – a Point of View

I have never pretended to understand either the national or the international financial crisis. What worries me is my suspicion that none of our top politicians, nor our financial experts (none of whom forecast the bursting of the housing boom bubble in 2008) understand it either.

Below is part of an email that I have received from a regular blog reader and occasional correspondent whose judgement and opinions I have come to trust. He is neither a young wild-eyed revolutionary nor an old has-been like myself. He is, in fact a successful entrepreneur in late middle age, with a wide experience in both the public and the private sectors. He is the founder and Managing Director of an IT consultancy known and respected nation-wide, and is a member of the Institute of Directors. He has written to me about the economic situation.

Apparently Ed Miliband is promising to use the money that will come from the eventual sale of the Nationalised Banks to pay off the deficit, whereas Nick Clegg and David Cameron both have plans to give it away in some form. Ed Miliband is right to say that. I am absolutely horrified that anyone has suggested otherwise. First of all we (very unwisely) bail out these banks instead of telling the investors they have lost their money. Then we have a horrendous five years of cuts to services, benefits, public sector salaries and pensions to pay for the deficit created; then I suppose, when the deficit is paid off, and the state “rolled back” to the size Cameron thought it should always have been, they are just going to have some pre-election giveaway with the surplus cash!! It will be blatantly stealing from one section of the community to reward the rest and buy the votes of the majority. This so immoral and outrageous, I cannot believe that Cameron and Clegg could sink so low.

This whole thing is getting absolutely ridiculous. I was reading this morning (in the Observer) about the terrible hardship they are forcing on the people of Greece, who have lost 50% of their spending power, now have 15% unemployment, and a suicide rate that has rocketed. People are raiding bins in the evening for food and there is just no end in sight for them, just more and more misery. And all of this is so that French and German Banks (that is actually the investors in French and German Banks) don’t lose any money. But now the “good news”, is that the politicians are talking of setting up a £1.5 trillion rescue fund, paid for by Eurozone tax payers, to bail out, yet again, the banks and offer Greeks the “kindness” of defaulting on 50% of their debt.

I am almost reaching the point of hoping for a major financial meltdown, in the hope that it will serve as the catalyst to sweep away these self-serving politicians, unelected financial gurus and incompetent civil servants in central banks and treasuries. Then people who just want to make money by working, not gambling or cheating, can get on with their lives.

I am glad that he is only almost hoping for financial meltdown. I very much fear that, much as the idea appeals, sacking our current governing hierarchy could create a power vacuum waiting to be filled by a thrusting and charismatic young politician promising to sweep away the worn-out ideas of the past and to lead a proud and united nation to a shiny new promised land…….. someone, for instance, like the young Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin or Benito Mussolini!

A Terrible Dilemma

Nothing that has happened in Afghanistan inclines me to change my opinion, first expressed several years ago, that in that country we with NATO, are engaged in a war that we cannot hope to win. Twice during the 19th Century we attempted to defeat the Afghans – and failed. Towards the end of the 20th Century the Soviet Union made a similar attempt – and failed. We, the British and Americans, helped to bring the Taliban to power by our support for the ‘gallant mojihadin’ in defeating them – and we therefore bear some responsibility for the Taliban’s excesses. Do you believe that life in Afghanistan was worse under the Soviet puppet government than under its successors? I certainly don’t.

Now, after a decade of war, the Taliban are still well able to mount successful attacks on targets in the very centre of Kabul, the capital. In an attempt to find a face-saving exit strategy we decided to negotiate with ‘the moderate Taliban’. The Taliban’s peace negotiators duly turned up but with explosives in their turbans. They blew to smithereens both themselves and those with whom it was hoped they would negotiate. It is not in the nature of members of the Taliban to be ‘moderate’ – and they have no doubt that death occurring while killing ‘infidels and apostates’ will ensure them a place in Heaven. Scarcely a week passes without news of another British soldier killed by a sniper or an improvised explosive device (it may well have been a member of the CIA or of our ‘special forces’ who showed the Mojihadin how to make them – for use against the Russians of course)

Every instinct within me urges that we should get our forces out of that benighted country before more British blood is shed. Perhaps the Taliban would mellow. After all, civilisation as we know it was expected to collapse if the Viet Cong triumphed in Vietnam. Thank goodness that we then had a Prime Minister who declined to get us involved. The Viet Cong did triumph. The world didn’t come to an end and Vietnam is now a popular holiday destination for both British and Americans.

