24 January 2015

Tendring Topics………on line

Keeping things ‘in proportion’

          I am not one of Lord Mendelson’s greatest admirers.  He was one of the creators of New Labour which, to win elections, surrendered the Labour Party’s soul and converted British politics into a pale imitation of the politics of the USA. There is precious little difference between the objectives of the two main parties.   They only differ in how best to achieve them.  In office Tony Blair, Lord Mendelson’s friend and political colleague, continued the process begun by Mrs Thatcher of turning the UK into a Prime Ministerial dictatorship.

            However, I am inclined to be on Lord Mendelson’s side in his current disagreement with Ed Miliband and his shadow Chancellor Ed Balls.   It is, I think, shameful that multi-millionaires in this country are likely to pay a much smaller proportion of their income in taxation than those whose income is so low that they pay no income tax at all, but do have to pay the government every time they buy an object or service that is subject to VAT or purchase something that is subject to customs duty, like a packet of cigarettes or a pint at a pub.  Multi-millionaires also, of course, pay a much smaller proportion of their income in taxation than do those mythical beings who David Cameron always claims he is eager to help – average hardworking wage earners who pay income tax and, of course, the indirect taxes and custom duties that this government prefers

Ed Miliband’s mansion tax may not be intended to be a one-off tax to help the NHS – or any other good cause – out of its current crisis, by taking a few hundred thousand pounds from the bank accounts of the super-wealthy, but that’s how it sounds.  I think that the government should be fair to both the wealthy and the poor by claiming an equal percentage of the gross income of all of us to fund public services.   The obvious way to do this is by means of the income tax system, the only tax that is linked to ability to pay.  I think we should consider it not as an imposition but as a privilege to pay our annual subscription towards the not-inconsiderable benefits of being a British Citizen, or towards our permission to live and work within the UK.  We would then all have an equal stake in the prosperity or economic failure of our country.  We really would be all in this together!

            Income tax is the obvious means that a government could use to level the economic playing field but another way that would help to do this would be – as Lord Mendelson suggests – adding additional tax bands to the Council Tax system.

            Blog readers past the first flush of youth will recall the ‘bad old days’ in which local authorities, County, Borough and District Councils raised part of their income by means of ‘the domestic rates’.  These were an annual charge on each dwelling within the district.  Nobody enjoyed paying them but they were based on the estimated rental value of the property. They therefore had at least a rough relationship to the income of the occupier of the occupier or occupiers

Mrs Thatcher’s government changed all that.  Instead of the rates we were to have a ‘community charge’ (almost instantly rebranded ‘the poll tax’) which taxed each individual equally regardless of whether that individual was a millionaire or a refuse collector.  It took no account whatsoever of ability to pay. The rating system may have been disliked but the poll tax was actually hated.   It was just such a tax that had provoked the medieval ‘peasants revolt’.  In the late twentieth century it produced wide-spread demonstrations, riots and the eventual fall of the Thatcher government.     

The Poll Tax was replaced by the ‘Council Tax’. This is based on the estimated purchase value of the property and therefore makes a pretence of bearing some relationship to the income or wealth of the householder.  Properties are classified as being in one of eight ‘tax bands’, the lowest of which is under £40,000 and the highest £320,000 and above.  A glance will make it clear that those bands are hopelessly out of date.   I suppose for £40,000 you might, just possibly, get some kind of a shack in an area like the Brooklands Estate, Jaywick  just a couple of miles from my home – but that estate has been declared to be the most deprived area in the UK!

At the other end of the tax bands the situation is even more ridiculous.  The highest tax band for Council Tax is £320,000 and above. I agree that in the Clacton area you would get a very nice property for £320,000 – but not in many other parts of the UK

Do you ever watch ‘Escape to the Country’ ­on BBC tv.   Briefly it’s about very fortunate (and often very hard working and gifted) folk who have made a fortune in London, or Manchester or Sheffield or wherever and are now seeking a residence ‘in the country’.  A BBC presenter introduces them to three or four ‘desirable residences’ in the area of their choice.   It’s not a programme I like to watch.   I have spent too much of my professional life trying to help people who are homeless, or overcrowded or living in squalid conditions, to enjoy seeing well-heeled folk looking over a luxurious home and complaining that ‘the view isn’t quite what we’d hoped for’ or ‘the paddock isn’t really big enough for Rosalie (their spoilt brat!) to exercise the pony we’ve given her for her birthday’.

It’s very unusual for one of those very comfortable and very desirable homes ‘in the country’ to change hands for as little as £320,000.   That sum would probably buy a roomy three bedroom home in one of London’s more pleasant suburbs.  That means that an executive officer of a biggish enterprise or a middle-grade civil servant, living in a comfortable but hardly palatial home in Cheam or Twickenham would pay exactly the same Council Tax as the owner of a ‘Downton Abbey’ or similar stately home or family mansion.

