Week No. 37.10 14th Sept. 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

Prophetic Topics?

Hardly; the fact that likely future events mentioned in this blog often actually occur a week or so later, doesn’t mean that I have the gift of second sight. It is simply that the probable result of some political actions is blindingly obvious to anyone endowed with common sense, devoid of party dogma and immune to the headlines of the popular press.

I wrote, some time ago, that since much of the private sector depends upon the public sector for its work, savage cuts in the public sector were likely to affect private firms before their public authority customers. And so it has. Recently I learned that 5,000 small private firms, contractors of services to local authorities, were already in financial difficulties. The private and public sectors were, I said, like conjoined twins – whatever, good or bad, is done to one of them will inevitably affect the other.

That was just small contractors. Now we learn that the division of the giant building maintenance organisation Connaught, that deals with the upkeep of social housing countrywide, is in financial trouble with thousands of job losses. That is just the immediate result of the cuts. The other, and less easily remedied, effect will be neglected repair and regular maintenance and the descent of social housing into irredeemable slums.

On a recent tv news programme the presenter asked randomly selected members of the public if they would prefer the government to try to reduce ‘the deficit’ by cutting benefits, or services. Most, no doubt inspired by press headlines about ‘benefit cheats’, unhesitatingly replied ‘benefits’ – until they were reminded that ‘benefits’ included child allowances, rent and tax rebates, retirement pensions, free tv licences, bus passes, winter fuel allowance and so on. Many of those interviewed imagined that ‘benefits’ just meant large sums of money paid to ‘other people’ the majority whom were layabouts and/or cheats.

A very great many people (I am among them) are in receipt of some kind of benefit. It can’t be too strongly stressed that, just as the vast majority of young people are not violent drunken hooligans, and the vast majority of Muslims have no sympathy whatsoever with terrorists, the vast majority of people in receipt of benefit are not cheats.

What should have been asked was, would you prefer the government to reduce the deficit by cutting benefits and services to the public, or by modest increases in direct taxes such as income tax, inheritance tax and capital gains tax?

Cutting services, reducing benefits and increasing indirect taxes like VAT and excise duties on such items as tobacco, alcohol and petrol, disproportionately penalise the poor. Income tax rises would affect a wide swathe of society from some with relatively low incomes (they would certainly affect me!) to the seriously wealthy. They would claw back some of the ‘benefits’ from those who didn’t need them and – by their very nature – they are only demanded from those who are able to pay them.

Funny thing, the idea of an extra penny in the pound on the standard rate of income tax, which would reduce no one to penury but would raise a great deal of money, appears not even to have been considered.

I would find it easier to accept all this stuff from the present Chancellor about belt tightening, what the country can and cannot afford, and how we all shall have to suffer, if I could only forget that, just a year or two ago he and Lord Mandelson (then a Labour Government Minister) were together enjoying the hospitality of a multi-millionaire on his luxury yacht. I wonder how much discomfort, never mind suffering, their then host will have to suffer?

Clacton’s Water Feature is back

Recently I expressed my regret at the fact that Clacton’s much criticised and crisis-ridden water feature seemed to have been turned off forever. It had had a short ‘normal’ life during which it had brightened up the town centre. On warm days adventurous children had plunged through its jets to the entertainment of passers by. Sadly though, it appeared that by doing so they were risking their health and safety. The feature didn’t have an adequate water purification plant. Goodness knows what dire pollution may not have been introduced into the ever-circulating water by stray cats, dogs and passing seagulls!


Last summer it made a brief appearance behind a steel fence, intended to protect those of the younger generation from their own bravado. It was anything but an asset to the town centre. Amid universal derision the fence was removed and the jets switched off. This year the Council brought cutting-edge electronic wizardry to its aid. There was no fence. The water feature was switched on - but if any one, adult or child, approached too close to the jets, they faded and died. Sadly, some of the younger generation discovered a blind spot in the defences and a way through the metaphorical minefield. Once again they endangered their health by venturing through the jets. The feature was again switched off. This time I feared, for good.

I’m glad to say that, by means beyond my understanding, the blind spot no longer exists. The path through the minefield has been successfully blocked. The jets of the water feature have been restored. Unless there has been another catastrophe since I took this photo (on 9th Sept.), they are happily jetting away now!
Power to the People!