A fortnight ago though, I read an article in The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, that told me that for Afghan women in particular, the departure of NATO forces would be unlikely to bring a ‘happy ending’. The article illustrates the author’s contention that, ‘In some cultures contempt for women is deeply endemic and extreme violence may be used against them with complete impunity’. One such culture existed in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban, and may well lie just below the surface today. An extreme example of that contempt was the treatment of a ‘woman’ accused of adultery in Somalia in 2008, in an area of the country controlled by the African equivalent of the Taliban. Her execution by stoning was staged as an entertainment in a football stadium before a crowd of over a thousand. She cried and begged for her life as she was buried in the ground up to her neck prior to the stoning. Amnesty International’s investigators discovered that this judicially murdered ‘adulteress' was a thirteen-year-old child who had been sadistically tortured and brutally gang-raped by the Somali military. The men who perpetuated this nauseating atrocity completely absolved themselves from any culpability. They had, so they claimed, simply obeyed ‘The Law of God’ - thereby adding a most appalling blasphemy to their catalogue of infamy!

It is known that such ‘entertainments’ as this – together with a bloodbath of those who collaborated with the puppet government – followed the departure of the Soviet Army from Afghanistan. I very much fear that within months of NATO’s departure the Taliban will again be in control. Those who collaborated with ‘the West’ could expect to be treated much as were those who did so with the USSR. As for women and girls – the very best that they could hope for would be a return to virtual slavery and an end of any hopes of an education and rewarding career.

Should we abandon those whom we have made our friends, as the USSR did theirs in Afghanistan and as the USA did theirs in Vietnam? Or should we continue indefinitely to wage a war of attrition, patching up the wounded, honouring the fallen as their bodies are returned to this country – and hoping for a miracle? I just don’t know the answer to this terrible dilemma.

A depressing experience

For some years Churches together in Clacton, particularly the Salvation Army and the Baptists, have – as part of their Christian witness – been taking practical steps to alleviate the plight of people in our area who are homeless or badly housed. At the end of September they arranged for the Tendring Council official responsible for dealing with the homeless to explain the current situation to concerned members of individual churches. I attended both as a Quaker and because of professional knowledge and experience, both as a Public Health Inspector and a Housing Manager in this field (albeit between 40 and 50 years in the past!) I was very pleased that there were three other Quakers as the meeting despite the fact that we have fewer members than any other church in our area.

It was a thoroughly depressing experience. The situation certainly hasn’t improved in the past half-century and in many ways it seems to be appreciably worse.

As well as the Tendring Council official’s talk there was a fairly general discussion among those present, among whom was a district councillor and representatives of housing charities. I can’t, I am afraid, recall with certainty who said what but the following statements – that I felt revealed appalling circumstances – were made and remained unchallenged:

There were houses in our district in multiple occupation (several families and/or individuals renting ‘furnished rooms’ in one house) served by a single toilet that was out of order. If an attempt were made to force the landlord to make the toilet serviceable he would refuse to do so and would evict all the tenants, making them homeless. In my days as a Health Inspector a threat of this kind would have been ignored, notice served on the landlord and legal proceedings taken against him if he failed to comply. The chances are that his threat would have been a bluff (the landlord wouldn’t really want to lose his rent income). In any case though, since this was in the days when Councils were encouraged to build houses for letting and most had large housing estates, the chances are that they would have been able to find accommodation for any displaced tenants within a few weeks.

Serious overcrowding no longer qualifies housing applicants for urgent consideration. The whole purpose of the housing legislation enacted at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century was to alleviate the overcrowding that was recognised as a major cause of the epidemics common at that time. In my day we took overcrowding very seriously, helping – as promptly as we could – families found to be overcrowded and prosecuting those who deliberately overcrowded their properties.

Any homeless single person with a child applying for accommodation could expect the child to be taken immediately into care. I thought that the BBC’s tv docudrama ‘Cathy come home’ (remember that?) helped to put an end to that practice years ago. I found it quite appalling. If true it explains the determination of some vulnerable people never to seek help from Social Services. It may be that there are occasions when taking a child into care is the best answer to a particular problem. Surely though, in the vast majority of cases, every effort should made to find accommodation for the adult and child together.

I think that what was revealed at that meeting would have had the public health, housing and social service pioneers of the 19th and 20th centuries, (Sir Edwin Chadwick, George Peabody, George Cadbury, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry and so on), turning in their graves.

A Prophecy fulfilled!

I generally refer to the weather with extreme caution in this blog. I know from experience that hardly have I posted such a comment than there is likely to be a sudden and dramatic change in the weather that makes nonsense of it. Yes – I do know that I could retrieve my blog and edit it after posting but that, I feel, would be cheating!

However, a few weeks ago, criticising Tendring Council’s decision to end the holiday season and close at least some of their holiday services on 31st August, I remarked that the weather at the beginning of September was disappointing but that towards the end of the month, and even into October, there might well be a heat wave.