There should be at least three higher tax bands, ending at homes valued at £2 million pounds or more, to bring something like fairness to the Council Tax system. The Council Tax bands, like the income tax system, need urgent reconstruction to make sure that those who have done best from our market economy should pay at least as big a proportion of their wealth in tax as those who have been less fortunate.

A trusted ally – or a ‘pariah state’?

In recent months I have been quite proud of the fact that I am a member of the Church of England as well as of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).   I welcomed the Church’s decision to ordain women as Bishops as well as Priests.   I have applauded the Archbishop of Canterbury’s campaign to replace ‘pay day lenders’ with local ‘credit unions’ and his criticism of economic policies that have led to the proliferation of Food Banks throughout the UK.

That enthusiasm suffered a severe blow this (23^rd January) afternoon when I learned that, to comply with government guidelines, the authorities of Westminster Abbey would be flying our national flag at half-mast in mourning for the King of Saudi Arabia.  It suffered a further blow with the news that the Prince of Wales (a future ‘Defender of the Faith’) together with our Prime Minister were to fly to Saudi Arabia to express their condolences.  I suppose that the Prince is aware that any expression of the Faith that he will pledge himself to defend is strictly forbidden in Saudi Arabia and that any Muslim in that country who converts to Christianity is likely to be executed!

Saudi Arabia’s disregard for democracy and human rights makes North Korea seem like a liberal Paradise!  Torture is routinely practised in Saudi gaols and public executions, amputations and floggings are daily occurrences.  The case of a blogger who considered the possibility that Saudi Arabia might become a secular state and who is being publicly flogged with fifty lashes every Friday until, if he survives long enough, he has received a total of 1,000 lashes, has recently made the press headlines.  Women in Saudi-Arabia are said to be much more free than they were a decade or so ago – but they are still forbidden to drive cars or leave their homes without a male escort (husband, father or brother).

Most of those involved in the 9/11 outrages in New York were Saudis.  Saudi Arabia is the home of the noxious fundamentalist Islamic faith that IS (the Islamic State) is trying to impose in Syria and Iraq and that Boko Haram is imposing, even more blood-thirstily, in sub-Saharan Africa. Donations from oil-rich Saudi millionaires financed IS during its early days. They possibly still do so.

Do we really need oil (and arms sales) so badly that we are prepared to befriend a state whose philosophy is the exact opposite of the British values that David Cameron and his colleagues are so eager to propagate?

   

Week 38 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Thoughts on an anniversary

            I am typing these words on the twelfth Anniversary of the ‘9/11’ terrorist attack on the ‘Twin Towers’ of New York, a terrorist attack that was one of the pretexts for the invasion of Iraq and the reason for the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. I consulted ‘Google’ to check my memories of the event (I remember that when we first switched on the tv during the afternoon of 11^th September 2001 my wife and I imagined we were watching a preview of a sci.fi. disaster movie!)

            I did learn from Google that the CIA had published the names and nationalities of nineteen terrorists who had played leading roles in the outrage.  They were all members of Al Qaeda  To my surprise I found that fifteen of them were from Saudi-Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon.  There was not a single terrorist from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or Syria.   Yet those are supposed to be the ‘rogue states’ that harbour and encourage terrorists and must be brought to heel by the ‘free world’, while Saudi-Arabia and the U.A.E. are trusted allies.

 Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E are the main supporters and suppliers of arms to the rebel forces trying to topple the present Assad government in Syria.  They are now expressing their anger and dismay at the fact that the USA has at least postponed its  punitive missile attacks on the Syrian government while it pursues the possibility of that government handing over its store of chemical weapons to the ‘international community’. Prominent among those rebel forces in Syria is Al Qaeda, the organisation that undoubtedly was responsible for 9/11.  We, the Americans and the French are currently giving them moral support and helping to supply them with all their needs short of actual weaponry!

            The British and American governments are said to have ‘compelling evidence’ that the Assad government was responsible for the chemical attack that undoubtedly killed a very large number of Syrian civilians a fortnight ago.  We haven’t yet  been allowed to see that ‘compelling evidence’.  Is it, I wonder, as irrefutable as the evidence for Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction that lured us into the invasion of Iraq?

