5th April 2015 (Easter Day!)

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Voices of the People?

            I am interested in politics. That’s why they’re a recurring topic in this blog.  But I’m not really interested in politicians’ speeches, and in interviews with politicians.     They’re all too often a masterly demonstration of how to avoid giving a straight answer to a straight question; ‘What we should really be asking ourselves is…………………’ and so on! Then again what, at the time, seemed to be a firm promise turns out to have been no more than an ‘aspiration’.  I’m much more interested in what they do than in what they say!

            Even as recently as a week ago if someone had told me that for two whole hours I would listen to politicians arguing with each other on tv, I’d have thought they must have confused me with someone else.  Yet that’s precisely what happened during the evening of Maundy Thursday, 2^nd April.  A debate took place on ITV between seven prominent politicians, each the leader of a political party with candidates in the General Election on 7^th May.   There was David Cameron, Conservative; Ed Miliband, Labour: Nick Clegg, Liberal; Nigel Farage, UKIP; Natalie Bennett, Green Party; Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish National Party; and Leanne Wood, Welsh National Party.

            I started to watch when the debate began at 8.00 pm, telling myself that I could always turn it off or switch to another channel if it became really boring.  But it didn’t and I watched till the end at 10.00 p.m. Mind you I was sitting in a very comfortable armchair with a generous double-scotch (well watered down!) at hand. I really think that the ITV authorities who organised the event, and the presenter, who kept the participants in order, deserve to be congratulated.  It could have developed into disorganised pandemonium and threatened to do so on a couple of occasions.  However the presenter was polite but firm and order prevailed.

             I suspect that watchers heard what they wanted to hear from the debate.  The headlines of at least one newspaper reported that David Cameron had clearly triumphed, while an immediate post-debate opinion poll commissioned by another newspaper indicated victory for Ed Miliband.   Personally, I thought that Cameron and Miliband trotted out all the predictable arguments that we have heard from them before.  Nick Clegg remains confident that Lib.Dems. will help either Labour or Conservatives to form a government and will steer that government’s actions towards the ‘middle ground’.  He could, of course, be right – but I doubt it.  Nick Clegg also took pride in the fact that the coalition government had raised the threshold of liability for income tax thereby, so he claimed, lifting thousands of people ‘out of the tax system altogether’.  That is simply untrue.  It has raised them out of the ‘income tax’ system but they still pay the indirect taxes and customs duties like VAT and duties on petrol, alcohol and tobacco that Conservatives much prefer.  It also perpetuates the myth that there is an under-class of non-taxpayers supported by tax-payers who have lifted themselves out of poverty by hard work and thrift.  I wonder how many of Britain’s thriving billionaires acquired their millions by their own ‘hard work and thrift’?   

            Nigel Farage was his usual obnoxious self, pouring scorn on the EU and suggesting that ‘Health Tourism’ is a serious problem and that a majority of folk diagnosed as HIV positive were immigrants.  Nick Clegg pointed out that not all foreigners in this country were malign.  Both he, and Nigel Farage, were married to ‘foreigners’!   Farage also claimed that all the other parties represented at the debate were the same, since they all supported EU membership. Only Ukip, he claimed, represented the will of the British people.  I continue to see in Nigel Farage’s progress parallels with the early political career of Adolf Hitler in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.  He too assured a disillusioned-with-politicians electorate that his Party (the NSDAP or Nazis) was ‘different’ – and so it was!   

            I was impressed with the three women representing the Green Party, the SNP and the Welsh Nationalists but am quite ready to concede that my judgement is largely founded on the fact that the policies they promoted are the ones that I believe are needed today.   The most impressive, confident and articulate was Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party.  She was the only debater who had the courage to refer to the UKs folly in its insistence on possession of nuclear weapons.  ‘The scarce resources of our country should be invested in the future of our children, not on new nuclear weapons’.  A comment on ‘I’ daily newspaper says that she gave an impressive performance and that ‘it is possible that some English voters watching might have been tempted to switch from Labour to SNP if the Party was standing outside Scotland’. I remarked in this blog a few weeks ago that Ms. Sturgeon was a worthy successor of Alex Salmond.  She certainly is! It is a pity that those three women party leaders with so much in common, didn’t get together to agree who was to say what at the debate!   Leanne Wood (Welsh Nationalist) and Natalie Bennett (Green Party) covered much the same ground as Nicola Sturgeon but less confidently and forcefully.  I’d have liked to have heard from Natalie Bennett rather more about the Green Party’s environmental policies – the importance of combating the effects of climate change world-wide; of finding and developing  clean and renewable sources of energy, and of urgently reducing our dependence on fossil fuels;  and, of course, of the utter folly of encouraging ‘fracking’.