I hardly thought that that tentative prophecy would fulfilled quite as convincingly as it has been. I shall be surprised if the first weekend of October hasn’t brought scores of visitors to our sunshine coast for a day or two of wall-to-wall sunshine and, before autumn really sets in, a satisfying draught of 'the last of the summer wine'.

Thanks to cheese-paring Tendring Council and its Tourism boss, they’ll have found that there are no beach patrols and that many of the Tourist enquiry offices closed weeks ago for the winter!

Week 38 2011 27.9,2011

2011-09-27T07:19:00.000+01:00

Tendring Topics……on line

Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate – a Retirement Village?

I learned with distinctly mixed feelings the suggestion that Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate could be transformed into a retirement village. I have a double interest in the idea. It is an area with which, as a Public Health Inspector, I first became acquainted in the late 1950s. It was then still trying to recover from the disastrous floods of 1953 that had taken many Jaywick lives. Its facilities were even more basic then than they are today.

My other interest is that today I am not just ‘elderly’ but ‘old’, and it would be people like me (though a bit younger!) who might be expected to make their homes there. Nothing less than an ambulance or I suppose, a hearse, will ever prise me away from the bungalow in Dudley Road in which I have lived for fifty-five years. Perhaps if I wanted to move home, I might be tempted by a modern bungalow within yards of Jaywick’s golden sands in a newly built ‘retirement estate’ on a redeveloped Brooklands. That though, isn’t quite what Jaywick campaigner Mick Masterton, founder member of the Friends of Brooklands, Residents Group, has in mind. He wants to retain the existing dwellings. He points out that many of those on the Brooklands estate are much too tiny for permanent family use. This is hardly surprising as, when built, they were intended only for brief holiday use in the summer months. He feels though that they would be perfect for residential use by retired couples. I wonder?

The Daily Gazette reports him as saying, ‘There’s not enough room to swing a cat in some of these properties, let alone stick a family of three in them. But they are a perfectly good size for people who have retired’ and, ‘you can’t put a mum, dad and three kids in a rabbit hutch with no room, but they are perfect for a retired couple’.

He goes on to say that, ‘If you start putting more mature people in there, it will start to become a nice place to retire and property prices might start creeping up’. He is hoping to persuade landlords and estate agents to rent these properties to the over 55s in the future. He believes that this could transform Brooklands. ‘If you live next door to old people, then you’re happy. They aren’t likely to go round smashing people’s windows. Could Mr Masterson have been misquoted? I hope so because the former public relations officer lurking within me thinks that his words are very unlikely to encourage the newly retired to seek a home in which you can’t swing a cat, or one that resembles ‘a rabbit hutch with no room’, even if it is unlikely to have its windows smashed in by its neighbours and is within a few yards of the golden tide-washed sands of Clacton-on-Sea’s sunset suburb!

Also, of course, no one puts ‘a mum, dad and three kids’ in accommodation in which they will be desperately overcrowded. They go into it because they can find nothing better. The reason for this is that Councils were compelled by the Right to buy legislation to sell off Council Houses built by their predecessors to eradicate homelessness and overcrowding, and cannot now build more homes for letting. Housing Associations and the Private Sector are quite unable to meet the demand.

Dreaming of an Empire?

Local control is what local government is all about – and it is a principle our present central government claims to support.

It is surely obvious that the smaller the local government unit the closer it will be to the people, and the more likely it will be to reflect their wishes. A few weeks ago I suggested that one way in which this objective could be furthered within Essex would be to abolish the County Council and to make the individual district and borough councils wholly responsible for all local government services within their own district. It now seems though that the very reverse is beginning to take place!

The Daily Gazette reports that Tendring Council has agreed to ‘share offices and work more closely with the Essex County Council’. This decision was made not by the full council but by its ‘Cabinet members’ and was signed by them on 6th September, not even being discussed at a subsequent meeting of the full council. Goodness – in my time such a revolutionary proposal would have been fully discussed by a multi-party council committee, reported in the local press for public discussion, and then debated at the next meeting of the whole council.

I am not surprised that Labour councillor Ivan Henderson sees this as the first step towards, ‘Essex County Council taking over control and making decisions about our local services. Decisions would be made to suit the county council and not the residents of Tendring’. Tendring Council leader Neil Stock, on the other hand, claims that this co-operation is, ‘a brilliant thing we are doing to protect, and hopefully create, jobs in the district, and improve services’.

