Week 3 2013

Tendring Topics....on Line

Helping to ‘Save the Planet’…….and make a profit!

            It isn’t all that often that the most responsible course of action, the course of action that ultimately benefits our fellow men and women, is also the most financially profitable one.  This has recently happened in Colchester though and is extremely satisfying to all who are concerned about the need to reduce and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and those who believe, as I do, in the value of local government.

            Two years ago, in 2011, Colchester Borough Council hired the Breyer Group to install photo-voltaic panels on 850 houses managed by Colchester Borough Homes, thus using the sun’s rays to generate electricity to power those homes and to feed any surplus back into the national grid.  I have little doubt that, at the time they faced – and faced down – criticism from Climate Change Deniers and those who are convinced that all attempts to use renewable sources of energy are devilish schemes dreamed up by ‘Brussels’ to impoverish us Brits and to line the pockets of ‘foreign’ investors.

            Now the scheme is bearing fruit and confounding its critics.  Tenants get between £100 and £150 off their electricity bills each year and Colchester Council gets a share of the tariff paid by the National Grid.   Councillor Paul Smith, the Council’s financial supremo, recently reported that he had received the first cheque from the Electricity Authority.   It was for the first three-quarters of 2012 and amounted to £60,000.  He believes that over the 25 year period of the contract, the scheme will net more than £2 million for the Council.

            Solar power is worth having.  My own very modest solar water heating system demonstrates that very effectively.  From March through to October, if there are between six and seven hours of sunshine, my single solar panel will supply all my hot water needs for the next twenty-four hours.  When there is less than that, and even during the winter months, an hour or two’s sunshine will preheat the water flowing into my boiler to 20 or 30 degrees, thus reducing the amount of gas needed to raise the temperature of the water in my storage cylinder to the required level.

Empowering Head Teachers

          The government encourages local schools to ‘cast off the fetters’ of the local education authority and become free schools or academies, deciding on their own curricula and purchasing their own text books, teaching aids and so on.  ‘They know what they want far better than some bureaucrat employed by the County Council does!’

            Quite so, but head teachers are skilled at teaching, not at buying equipment.  It is unreasonable to expect them to be also wise and responsible purchasers, able to spot the unreliable supplier and the glib but dodgy sales representative.  A month or so ago BBC’s Panorama tv programme featured head teachers who had been brought to nervous breakdown, resignation from their posts, and the verge of suicide because they had failed in a task for which they had never been trained and had allowed con men to sell them substandard equipment.    Typically they had been offered, and had paid for, computers for every pupil at what was ‘an offer they couldn’t refuse’ price only to find interminable delays in delivery, that they had bought substandard equipment that couldn’t be made to work or broke down soon after being delivered, or wasn’t sufficiently sturdy to stand up to use (and misuse) by exuberant pre-teenagers.

            The ‘pen-pushers at the County Hall’, with long experience of bulk purchase, would probably have been able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, the genuine from the phoney.  Those though, are not the skills imparted at Teachers’ Training Colleges.  Head Teachers can’t be expected to have them.

 

            Something of the sort seems to have happened just outside our area.  Honywood Community Science School, in Coggeshall, became an academy in May 2011 gaining independence – and an extra £200,000 added to its annual budget.  In October each of the 1,200 pupils was given a £400 iPad tablet.   There is no suggestion that these were in any way faulty but they were, by their nature, fragile.  Within a year 489 (40% of the total) had been damaged beyond repair and had to be replaced.

            Head Teacher Simon Mason told the Gazette that the high breakage rate had been due to inadequate protection cases and says that the number of broken iPads has fallen significantly since the cases were replaced. Presumably when he ordered the iPads in the first instance he had also chosen their cases?  He is reported as saying, ‘The tablet is integral to Honeywood’s focus on independent pupil-led learning.   Pupils are encouraged to find their own ways to learn and present their work, and the teacher’s role is to facilitate rather than direct’.

            Goodness, that’s impressive.  If I were a parent seeking a good secondary school for my offspring, those two sentences alone would be enough to persuade me to look elsewhere!

            Peter Inson, retired former headmaster living in East Mersea believes that giving gadgets to children free is an ill-advised idea.   The Gazette also reports him as saying, ‘I am not a technophobe, but I would be concerned about what pupils are using them for. An iPad gives them instant access to the internet’.

            Surely teachers, whether ‘head’ or assistant, are best engaged in doing what they are trained to do – teaching (even perhaps ‘directing’!) children and leave purchasing to those who can claim expertise in that field; ‘those bureaucrats at County Hall’ for instance.

What’s a job worth?

          That question is prompted by the news that members of the House of Commons have recently been asked to reveal, in guaranteed anonymity, what they feel their salaries ought to be.   A comfortable majority replied that they felt they deserved a 32 percent rise.

            This surely demonstrates, what some of us have suspected for some time, that members of parliament live in a different world from most of their constituents.  MPs currently receive an annual salary in excess of £65,000 a year and enjoy long holidays, generous expense allowances (even nowadays when it is much more difficult to fiddle them!) and quite a few worth-while perks; lots of free lunches and dinners for instance and, for those who nod, cheer and jeer ‘in the House’ at the right moments and troop dutifully into the division lobby when required, overseas trips to exciting and exotic places at the tax-payers’ expense.  Most of the rest of us, I think, would feel that they are doing quite nicely.