            Voting in the General Election will be taking place the day before the 70^th anniversary of VE Day, the day on which in Europe World War II ended.   It comes as something of a shock to me to realize that you really have to be at least eightyish to remember anything at all about World War II, six years that were such an important part of my life..  On that fateful day in 1945 I was with a group of British prisoners of war being marched south-westward into Czechoslovakia, away from the inexorably approaching battle front.  Half-way through the morning our guards announced that they had heard on the radio that the war was over, and left us to our own devices.  We thereupon liberated ourselves – though with grateful thanks to the Soviet Red Army.  I walked through the front door of my home in Ipswich just ten days later – on 18^th May, which happened to be my 24^th birthday!

            I little thought on that day that seventy years later the world would be threatened by climate change; that Christians would be massacred in parts of Africa and the Middle East for no other reason than that they were Christian; that the Christian faith was in danger of being eradicated from the region that saw its birth; and that the world’s rulers believed that nuclear weapons, whose use could erase humanity, were needed to maintain a precarious world peace.  

Finally

Let's end this somewhat gloomy blog with a message of hope on an Easter Morning on which the daffodils in my garden announce that Spring is here.  Here is the traditional Easter salutation of the Universal Church of Christ and the response.

'Christ is risen - Alleluia!'    'He is risen indeed, Amen!'  

           

   

            

Week 9 2014

Tendring Topics......on Line

Spring is on the way!

            Yes, it really is.  Last Sunday (15^th February) here in ‘sunny Clacton’ we had sunshine from dawn till sunset.  It was a weak sun with barely enough heat in it to temper the chilly breeze.  Nevertheless, shining all day on the solar panel on the roof of my bungalow, it managed to raise the temperature of the water in my storage cylinder to sixty degrees Celcius, quite high enough to provide all my hot water needs for the next twenty-four hours!*  And it was only half-way through February and officially still ‘winter’.  Mind you, I still needed to have the boiler going for space heating from mid-afternoon!

`In Southern East Anglia at least, this chilly (but not really cold), very wet and very windy winter really does seem to be coming to an end.   I have daffodils naturalised under the long grass surrounding the eating-apple tree in my back garden.  They have been evident as green shoots for some weeks but yesterday some of them were in full bloom – and here they are.  Known in some parts of the country as ‘Easter lilies’, they are true harbingers of spring.

    

        Nor is it only in the garden that new life has been burgeoning.   On 1^st February I became a great-great uncle when my great-niece Catherine gave birth to a baby boy, Jay Luke Beard.  Here he is with his great-great uncle. Between us Jay and I span four generations and almost a century.  I was born in 1921, within the first quarter of the twentieth century, and Jay first saw the light of day in the first quarter of the twenty-first century – the second decade of the new millennium!

            Jay's life will undoubtedly be very different from mine, but whether better or worse - only time will tell!

*It did the same thing on Saturday 22nd February - we really do  get
more than the average amount of sunshine in Clacton-on-Sea!

           

 

 ‘A Plague on both your Houses’

          Three paragraphs in the latest issue of Private Eye explain why I have no confidence whatsoever in either of the political parties likely to form a government after the next General Election:

            No matter how loudly Ed Miliband proclaims that “those with the broadest backs should bear the greatest burden” the party has no plans for some of those with the deepest pockets to do their bit.

            These are the non-domiciled elite who claim allegiance to somewhere abroad while remaining resident in the UK (often, as in the case of Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere*, for their whole life) and pay the not exactly burden-sharing rate of, er, 0 percent of offshore earnings if they can find an easy way of getting them back into the UK (which they easily do).

            At this stage before the 1997 election, even in the midst of a City charm offensive, New Labour promised to end the non-dom tax break.   That was before, in office, the Party back-tracked as non-doms such as Lakshmi Mittal and private equity broncho Sir Ronald Cohen bankrolled it through subsequent elections with seven-figure donations.  Such plutocrats can look forward to tax haven Britain not loading much on their shoulders, whoever wins in 2015. 

            I really don’t want the United Kingdom to have the very best government that money can buy!

           I am disillusioned with both the Conservative and the Labour Parties and I am sure that I am one of thousands who feel the same.  Nor am I alone in feeling betrayed by Nick Clegg after having voted Lib-Dem. in the last General Election.  The danger is that some – perhaps many – voters, disillusioned with the traditional parties, will vote for UKIP.   Nigel Farage, the Party Leader, wants to sweep away party politics and put Britain first – and what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that thousands of Germans thought in much the same way about Hitler in the 1930s.  The fact that, unlike  Adolf Hitler, Nigel Farage is a socially likeable chap who enjoys a drink and a smoke  possibly makes him all the more dangerous.