I doubt if Mr Henderson’s forebodings will have been allayed (mine certainly haven’t been!) by the reported statement of the leader of Essex County Council that, ‘our customers want seamless and joined up delivery of services. They do not recognise the typical situation where geographical and organisational boundaries determine how services and management should be structured. By agreeing to this new joint way of working, we’re breaking down the barriers.’ This statement is made even more potentially sinister by the fact that the county council has signed similar agreements with Brentwood and Braintree councils. It is surely clear that the County Council’s ultimate aim is to establish itself as the single unitary authority in full control of all ‘local’ government services within the county.

Lord Hanningfield, the Council’s former leader, once declared (later he said ‘only jokingly’) that Essex was large enough and wealthy enough to be a sovereign independent state. He was clearly dreaming of an independent Kingdom of Essex (no need to ask whom he had in mind as king!). His successors are even more ambitious. They’re dreaming of an Essex Empire! And perhaps they’ll succeed. I learn that other County Councils have earned the praise of the government by organising similar mergers. I am sorry to say that I begin to see a future in which County Councils are the only units of what used to be called local government.

Recyclables Collection Centres

An example of the dire effects that can result from an attempt to manage Tendring District’s affairs by remote control from Chelmsford, is to be found in the readers’ letters page of last week’s (22.9.11) Clacton Gazette.

Mr James Smith of Spring Road St Osyth wrote:

It is said that the refuse centre off Colchester Road St. Osyth is to be closed in October. So, I gave the Rush Green depot a go. When I got there at about 10.00 a.m. there was an enormous trail of cars waiting to go in. If this is an example of what people can expect there will be more fly-tipping and Tendring Council will be to blame. Closing any refuse site is not an economy. Our time is just as valuable as councillors. So, think again.

There’s just one thing wrong about Mr Smith’s letter. Extra fly tipping won’t be the fault of the Tendring District Council though they’ll probably have to clear up the mess and try to prosecute the fly tippers. One of the more idiotic features of 1974’s local government reorganisation was that refuse collection remained the responsibility of district councils but refuse disposal became that of County Councils. Recycling wasn’t a major concern way back in 1974 but it has become very important since.

Recycling is obviously part of the process of refuse disposal, so naturally refuse and recycling centres became the County Council’s concern. I can well imagine some chairborne strategist at County Hall carefully studying a map of north-east Essex and congratulating himself (or, of course, herself) on noticing something that had obviously been missed by ‘those ignorant peasants out in the sticks’. There were two refuse disposal and recycling centres within a short distance of each other – one in the former Clacton Urban District Council’s area and the other in the area of the former Tendring Rural District Council. Close one down and thousands of pounds would be saved. ‘That’s the way MBEs are earned – should be worth at least another salary grade at the next review’.

Officials in County Hall, Chelmsford are unlikely to know what hundreds of Clactonians could have told them, that removal and disposal of recyclable and unrecyclable waste from a private car or van take up both time and space. As a result there is often a long queue of cars stretching from the Rush Green Civic Amenity Centre right back towards Cloes Lane. In my motoring days I can recall being held up in such a queue. That must have been ten years ago, long before interest in recycling became general. For much of the time Rush Green recycling Centre is used up to and beyond its capacity. Closing the St. Osyth Centre would undoubtedly result in unacceptably lengthening queues of cars obstructing Rush Green Road and probably in the fly tipping that Mr James Smith predicts.

Twenty-first Century ‘bear baiting’?

Lord Macaulay, early 19th Century historian, poet and politician famously berated the Puritans for having opposed bear baiting, not because of the pain suffered by the bears, but because of the pleasure that it gave to spectators. George Bernard Shaw, 20th Century dramatist and controversialist said that the Puritans had been quite right to oppose bear baiting on those grounds. He pointed out that bears, whether captive or in the wild, suffer pain regularly from a number of natural causes, as indeed do humans. What was truly appalling was that humans should watch and derive pleasure from the deliberate infliction of that pain – or of pain inflicted deliberately on any living thing.

Although no pain was involved, I felt rather similarly about the recent controversy over the spectacle of eight year old boys clad only in shorts wrestling with each other within a large wire ‘cage’, watched with enjoyment by a cheering audience consisting largely (perhaps wholly) of young to middle-aged men.

I am quite prepared to believe that not one of those boys was in the least danger of being physically injured; that they were safer in fact, than they would have been had it been a rough-and-tumble with their mates in one of their own back gardens. Mind you, I did find incredible the words of the father of one of the wrestling boys who claimed that if his son had not been engaged in this juvenile ‘cage wrestling’ he’d have been out on the streets ‘causing trouble.’ At eight! It doesn’t say much for his mum and dad’s parenting skills!

I don’t think that those who know me best would be likely to describe me as being either particularly squeamish or prudish. I have to say though that I found the spectacle of those scantily clad kids, inside a cage and wrestling before an excited adult male audience in an atmosphere of booze and betting, utterly revolting.