            A Conservative MP (but it could have just as easily been one from Labour or the Lib.Dems) when asked to comment on tv, declared that many MPs could earn twice as much outside parliament but gave it all up to serve poor suffering humanity.  He may have brought some of his tv viewers to tears with his portrayal of an MP’s wife explaining to the children on Christmas Eve that Santa Claus wouldn’t be visiting them this year because their daddy had nobly chosen to serve the community instead of concentrating on making more and even more money.

            I wonder that no-one has thought of relying on the market forces that rule most aspects of our lives these days, to determine the proper level of MPs salaries.   While there are at least two or three applicants on the short list for each vacancy that occurs (and many more hopeful applicants have been eliminated by the local political parties long before the election) salaries are obviously generous enough to attract them.   Now that we’re ‘all in this together’, cutting MPs and Ministers’ salaries and allowances might be among the hard and painful decisions that should be made.    So far, those who have made such decisions have had to endure very little personal hardship and even less pain.

The Danish Example

          If anyone had told me eighteen months ago that I would be hooked on a tv (BBC4) who-done-it with a sub-plot about the election of the Mayor of Copenhagen, with the leading actor a dour woman detective on the brink of middle age and with the dialogue in Danish but with English subtitles, I would have thought they were mad. If they went on to say that I would be at least equally captivated by a tv serial in the same  language about a Danish woman prime minister and her problems in holding together a fragile coalition while coping with her conscience and problems within her own family, I’d have really thought they should be sectioned!

            Yet I have been entranced by three series (I thought that the first was the best) of ‘The Killing’, featuring Sara Lund, the unsmiling cardigan-wearing Copenhagen woman detective, and am currently hooked on the second series of Borgen, in which likeable Birgitte Nyburg, Denmark’s fictional Prime Minister, struggles with her conscience, an unruly coalition government, and her family problems.   We have also had The Bridge in which a particularly gruesome murder which left the victim at the midpoint of the international bridge joining Denmark and Sweden, is solved by co-operation between Swedish aspergic woman detective Saga Noren and a male Danish detective from Copenhagen.  Although The Bridge held me, I couldn’t warm to Saga Noren as I had to Sara Lund!

            I wasn’r alone in my enthusiasm for these Scandinavian dramas.   Readers’ letters in the Radio Times and elsewhere in the national press make it clear that this enthusiasm is widespread throughout the UK particularly among viewers who have had a surfeit of inane quizzes, ‘reality’ programmes, cookery programmes, celebrity worship, and wealthy people seeking an ‘escape to the country’..

            These Danish offerings seem too to have an edge on most British crime and political dramas.  I have felt ‘at home’ among the characters and in the landscape.  It’s not surprising perhaps.  The Danish landscape is similar to that of Essex and Suffolk and most of us, particularly those who are natives of eastern England, certainly have Danish ancestors!  In Borgen, the political drama currently broadcast on Saturday evenings, there's a fragile coalition government struggling with its finances.  The fact that this (taking place against a background of power struggles and domestic upheaval) holds the attention and interest of viewers, is a tribute to the skill of the producers and script-writers.

            These tv dramas have aroused British public interest in the country that produced them and have inspired a number of feature articles on Denmark in the popular press. We were once, admittedly a thousand years ago, united.  Like us the Danes have a constitutional monarchy.  Like us they are members of the European Union but have their own currency and not the Euro.  There though the similarity ends.

            Whereas the UK has the widest gap between the very rich and the very poor of any developed and democratic European country, Denmark has already achieved what I (a voice crying in the wilderness!) have been advocating in this blog for several years; one of the narrowest gaps between rich and poor in the civilised world.  One article that I read commented with amazement that a Danish solicitor’s income is only twice that of his office cleaner.   And why should it be more than that – they have similar needs, both work hard at their particular task and while the solicitor’s work is interesting and challenging, that of the cleaner is tiring, boring and repetitive?.  The solicitor’s education and training took much longer than the cleaner’s but in Denmark university education is free (as it was in the UK before the advent of the Thatcher/Blair axis!) and there are generous grants for students.  In the UK it has been conceded that it is not unreasonable for the pay of the most senior positions in the public service to be limited to no more than ten times that of the most humble worker. That surely is still a ridiculously high differential -  but in the private sector the idea that there should be any such relationship whatsoever  produces outrage!

            Denmark has, by our standards, a very high rate of income tax but it seems that the Danes pay it happily, believing it is used in the national interest and not for such stupid, extravagant and totally counter-productive purposes as maintaining a fleet of nuclear submarines patrolling the high seas and failing to deter either terrorists or ‘rogue states’ from their nefarious activities.

            There’s a lot that our politicians and business men and women, as well as our tv programme producers, could learn from our Danish cousins and EU partners.  I wish that I thought there was the slightest chance of their being prepared to do so!

              

         

 

           

Week 6 2012 9.2.2012

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!

             

           

           

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