               Me? I shall definitely vote Green in the European Parliamentary Elections later this year.   That election is being held by proportional representation and every vote really will count.  If I’m still around for the General Election I’d like to vote Green again, but under our first-past-the-post electoral system a Green vote is likely to be a wasted vote.  Our present Conservative MP’s views are virtually indistinguishable from those of UKIP so I shall probably vote for whoever is most likely to defeat him unless, of course, his most dangerous rival is the UKIP candidate! I think it likely though that the local Ukippers will consider Mr Carswell to be ‘one of us’ and won’t oppose him.

* I had always thought (when I gave any thought at all to the matter) that Lord Rothermere was as British as the Union Jack. Intrigued by the comment in parenthesis in the second paragraph of the Private Eye article, I consulted Google and found that that his father had lived in France and had taken up French nationality. The present Lord Rothermere has inherited the nationality as well as his title and the Daily Mail.

The Expert

‘The bloated and bureaucratic’ Common Agricultural Policy, that hands out over a billion pounds every year to Europe’s farmers and land owners, is a favourite target of such Europhobic dailies as the Sun, Express and Mail. Who am I, knowing virtually nothing about farming and rural estate management to say whether or not these payments are justified?  I was though interested to learn from Private Eye that an increasingly large share of that billion-plus subsidy is paid not for agricultural production but to land-owners who improve the environment or diversify the local economy by providing and overseeing rural activities.

Private Eye records that the Langwell Estate near Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands has attracted £248,000 (nearly a quarter of a million pounds) in such subsidies.  It offers grouse shooting, deer stalking and other similar activities and rents lodges for £4,250 a week during the high season - a sum larger than the total that my family and I spent on half a dozen annual camping holidays in the Scottish Highlands, the Welsh Mountains and mainland Europe!

I was astonished to learn, again from Private Eye, that the owner of the Langwell Estate is Paul Dacre editor of the Daily Mail.  I have to concede that when leading articles in the Daily Mail rage against the huge handouts of ‘our money’ made by the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels who operate the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, the author – quite unlike me – undeniably has direct personal knowledge of his subject.

NHS National Database

          Every household in the country is supposed to have had an official leaflet delivered to them explaining that a national NHS database is being prepared, giving the medical details of each of us held on the computer files of every medical practice nationwide. It also said that we could ‘opt out’ of the scheme if we wished, and told us how to do so.  The scheme had been supposed to come into operation this April but as thousands of people claim that they have never received the leaflet and knew nothing about the database, the launch has been put back to the autumn.

            I do remember receiving the leaflet.  I glanced at it briefly and it occurred to me that there might be some people with medical conditions that they didn’t want to be made available for instance, to friends or relatives, to employers, or to an insurance company. That didn’t apply to me. At 92 no-one is going to offer me life insurance and my afflictions are boringly common – high blood pressure, osteo-arthritis, failing strength, vision and hearing, and other conditions of old age.  I really don't care who knows about them and I didn’t for one moment seriously consider ‘opting out’.

            I think it likely that a great many people who honestly don’t remember receiving the leaflet, did in fact do so, but just thought it was a piece of the junk mail that we all receive every day (special offers at local supermarkets, begging letters from worthy charities, catalogues from mail order firms and leaflets from local entrepreneurs eager to clean windows, tidy up the garden or clean out the roof gutters) I’m sure I’m not alone in consigning most of them  the recycling bin with no more than a cursory glance. It was pure chance that made me decide to read right through the NHS leaflet when it arrived.

Week 13.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘The Year’s at the Spring….

…………and the day’s at the morn.
The lark’s on the wing, and the snail’s on the thorn.
Morning’s at seven, the hillside’s dew-pearled.
God’s in his Heaven; all’s right with the World’

So sang Pippa, in Browning’s poem ‘Pippa Passes’, on a very similar morning and at much the same time as that on which I am typing these words. It would be a gross exaggeration to suggest that all is right with today’s world, and I hope and believe that God isn’t confined to ‘his Heaven’ but is also present and active in his Creation.

Otherwise, I fully endorse Pippa’s sentiments. Even a world-weary old man like me feels a lift in his heart on such a morning, especially when looking out of the kitchen window I see the daffodils, golden in the early sunshine, blooming round the apple tree in my garden. Mind you the scene also brings back memories of the many, many similar spring mornings on which I looked out of that window at those same golden daffodils with Heather, my wife for sixty years, who is sadly no longer with me.