Drawing a line….

There’s nothing that top politicians like more than ‘drawing a line’ under the mistakes of the past and concentrating on the future. Burglars, muggers and confidence men feel just the same, when they have been caught out. One scandal that obstinately refuses to have a line drawn under it is that of Rupert Murdoch’s evil empire News International. It began with a revelation about phone hacking but has now progressed far beyond that. We knew that Neil Wallis, former Deputy Editor of the News if the World had subsequently been employed as a consultant to the Metropolitan Police who paid him £24.000 for his services. We now learn that during that time News International was also paying him over £25,000 for crime stories sold to them to which he had obviously had inside access. Meanwhile his former boss Andy Coulson is suing News International for failing to pay his legal fees for the litigation in which he is involved.

Why on earth should they? Andy Coulson hasn’t worked for News International for four years. Perhaps David Cameron – a more recent employer – will help him out.

Week 37.2011 20.9.2011

2011-09-20T08:11:00.000+01:00

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree’

So claimed American poetess Joyce Kilmer. I think that she was comparing chalk with cheese. What is indisputable though is that trees have inspired poets through the ages. They enhance the appearance and charm of the countryside, mop up some of the carbon dioxide that is produced by human activities and help to prevent soil erosion and flooding. They provide a safe haven, breeding ground and food supply for myriad forms of animal and plant life, as well as shade, recreational facilities, fuel and building materials for we humans.

In my back garden are two apple trees (in blossom) a damson tree, a Japanese winter-flowering cherry and four silver birches. I do try to practise what I preach!

Between 1974 and 1980, while I was Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer I remember that the Trees Working Party, under the chairmanship of tree enthusiast Councillor Malcolm Holloway, was one of the Council’s most successful working groups. Completely non-political, the Working Party encouraged tree planting as a condition of new housing, commercial or industrial development, and helped to preserve existing trees on public land by enlisting volunteer spare-time tree wardens throughout the district to report acts of vandalism and to water local street trees in times of drought. I recall that we organised a children’s essay competition on the importance of trees to humankind. This was judged by the editor of the East Essex Gazette (now the Clacton Gazette) and certificates and small prizes were presented to the winner and runners up. The Dutch Elm Disease epidemic was at its peak during the late 1970s. The Working Party made the public aware of this threat to the English countryside and encouraged replacement of diseased trees. At that time the Council had a ‘tree nursery’ on land beside Holland Brook near the Thorpe-le-Soken sewage treatment works. On it ‘tree whips’ were grown into saplings ready to be planted out in public places. This received publicity both in the local and regional press and on tv.

The Silver Jubilee of the Queen’s reign occurred during those years and I believe that Chairman Malcolm Holloway was the first to coin the slogan Plant a Tree for the Jubilee! that was later widely used nation-wide. If he were alive today I am sure that he would be delighted by the fact that the Woodland Trust intends to plant six million trees in Britain to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year. The biggest proposed tree-planting project is for a 4,600 acres area in Leicestershire, but there are other less ambitious schemes planned throughout the UK, which at present is said to have proportionately the lowest area of woodland of any country in Europe.

I wish the campaign every success. I wonder though how it will fit in with the government’s determination to speed up the granting of planning permission for new development by watering down local authorities’ already limited powers of veto, and creating a presumption of approval for proposed development. This it is hoped will lead to more homes and more jobs? I have a feeling that woodland will not be allowed to stand in the way of developers’ profits and that, despite lip service to ‘localism’ the government will override local objections to wholesale tree felling.

In this connection I was interested to learn from a national newspaper that three government ministers, the Chancellor of the Chequer among them, while endorsing the government’s relaxation of planning legislation nationally, are strongly supporting local protests against unwelcome development their own constituency areas!

NIMBY!

Unemployment

The latest unemployment figures – another 80,000 jobless during the past three months bringing the total number of unemployed to two and a half million, seem to have come as a total surprise to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Regular readers of this blog will not have expected me to be surprised. Drastic cuts in the public services are just beginning to have their effect. There will be worse to come.

Nor was I surprised to note that the Private Sector had been quite unable to find work for those made jobless in the Public Sector. Much Public Sector work is contracted out to private consultants and contractors. What’s more, the Public Sector provides an environment in which private firms can thrive and make their profits.

They are the people who repair and keep litter-free the roads and pavements along which everyone comes to work. They take away and dispose of domestic and commercial waste. They try to maintain law and order. They maintain a healthy and pollution free environment. They make sure that our food is fit to eat and that our restaurants, pubs and cafes are safe places in which to eat it. They care for and treat the sick and injured. They help struggling mothers with young babies and old folk even more helpless than I am!