Last week in this blog I commented on what seemed to me to be two totally outrageous ideas suggested by the Policy Exchange ‘think tank’ to alleviate Britain’s housing crisis. They involved bribing members of rural communities to vote against their own instincts in proposed referenda on whether or not development should take place in their villages; and seizing the thousands of homes provided and run by Housing Associations, using their rent to build more houses for sale.

I said that although I understood Policy Exchange to be an organisation close to the government, I felt sure that both David Cameron and Nick Clegg had more common sense and integrity than to think seriously about adopting either of these (currently criminal!) ideas. Now……..I am beginning to wonder.

Policy Exchange’s report has evidently reached Whitehall. This morning on tv I heard a government spokesman explain that among the problems afflicting would-be developers were long delays in the current planning procedures. They would prepare and submit their plans for housing estates, supermarkets and so on. The district or borough council concerned would consider these plans. They might be passed, passed subject to conditions, or rejected. If they were rejected or it was considered that the conditions were unreasonable, the Developer could appeal – Central Government would become involved and the procedure might drag on for months.

This, as the spokesman said, was clearly unsatisfactory. It might have thought that a government devoted to ‘giving power to local communities’ would decide that, to speed up the process, there should be no appeal for most proposed developments. The decision of the democratically elected district council, taken in consultation with the parish or town council where there was one, should be final. I say most proposed developments because if it were a universal rule, there would be no refuse disposal plant, no sewage works, no penal institutions and no provision for ‘travellers’ anywhere. These are developments that most of us agree are essential but none of us want in our backyards!

That was not the solution favoured by the government spokesman. He suggested that decisions should be passed to local communities and decided by a public referendum, adding that it might be possible to provide ‘inducements’ for the local community to accept the development! His words could have, and possibly did, come straight from the Policy Exchange report.

As it happens just such a development as the government spokesman had in mind is being considered within the Tendring District at this moment.

The owners of St Osyth Priory, a historic stately home in a picturesque and historic village had, to the villagers’ consternation, proposed the building of 200 homes on their land. They were to be part of a scheme needed to raise millions of pounds to restore the Estate. Even more recently that number has been doubled, increasing the number of proposed new houses to 400 This, say the villagers, would increase the number of homes in the village by 50 percent, totally altering the community’s character!

I was particularly interested in this proposed development because in 1974, in the immediate wake of the local government reorganisation of that year, Mr Colin Bellows, the then-new Tendring District Council’s Engineer and Surveyor and I, as Public Relations Officer had visited every town and parish council in the district to familiarise their members with the responsibilities of those local councils under the new Act of Parliament.

I spoke about the newly formed District Council, serving the whole of the Tendring Peninsula, and its relationship with parish and town councils. Mr Bellows explained the new planning laws. These for the first time gave such councils the power to examine and comment on the plans of any proposed new development in their area, before the Tendring Council, as Planning Authority, made its decision.

It was thirty-five years ago and there is only one of those meetings that remains in my memory. It was in the village hall in St. Osyth. An elderly parish councillor had stood up and expressed his regret that we had wasted our time coming to see them. ‘St. Osyth’, he said, ‘already has all the development that is needed and the parish council is opposed to any more whatsoever’.

It seems that that old gentleman’s spirit lives on today. An unofficial poll of local residents taken by the Save our St. Osyth Group after the earlier proposal to build just 200 new homes, revealed that 90 percent of villagers objected to the scheme. Now that the proposed number of homes has been doubled, I would expect there to be even more objectors.

I reckon that it would take a pretty hefty inducement to make that lot change their minds!

The Paradox of Life

The September issue of the Southern East Anglian Area Quakers’ newsletter contains quotations from ‘The Mahabharata’ on life’s paradoxes. Reality, the quotations insist, is composed of opposites. To assert the one is to assert its opposite as well.

Here are a few examples: The paradox of having is that the more one has the greater is one’s discontent. There is a paradox of limits – one becomes aware of one’s limits only by transgressing them; there is no known way by which one can know one’s own limits in advance and The paradox of the self is that without the other, the self would be inconceivable.

These made me remember some paradoxical thoughts on happiness that have developed in my mind over what is now a very long life.

Those who spend their lives seeking their own happiness are destined never to find it.

We realize how happy we have been only when we are happy no longer.

It is our happiest memories that are most likely to bring us to tears

Week 36.10 7th Sept. 2010

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Policy Options!