Wind-farm Progress

On recent visits to Clacton both my sons and daughters-in-law have driven along the sea front to see any signs of the developing wind-farm. There hasn’t really been a great deal to be seen. Some kind of structure was just visible and one or more craft near it were the only evidence that anything was taking place.

All that is due to change within the next few weeks. The Danish construction company’s heavy lift ship Titan 2 is getting ready for service at Harwich and will very shortly sail out to the Gunfleet Sands to erect the first turbine. Six of these have already arrived from Denmark and are to be erected on the foundations that have been prepared for them during the past six months.

The turbines will be commissioned in phases as they are erected and the electric cables between each turbine and the off-shore substation laid. It is expected that the first group will be fully operational before the end of the summer. The work of installation will continue until its completion some time next year. When the wind-farm is complete it is expected that it will generate 172 megawatts, enough electricity to meet the needs of 120,000 homes ….the equivalent of 90 percent of the homes in Colchester and the Tendring District.

Solar Heating Progress

It is good to see a ‘green’ project being pursued with vigour and, despite the vagaries of wind and weather, adhering to a timetable laid down many months ago.

I wish that I could feel quite the same of progress toward the installation of a solar powered water heating system for my bungalow, which should reduce markedly my own dependence upon gas for water heating (but see Late News on the Solar Front at the end of this item) It got off to a splendid start. Little more than a week after I had made my first tentative enquiry Sunmaster Solar Energy Systems’ surveyor had inspected my bungalow, made notes of my bungalow’s requirements and had confirmed my own belief that the solar heating installation would prove to be a pretty straight-forward job. Scarcely more than a week after that I had a phone call to inform me that the next day would see the fitting of the solar heating panels on my roof. This would be followed by a date on which the internal plumbing alterations and the connection of the solar heating system to the existing hot water supply system would take place.

Exactly as promised two very pleasant young men arrived with their van and did the necessary work on the roof of my bungalow quickly and efficiently. They fitted two solar panels, together with two much smaller panels one on each side of them. The purpose of these (photo-electric cells?) is to drive the pump that will circulate the antifreeze solution through the two solar panels and thence through my hot water system. The system will thus operate independently of the bungalow’s electricity supply.

The solar panels go up on my roof

The two young men told me that the remainder of the operation was usually carried out about a week after their visit. They advised me to phone Sunmaster Solar Energy Systems if I hadn’t heard from them by that time.

The roof job completed. To the left of the solar panels you can see the photo-electric cell operating the pump. My mobility scooter ('iron horse') complete with all-weather canopy, is in the foreground.

I didn’t hear from them and on 17th March I phoned as advised and asked when the job would be completed. The reply was unsettling. There was a component needed for my particular hot water system that they hadn’t yet been able to get hold of. They weren’t yet able to tell me when they’d be able to complete the job. Yes, they thought that it would be before Easter ….but couldn’t give a firm promise.

The claim that my system needed some unique component didn’t accord either with the assurance of the firm’s own surveyor that it would be a perfectly straightforward job, or with my own assessment of the situation.

It is a week later, and I have just phoned the firm again. This time I did at least learn which component it is that they're waiting for...........and it now makes sense. When the system is in operation water will be heated by the sun's radiation in a series of copper tubes within the glass-fronted solar panels on the roof. These will be connected to heat exchanging tubes within a heavily insulated copper cylinder in my roof space, thus heating the water in that cylinder.

The cold water supply to the hot water system will be connected to this cylinder instead of to the main storage cylinder below and a connecting pipe from the upper cylinder to the main one below will take its place. Thus all water flowing into the main storage cylinder will be pre-heated from the upper solar heated cylinder. In the winter it will supplement the boiler as a source of heat for hot water supply. In the summer it may well replace it altogether.

The missing component is, in fact, the special upper cylinder to be heated by the solar panels.

This is, of course, absolutely vital to the system and I am persuaded that the installers are doing their best to expedite its delivery. I shall just have to be patient. Sadly, I fear that those who know me best would not include patience among my most conspicuous characteristics!

Late News on the Solar Front!

I won't need to exercise my limited supply of patience after all. I wrote the above this morning (24th March) and at 3.45 p.m. this afternoon I received a phone call to say that the special cylinder had now arrived and that they would be calling on me tomorrow morning between 9.00 a.m. and 11.00 a.m., to complete the installation! I am more than pleased and hope that next week I'll be able to give you a glowing report of the system's installation and early functioning.