Did you notice that when ‘the west’ wanted to get Libya on its feet again and out of the chaos produced by months of civil war – nobody said, ‘We must get that casino, those night-clubs and that race course on their feet again to create some wealth‘ or even, ‘We must get the supermarkets, the factories and the oil pipe lines in operation as a first priority’. Not a bit of it. Their first task was to pay the public servants who hadn’t been paid for months. Only when law and order had been restored, and the essential health and environmental services brought back into operation, could they begin to think of getting the private sector enterprises working again. The public sector provides the foundation on which modern society is built. It is not an optional extra. It is neglected at our peril.

Incidentally, just as in Scotland there was none of the recent rioting that afflicted England, neither has there been a rise in unemployment. On the contrary ‘north of the border’ there has been a reduction in unemployment. This is because the devolved Scottish government has embarked on a programme of public works and has thus created much-needed jobs.

This, so our government insists, is the road to ruin. We shall see. In the meantime the Scots may have to cope with increasing numbers of white Anglo-Saxon economic migrants from ‘down south’!

Tuberculosis stages a comeback!

A recent news item on the radio (I think it must have been on the BBC World Service) sent cold shivers down my spine. Tuberculosis, so the newsreader said, was again beginning to become widespread, thanks to the development of strains of the Tuberculosis Bacillus that were resistant to all known antibiotics My own acquaintance with that one-time killer disease that we all thought had been tamed for good, was in 1948. I was 25 and my wife Heather 23. We had been married just two years. During the previous, very hard, winter she had had two or three bouts of what had appeared to be ‘flu. bed rest and aspirin had been prescribed and she had slowly recovered her health, but not her strength, on each occasion. In the late summer of 1948 she had another attack – and this time aspirin and bed rest didn’t help. She had a persistent cough. Her voice became husky. Her temperature was abnormally high in the evening and low in the morning. She perspired heavily at night, had no appetite, had lost her strength and was visibly losing weight. X-ray and sputum tests revealed that she had a severe tubercular infection of the larynx and left lung. The prognosis was not good. She was admitted to what was then the British Legion Sanatorium at Nayland near Colchester. For several weeks her condition deteriorated and I was in despair.

Heather had to gain a stone in weight before she could go to Papworth for surgery. She had just achieved that aim when this pcture was taken at Nayland Sanatorum.

The new ‘wonder drug’ streptomycin had just appeared on the scene. It was expensive and in short supply. It was given only to patients who were very ill indeed but not beyond all hope. Heather fell into that category. Her right lung had never been affected and that made recovery a possibility. A course of streptomycin was supplemented by P.A.S (para-aminosalicylic acid) and the partial collapse of the left lung by crushing the phrenic nerve and pumping air into the space below the diaphragm, a pneumo-peritoneum (PP). ( How extraordinary that I can remember these medical terms after half a century but can’t remember the name of someone I was talking to this morning!)

It worked! Heather’s larynx healed and the progress of the disease in the left lung was halted.. To complete the healing process the left lung had to be permanently collapsed. This was achieved during an eight weeks stay in Papworth Hospital, then a centre for TB treatment. In three separate operations, each a fortnight apart, eight of Heather’s ribs were removed (an eight-rib thoracoplasty) and the diseased lung collapsed. The operation was a success. Heather gradually regained her strength and her appetite. She was discharged cured (well, as cured as she would ever be) in time for Christmas 1950.

It had been a life-saving operation. It had also been a crippling one. Heather had, in effect, just one fully operational lung. She had to rest for an hour or so every afternoon. I always had to help her with shopping and with heavy work about the house. ‘Evenings out’ were too much for her. Our guests, for whom she never spared herself, didn't know how exhausted she was on their departure. When, in her seventies, she developed osteoporosis, the absence of supporting ribs increased the spinal curvature that developed..

Heather happily camping in the 1970s

Heather wasn’t one to moan and groan. She gave me two fine sons who, in their turn, gave us three wonderful grandchildren of all of whom we had every reason to be proud. She was a good and untiring cook, an expert with the needle and with the sewing machine and a great make-do-and-mender! She enjoyed life too though her physical activities were limited. She was hardly an ‘outdoor girl’ but she thoroughly enjoyed the camping holidays that we took every year.

No one could have had a better wife, nor could our sons have had a more loving and supportive mother. Yet sometimes I find myself thinking how different her life could have been had the full potential of antibiotics been realized a few years earlier and she had been spared the crippling operation that had cured her tuberculosis - but at a heavy price!

That is why I experienced a shock when I heard that Tuberculosis was staging a comeback – and that the bacillus had now developed a resistance to all existing antibiotics.

Week 36 2011 13.9.2011

2011-09-13T07:45:00.000+01:00

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘Why don’t they eat cake?’