 Intelligence Services are made up of fallible humans, with human strengths and human weaknesses. They receive and analyse scores of often-contradictory reports daily.  It would be surprising if they didn’t emphasise the importance of evidence that their political paymasters want to hear, and minimise or discard that which they don’t.  Evidence from Saudi Arabia is very likely to be biased against the Assad Government. Assad is the wrong sort of Muslim! So, I fear is evidence from Mossad, Israel’s secret service.   We know that Israel doesn’t like the present Syrian government, if only because of its ties of friendship with Iran.  We also know that Mossad is utterly ruthless in defence of what it considers to be Israel’s interests.  It has carried out assassinations, kidnappings and forgery (of British Passports, for example, to make it possible for assassins to get closer to their target).   I do not think that, if they considered it to be in Israel’s interest, they’d have any problem with bearing false witness.

            I hope that the current initiative for peace does succeed.  I wonder if the prayers of millions of people world-wide inspired by the Pope’s appeal to all  humanity have been heard – and answered.  I think that armed interference by foreigners like ourselves on behalf of either side can only add to the death and destruction.

            What is needed is for all foreign fighters, on both sides, to go back to their homelands.  Then, free of foreign interference, for the Syrians on both side of the conflict to lay down their arms and get on with the task of rebuilding their lives and their shattered country.   I am quite sure that they would receive generous help in doing so from well-wishing, peace-loving, folk world-wide. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers…..’

Pots and Kettles!

            I am sometimes embarrassed by the patronising ‘holier than thou’ attitude of our top politicians and those of the USA with regard to the sins of other governments. We don’t mistreat prisoners of war, bomb harmless civilians, threaten others with nuclear weapons and so on – and on.   All fine – until we are stopped in our tracks by allegations of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers, the torture and killing of terrorist suspects during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya and, going back a little, the blanket fire raids on civilian centres like Dresden in World War II.  Going back even further it comes as something of a shock to learn that it was  neither Hitler nor Stalin but we Brits. who invented Concentration Camps.  The very first of these was built by the British for the confinement of Boer Families during the South African War

         When we hear politicians on both sides of the Atlantic threatening dire consequences if this, that or the other regime manages to acquire a nuclear weapon, it is worth remembering that the only country that has ever used these dreadful weapons to kill fellow human beings (men, women and children 'in one red burial blent') was the USA when, with full British approval, they dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945!  

.      I am amazed that the Americans have the gall to lecture others on the wickedness of Chemical Weapons when there are something like half a million Vietnamese children with serious physical or mental defects as a result of the use by the USA of Agent Orange as a defoliant during the Vietnam War. About three million were affected altogether.

       The reason why some 20 million gallons of  herbicides and defoliants were poured onto the forests of Vietnam was not primarily to kill or maim little children but to get rid of the trees and bushes that provided cover for the Vietcong – but kill and maim the  innocent they certainly did.  It was, at the very best, recklessly irresponsible.  In 2010 a joint U.S.A /Vietnam Commission recommended .that the U.S. should pay $300 million in compensation for the victims and towards the repair of the ecosystem. To date the USA has paid nothing.

Then, of course, there was the use of Napalm, a particularly unpleasant chemical weapon – a burning gel that adheres to the body or clothes of its victims causing intense agony and death.  One of the most striking news pictures of that dreadful war was of the little nine year old girl who had torn off her burning clothing and was running naked with other refugees from a Vietnamese village concealed by smoke and consumed by flame..   A South Vietnam Air Force plane had committed  that particular war crime – but their US allies had supplied the Napalm, and had used it themselves often enough in Vietnam..

That naked and terrified little girl, although badly burnt, survived and currently lives in Canada.   Here is a message that she sends to all humankind.  If only we all heeded it!

‘Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days but my heart is cleansed. Napalm is very powerful, but faith, forgiveness, and love are much more powerful. We would not have war at all if everyone could learn how to live with true love, hope, and forgiveness. If that little girl in the picture can do it, ask yourself: Can you?’ 

Well, can you?

Clacton Quakers

The interior, Clacton Quaker Meeting House

     Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a Quaker (a member of the Religious Society of Friends).  My wife Heather and I joined the Quakers in Ipswich in 1948 and became members of Clacton-on-Sea  Quaker Meeting in 1955 when we moved to this area.   We celebrated and gave thanks for our silver, ruby, golden and diamond wedding anniversaries in the Clacton Quaker Meeting House, and the Meeting House was full when we gave thanks for Heather's life at a Memorial Meeting for Worship there on 30th July 2006.

Our golden wedding celebration 1996

       I still try to get to our Sunday morning Quaker Meeting for Worship every week.

       We Clacton Quakers now have our own web site.  If you'd like to know more about the faith that inspires me to write 'Tendring Topics....on line' each week, click onto www.quaker.org.uk (that's the official national Quaker website) but if you'd like to know more about the Quaker Meeting of which I have been a member for over half a century click onto www.clactonquakers.org.