Probably you have never heard of ‘Policy Exchange’. They’re one of those mysterious ‘think tanks’ that spend their time considering Government future policy. When the Prime Minister or any other member of the Cabinet comes up as, often they do, with ‘a brilliant new idea’ to solve this that or the other national problem the chances are that the idea will have originated in one such ‘think tank’. I am told that Policy Exchange is very influential and close to the present coalition government.

I hope that I’m wrong about that, because to solve the national housing problem to which I referred a few weeks ago, they have come up with two of the most outrageous ideas that I have ever heard. Should these ideas ever became official policy I would expect the collapse of the government to follow. If Nick Clegg and his Lib.Dem. colleagues were prepared to endorse them, they could surely say farewell to any remaining shred of credibility.

Britain, so Policy Exchange rightly claims, needs many more affordable homes to house those who need them and to help bring down the prices of existing housing stock. They don’t, of course, suggest the repeal of 'right to buy' legislation and the encouragement of local authorities to build homes for letting. They believe that local authority reluctance to give planning permission for new homes in their areas is a major cause of the problem.

Their report suggests that the power to grant or refuse planning permission for the building of new housing estates should be withdrawn from the local authorities. Instead, it should be decided by referendum of the community where the development will take place – a simple majority of the vote deciding yes or no. Those with knowledge of these matters may find this an astonishing suggestion. Experience suggests that village communities are much more likely to refuse planning permission for new housing estates in their area, than a borough or district council whose members have to consider the interests of the entire district.

Policy Exchange has a brilliant idea though. They believe that such local resistance could be overcome by the offer of cash incentives to local people by the developer. ‘If a village decided to increase in size from 2,000 to 3,000 households there could easily be a £10,000 cash payment to every householder in the village!’

Alex Morton, the former civil servant who prepared the ‘Policy Exchange’ report, says that such payments shouldn’t be regarded as bribes – the money might perhaps be used to provide a park or similar amenity. Yes, I suppose that it might – and pigs might fly! Who needs a park in a rural village? If villagers are to be persuaded to vote against their natural instincts, they’ll each want their own bribe, cash-in-hand, at the close of poll!

I wonder if Mr Morton has considered the possibility of leaving matters as they are and bribing the existing councillors instead. That, I think might well prove more cost effective and wouldn’t be all that much more outrageous! Yes, I know it would be illegal as things stand. It would though, be a government-backed scheme – and hasn’t the government promised to sweep away pettifogging regulations that impede progress?

But that’s only the half of it!

Modestly, Policy Exchange doesn’t suggest that that one ‘big idea’ would solve all Britain’s Housing problems. They have another one – surely a real clincher!

Such houses as Councils still have left in their ownership should not, when they become available for letting, go to those in greatest need. They, for some reason, are not considered to be quite so needy, or perhaps not so deserving, as others. Any such tenancies should, first of all go to the severely disabled. That sounds fine – except that the severely disabled housing applicants whom, as Housing Manager, I have rehoused (I wonder if Mr Morton has ever actually met any?) wouldn’t consider it much of a privilege to have first call on the tenancy of a third storey flat, or a house with an upstairs bathroom!

When the severely disabled have been satisfactorily disposed of, tenancies should be allocated to those housing applicants who have been waiting the longest or who have the greatest local connections (I hope he means 'associations' and not 'influence'). There’s no mention of the local authorities that actually own these properties, having any say in this allocation. Perhaps, as part of the ‘power to the people’ that David Cameron is so keen on, all Council owned housing would, in the future, be controlled directly by central government.

Policy Exchange clearly thinks so because they also suggest that all Housing Association stock should be handed to the government and could then be sold off to tenants who wanted to buy. New houses would be built by issuing bonds to be repaid out of rent. This would enable 100,000 extra homes to be built and the Treasury would make £2.64 billion a year from house sales.

(Just imagine the, quite justifiable, outrage there would have been if it had been suggested that a Labour government might seize all privately owned tenanted homes – and use their rent to build new Council houses! ‘Neo-Stalinist snatch of our homes’ would have been among the more moderate headlines in the popular Press)

The present financial crisis was triggered by the folly and cupidity of leading bankers, first in the USA and later in the UK and elsewhere. There is a certain irony in the fact that among the victims of the proposed act of highway robbery would be the Peabody Housing Trust, which currently provides homes for some 50,000 Londoners. The Trust was founded in 1862 by George Peabody, an American Merchant Banker who settled in England and whose philanthropy, particularly in the field of public housing, earned him a burial in St. Paul’s Cathedral. I hope that the Cathedral’s foundations are sound, because he’ll be turning in his grave!