I do not recall ever before having heard quite such blatant rubbish on tv as that put forward to urge the abolition of the higher rate of income tax!

It is worth giving some thought to what this ‘higher rate’ actually amounts to, and who has to pay it. It applies only to those with a taxable income of £150,000 a year or more. That is a sum so large that it is all but meaningless to most of us. It works out at over £2,884 per week or, if you prefer, £12,500 per calendar month. Do you know anyone with that sort of an income? Probably you don’t, neither do I. Perhaps to members of a government that includes 17 millionaires it may seem pretty commonplace - middle of the road in fact. I don’t think though that I am even acquainted with anyone who wouldn’t consider those liable to the higher rate of income tax as being very wealthy. These fortunate people are required to pay back 50% of any income above £150,000 a year. Hardly, it might have been thought, likely to cause the ‘victims’ of the tax serious hardship!

The idea of abolishing that higher rate of income tax received a boost last Wednesday (7th Sept) when 20 top financial experts wrote an open letter to the Financial Times urging that course of action. The very rich should be charged only the standard rate of 40 percent that I, and a great many others of us, have to pay on at least part of our incomes. The removal of the higher band of income tax would, so they claim, remove a brake on Britain’s economic recovery and allow us to forge ahead into a golden future. Among the flood of protesting emails responding to this item on BBC Breakfast was at least one asking if any/many/perhaps all of those twenty financial experts were themselves in receipt of incomes in excess of £150,000 a year and therefore had a personal financial interest in the matter.

On that same Breakfast programme another financial expert explained that entrepreneurs from overseas were dissuaded from setting up small businesses in this country when they were expected to pay back half their incomes to the government. If the higher tax band were retained all those with the best brains would emigrate. In any case, few people actually paid that tax because they are astute enough to protect their wealth by putting it into off-shore accounts in tax havens or in retirement trusts and the like.

I have been trying to think of a small business that could be expected to provide its founder and owner with an income in excess of £150,000 – drug dealing, gambling, the arms trade, money lending, the sex trade, organised crime perhaps. They’re all that come to mind and they are all activities we can comfortably manage without. Every listener to that broadcast must surely have known that no one at all has to pay half his income in tax – half of any income in excess of £150,000 is a very different matter.

To even think of increasing the incomes of the wealthy in a time of growing unemployment – particularly youth unemployment - while cutting public services and benefits to the poor, the sick and the disabled, is an obscenity. In lack of sensitivity and human understanding it is comparable with the ill-fated Queen Marie Antoinette’s famous suggestion when told that the poor of Paris were clamouring for bread ‘Why don’t they eat cake?’

Let us hope that it doesn’t have similar consequences!

I am more than ever convinced that Britain’s hope of mending our ‘broken society’ and discovering our country’s true ‘greatness’, lies in narrowing, certainly not widening, the yawning gap between the wealthiest and the poorest of our nation. A good start could be made by reviewing our income tax system and, with the aim of eventually making it truly progressive, bringing the threshold of liability for the higher rate of tax down from £150,000 a year to £100,000, while simultaneously seeking out and closing those currently legal loopholes by means of which the seriously wealthy avoid carrying their fair share of the country’s financial burden.

‘Those who sup with the devil need a long spoon’

So says the proverb and I think it likely that some of our politicians and police officers wish that they had had a rather longer spoon when they fraternised with Rupert Murdoch and the top executives of News International.

James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and representative, and two former senior employees of News International have been recalled for further questioning by the House of Commons Select Committee. The evidence of the latter two absolutely contradicts that of James Murdoch. On which testimony, I wonder, will the Committee base its final report?

The Committee’s continuing activities have prompted our Prime Minister to comment that perhaps he had allowed himself to get a little too close to representatives of News International, but this had been because he had been eager to explain the Government’s policies to the top management of all the news media – not just the Murdoch Press.

I don’t really think that the proprietors of the Guardian, the Independent, and the Daily Mirror enjoyed quite the same measure of Prime Ministerial attention as did the owner of the Times, Sunday Times, News of the World and the Sun, either from our Prime Minister or most of his predecessors. I am sure that no-one would dream of criticising Mr Cameron for explaining government policy to any or all of them. What is a matter of concern though, is the extent to which our present, or any past, Prime Minister may have been prepared to bend or change the emphasis of government policy in order to ensure friendly headlines, news stories, and feature articles and reviews in a powerful section of the national press. Remember the Sun’s boast after a Thatcher electoral victory – ‘It was us wot done it!’