Golden (and diamond-studded!) Handshakes

When I referred a few weeks to Sir Fred Goodwin’s walking away from the ruins of the Royal Bank of Scotland, at the age of fifty, with a pension of nearly three quarters of a million pounds a year I really didn’t think that that was the last we would hear of the matter. Surely, I thought, either he will see the reason for the public outrage and relinquish at least part of that enormous pension, or the government will find some way of relieving him of it.

Well, I was right about our not having heard the last of the matter but quite wrong about Sir Fred losing any part of his pension either compulsorily or voluntarily. The latest news that we have heard about this sorry affair is that in addition to his almost three quarters of a million a year pension (well over £1,500 a day!!), he has received a lump sum payment of £3 million!

It certainly pays to be a top person! I have little doubt that if the irresponsibility or incompetence of any junior or middle ranking employees of the RBS had cost the bank even a few thousand pounds, they wouldn’t have been encouraged, urged or even bullied into resigning or taking early retirement. They’d have been summarily sacked!

Town Hall Jargon

I was both interested and pleased to see that the Local Government Association is campaigning to ban the use of ‘Town Hall jargon’ by local government officials. I hate it myself and hope that I never used it when I was a local government official. Words and phrases guaranteed to set my teeth on edge were ‘monies’ (instead of money), ‘human resources’ (instead of employees), ‘interface’, ‘multidisciplinary’, ‘scenario’ and ‘proactive’.

I also disliked people being asked on official forms not for their ‘sex’ but their ‘gender’. These days sexually explicit words that a generation or two ago would have resulted in the user being barred from any reputable pub, are heard daily on tv. Can we at the same time possibly have reached a stage in which ‘sex’ in its proper sense, ‘that which differentiates males from females’, has become a rude three-letter word that mustn’t on any account be used on official forms?

Among the Local Government Association’s pet hates are ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘can do culture’, ‘performance network’ and ‘lowlights’. Like me, they also include ‘interface’ among their dislikes.
‘Lowlights’, I have to say, is a word that I had never previously encountered. As the opposite of ‘highlights’ I can see that it could be quite effective. I can imagine myself using it sometime. Of the other phrases I share the LGA’s feelings but, like many of my own dislikes, I don’t think of them as being exclusively Town Hall jargon. Apart from ‘interface’ I heard none of them during my local government career and think that council officials who use them are imitating the go-ahead young men of the private sector. I can imagine them being part of the small-talk in an advertising agency, an insurance office or among ambitious young salesmen.

The late Sir John Betjeman lampooned this ‘new-speak’ in his poem The Executive, which clearly wasn’t referring to a Council official:

You ask me what it is I do. Well actually, you know
I’m partly a liaison man and partly PRO.
Essentially I integrate the current export drive
And basically I’m viable from ten o’clock till five

For vital off-the-record work (that’s talking transport-wise)
I’ve a scarlet Aston-Martin …and does she go? She flies!…….

……..and so on, in Sir John’s own special style.

A leading article in the Daily Gazette (recently the Coast Gazette and earlier the Evening Gazette) applauds the Local Government Association’s campaign. Dwellers in glass houses really should think twice though before throwing stones. It isn’t for nothing that sloppy, inaccurate and exaggerated writing is called journalese!

Post Office Local Banks?

‘What do Post Offices know about banking?’ asked a Radio 4 listener scornfully, at the suggestion that Post Offices might serve a useful role as local banks. ‘Quite a lot’, would have been my answer.

My current account has, for over half a century, been with the Co-op Bank. The nearest branch is in Colchester. However from my local (or any) Post Office I can with my debit card, draw up to £200 cash from my account at any time. I can also pay cheques into my account there and, when paying a visit to mainland Europe, can change my pounds sterling into Euros. Unspent Euros can be changed back again into pounds on my return.

Last year when I made such a trip I returned with forty Polish Zlotys and sixty Czech Krone in my wallet. My local post office couldn’t help but Clacton’s main post office in High Street instantly changed them back into pounds and pence.

The Post Office also manages savings accounts and insurances. Those, with the others I have mentioned, are I think something like three quarters of the services that ordinary people expect from a bank.

If some or all of the other services that we may seek in commercial banks were available from Post Offices, I would be very surprised if they failed to provide them at least as efficiently (and probably a lot less expensively!) than did those who have landed us in our current economic crisis.

‘A host of golden daffodils!’

These daffodils, possibly because they are on the north side of the church, are less advanced than those shown at the beginning of this blog. But this enormous host of ‘Easter Lilies’ will be a spectacular sight by the time the members of the congregation of St. James’ Church, Clacton gather for worship and thanksgiving on Easter morning! ‘Fluttering and dancing in the breeze,’ they will surely rival those in the Lake District that delighted and inspired William Wordsworth some two hundred years ago.