No, it hasn’t happened yet, and probably won’t happen. Surely Messrs Cameron and Clegg have sufficient sense - and integrity - not to pursue that course.. It is worrying though, to know that this is the kind of poisonous drivel that is being dripped into their ears!

A New (mini) Supermarket

I was sorry to see the closure and demolition of The Black Bull in Clacton’s St Osyth Road. It was my ‘local’. I had watched it being built, I had had an occasional meal there, either alone or with a companion or companions (at one time they did a very good lunch, with an adequate menu and very competitive prices). Occasionally too, I had strolled down there in the evening for a nightcap and a friendly chat. Such conversations had sometimes been the genesis of items in Tendring Topics (in print!) that I wrote for the Coastal Express for twenty-three years.

I would have thought that, with competent management and some professional publicity, it could have continued to serve the neighbourhood in which I live for many years.

However, it was not to be. I watched its conversion into a Tesco Express mini-supermarket without enthusiasm – though I had to concede that it seemed that an imaginative and attractive conversion was in progress, and the builders were certainly getting on with the job.

Well, as those who live in my neck of the woods know, it is now open. I paid my first visit there last week and must say, a little reluctantly perhaps, that I think it is going to be an asset to the neighbourhood. It is bright and welcoming, well-laid out inside and, considering its size, carries a very wide range of stock. Not, of course, such a wide range as Morrisons where I expect I shall continue to do my main shopping – but very useful for a quick foray, perhaps after normal closing hours or for items forgotten on the shopping list!

It has a ‘self-service’ check-out that I found a little daunting. However, a friendly assistant operated it for me and promised that, if I dropped in when they were a bit less busy, he would introduce me to its mysteries.

It is not far from my home and well within what was once my ‘walking distance’. Now though, I am glad to be able to park my mobility scooter (I like to think of it as 'tethering my iron horse') immediately outside its entrance. And, of course, it is ‘open all hours’. Not quite all – but 6.00 am till 11.00 p.m. should meet most people’s needs!

‘No new thing under the sun’

A few weeks ago the Government’s Housing Minister suggested, as his own brilliant new ideas, facilitating exchanges of tenancy between council tenants in different parts of the country and encouraging – or forcing – tenants to move into less roomy accommodation when their families grew up and left home. These measures, he thought, would reduce ‘waiting lists’ for council tenancies and generally help the housing situation.

I pointed out in this blog that in Clacton, and no doubt elsewhere, both those policies were pursued in the 1970s, though without either the element of compulsion, or the extra layer of bureaucracy involved in setting up a national exchange agency. My personal experience was, of course, BC (before computers) and thoroughly out of date. My idea of advertising a desire to exchange was limited to the local press and cards in tobacconist’s windows. Now, I am told, there has for some time been a web site with no other purpose. I didn’t know that. Nor, it seems, did the Housing Minister.

Staff of Public Libraries feel particularly vulnerable to Government cuts. Most of them have experienced a marked reduction in public use in recent years. Moreover they mainly serve leisure and cultural interests. We haven’t yet quite reached the state of mind of the late Air-Marshal Hermann Göring ‘When I hear the word “culture” I reach for my revolver’, but in the brave new economic world of the 21st century, activities that aren’t ‘wealth creative’ can hardly expect generous government support. And, of course, those that are, don’t need it!

We have a Culture Minister (in George Orwell’s 1984, there was probably a Minister of Freedom!) but I suspect that Ed Vaisey’s main job is to find ‘efficiency savings’ that will reduce spending on matters as non-creative as leisure and as ephemeral as culture. Recently I understand, he has been explaining how money can be saved by improving online library services. He has also been extolling ‘the scope for savings in reducing the number of library authorities through voluntary alliances’.

It might have been imagined that he had been inspired by just such a voluntary alliance as What’s in London Libraries? (WiLL) which had been running since 2003 in the London area. Using WiLL, readers were able to search, on line, the catalogues of all 33 London Boroughs' Public Library Services. Having located the book or books they wanted to borrow, they could do so through the inter-library loan service, thus saving both time and money.

If WiLL was Mr Vaizey’s inspiration it can be so no longer. The web site is no longer available. Queries to London Libraries, the body set up to create and run WiLL produce the following message: ‘Due to financial constraints WiLL has now been discontinued. To access individual authorities’ library catalogues please visit their respective websites’. Who, one wonders, imposed the financial restraints?

So much for encouraging voluntary alliances and on line services!