One recent Prime Minister, John Major declined to pay homage to Rupert Murdoch and News International. It was to his credit – but he didn’t remain very long in office did he? It is for this reason that I believe very strongly that no substantial part of the British news media should be under the ownership, influence and control of a single individual, certainly not of an individual who is not British and who owes no loyalty to Great Britain, or to British and European values and traditions.

Who is being subsidised?

The residents of ‘Middle England’, through the columns of their self-appointed mouthpieces in the press (I have in mind in particular the Express, the Mail and the Telegraph) constantly remind us that they, as hard-working, honest and respectable citizens, have to subsidise the life-styles of unemployed layabouts, single parent families, old folk who are no longer making a contribution to society, other people’s children’s care and education, public transport, a European Union that they wish they had never heard of and so on, and on ……and on.

I have just heard it confirmed that I, and quite a few mostly old folk like me, are quietly subsidising the comfortable lives of a great many devoted readers of those newspapers. We, the unwilling and unwitting benefactors of aspiring Middle Britain, are those who have paid off our mortgages and are truly home owners. We have since built up a few thousand pounds of savings in savings accounts in the Banks or Building Societies that had lent us the money with which we had purchased our homes. Those accumulated savings are month-by-month diminishing in value, as inflation at twice the rate originally forecast by the government, outstrips the meagre interest that they nowadays earn. They will continue to shrink while the Bank Rate fixed by the Bank of England remains at the record low level of half of one percent.

And who gets the benefit of the value creamed off our life savings? Why, the keen go-ahead young couples who probably describe themselves as home owners but are, in fact, home buyers. The real owners of their homes, as they’ll quickly find out if they default on their mortgage payments, are the banks or building societies that loaned them the purchase money and now hold the deeds of their homes.

The interest that home buyers are paying is at a record low level, kept there artificially by the continuing absurdly low bank rate. The idea is, no doubt, that this boost to their income will give them more cash in their pockets which will encourage them to go out and spend – and get the wheels of Britain’s economy moving again. It is, of course, simply robbing Peter to pay Paul and on this occasion I am one of the Peters. I’ll survive. My savings aren’t substantial enough to attract a great deal of interest even if the bank rate and mortgage interest payments rose. It must though be a severe blow to those elderly people depending upon the interest on their savings to finance their retirement.

‘Our Holiday Season is ending early, due to lack of interest ……..from Tendring Council’.

Camping beneath the pines in September sunshine

During the late 1970s and early ‘80s, after my retirement from Tendring Council, my wife and I would often take a week’s holiday with our motor-caravan in late June and another early in September. The roads and the camping sites were less busy than in July and August, the children were back at school (ours had long since left school!) and the weather was often warmer and sunnier than it had been in the height of the holiday season. Sea temperatures too are often higher in September than in June and early July.

I have noticed that a great many, particularly elderly or childless couples do the same thing. The September weather this year has so far been disappointing but, who knows, there could be an Indian summer towards the end of this month or even into October. Those who decide to visit the Essex Sunshine Coast a little outside the peak of holiday season this year are likely to be disappointed by the reception they receive.

Many of Tendring’s Tourist Information Centres closed and the Council-run beach patrols stopped operating on 1st September. John Halls, Walton-on-the-Naze Town Mayor is furious. He is reported in the Daily Gazette as saying that there are still people coming here and holidaymakers can often be seen here until October. ‘This town relies on the tourist trade and we are trying to extend the holiday season, not cut ii short as soon as we reach September………Not all children have even gone back to school yet, and people don’t feel safe on the beaches without a patrol there. They have done a lot of good this summer but if someone gets stuck on the rocks now they will not be there to help’.

Needless to say, Councillor Stephen Mayzes, Tendring’s Tourism Boss, has an answer. ‘It is considered to be the end of the season, the schools are going back and there are far fewer people around. We have got to look at how many people are actually going into the information centre. We did a study last year and worked out that it was costing us about £7.00 for every person who walked into the centre’. Mr Mayzes would like to see in the future a hi-tech replacement for the centre. He has in mind an interactive screen that would allow people to explore tourist information all year. I can’t imagine anything more likely to put people off Walton forever than having to consult a giant computer screen rather than a friendly and helpful information officer! A virtual information office for virtual people – real people, on holiday, won’t want to go near it!

I suppose I haven’t made a terrible error about the responsibilities of a District Council ‘Tourism boss’? I had the possibly silly idea that his task was to attract tourists and other holidaymakers to our Holiday Coast. Mr Mayzes response to a prestigious camping and caravanning club making use of the playing field of the Coastal Academy during the holiday period, and his action in prematurely closing Information Centres and ending Beach Patrols, makes me wonder if his task is the precise opposite – to discourage strangers from making their way here and to keep our golden sands and holiday facilities unsullied for the enjoyment of ‘natives only’. If so, he is doing very well!