30th March 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘There’s no point in voting – they’re really all the same!’

          That’s one of the standard reasons given by those who can’t be bothered to vote in Parliamentary Elections.   The really sad thing is that they’re not far out.  In times gone by – certainly before World War II and I think for some time afterwards, political parties had a clearly defined purpose and we all had a pretty good idea of their ultimate aims. Leaders and members of the Conservative Party, as their name suggests, thought that the social order in our country and the way that industry and commerce performed were pretty well OK.  Conservatives agreed that some things might need a slight tweak here or there, but generally speaking they felt that history had come to an end and that we Brits were currently living in the best of all possible worlds.

            The Labour Party on the other hand, believed that there was a great deal wrong with our present social and economic system and wanted to change it.  They were influenced by the great reformers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, by Christian concern for the poor and disadvantaged (‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek..........He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich he hath sent empty away) and to some extent by the revolutionary ideas of such thinkers as Marx and Engels.  They thought it possible that they could, by democratic means, create an earthly Paradise – fulfilling William Blake’s prophecy in his great poem Jerusalem ‘I shall not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till I have built Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant land’

            The Liberal Party, originally the Party of the rulers of industry and commerce in conflict with the land-owning gentry of the Conservative Party, sat uneasily between Conservative and Labour, declining in power and influence throughout the twentieth century, though enjoying a temporary popularity at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Love them or hate them, the three parties were quite clear in their objectives and those who had votes (it wasn’t till well after the end of World War I that there was universal adult suffrage, and eighteen year olds didn’t get a vote until after World War II) knew exactly why they voted for the party of their choice.

Now, thanks largely to Tony Blair and his New Labour, all that has changed. All main political Parties now support the Market economy in which everything and everybody has cash value.  Job satisfaction – enjoyed by many thousands (including myself) in the past – has been replaced by a struggle for personal wealth in which everyone grabs as much as he or she can demand for as little as they can get away with.  Leading New Labourites like Lord Mendelson declare that they ‘have no problem with billionaires’; well (while thousands of their fellow Britons are homeless and reliant on voluntary food banks to keep their families fed) they should have problems with billionaires.

            Both Parties accept that top bankers must be paid in millions a year, plus more millions as bonuses – because ‘that’s the only way we can attract the very best brains’ to make Britain great again.  Those ‘best brains’ who demand and receive millions of pounds for their services are the very people who, as was repeatedly affirmed by the recently retired Governor of the Bank of England, caused the current financial crisis.  They were also responsible, if only by default, for the banking scandals that have made the press headlines in recent years.;  miss-selling of insurance (for which the banks have had to pay millions of pounds in compensation),  fiddling interest rates and assisting very wealthy clients to become even richer by tax avoidance.   If those are the kind of things that result from appointing (at enormous expense)  the very best brains to head our banks, perhaps we should find out what the ‘second-best’ brains can do.  At the very least they’d come a bit cheaper – and might not be quite so good at feathering their own nests!

            George Osborne is already set to impose further austerities on a long suffering public sector.  He says that he only proposes to impose the same economies this year as he did last year.  He will be imposing them on already sadly depleted services.  Does he really imagine that if you empty half the water from a bucket one year, you can pour out the same volume of water from that same bucket the next year without emptying it?

So far the competing political parties have been much more eager to denigrate their opponents than to tell us what they themselves propose to do to solve Britain’s problems.  The Conservatives promise more of the same medicine and warn us that electing a Labour Government will create chaos. The New Labourites point out that the Tories are already wrecking the NHS and will probably try to solve its problems by mass privatisation.  Well, my medical practitioner (family doctor) service is certainly not as good as it was when the coalition took over government and the government’s bungled reforms have without doubt played a part in this deterioration.  Now they are proposing that pharmacists should take on some of the tasks previously undertaken by doctors.  That has the potential of creating long queues waiting for service in pharmacies as well as in doctors’ waiting rooms.

              For many years the British government’s annual expenditure has exceeded its annual income resulting in a ‘deficit’ that is filled by borrowing.  Central Government’s strategy must be the reduction, and eventually the elimination, of that deficit.  There are two ways in which this can be done; by reducing expenditure and by increasing income.

            Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats have all chosen the path of reducing expenditure – not on obviously wasteful practices like maintaining a wildly expensive ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ which is neither independent nor an effective deterrent, maintaining an ‘armed presence’ in the Middle East, and unquestioningly  supporting the USA in such military adventures as the invasion of Iraq and of Afghanistan, not to mention blindly backing the Kiev government in the civil conflict in Ukraine.  No, the government has concentrated its demand for economies on benefits for the poor and the unemployed and on local government services – education, maintenance of highways and footpaths, social services, libraries, public parks and gardens, refuse and recyclable collections and so on; all the services in fact that make the difference between civilisation and barbarism.

            All the main parties reject the other way of reducing the deficit; increasing the government’s income by taxation.  There are ways in which this could be done with minimal hardship.  I have suggested in this blog that all state ‘benefits’ should be subject to income tax – winter fuel allowance for the old, children’s allowances, attendance allowance, free tv licence, free prescriptions and so on. This wouldn’t affect at all the really poor who don’t pay income tax.  It would affect the rest of us (several would affect me!) but they wouldn’t impose a crippling burden on anybody.  It would at least reduce the scandal of elderly millionaires getting exactly the same winter fuel allowance and other universal benefits as the rest of us oldies.

            Nor, I think, would a penny or two-pence on the standard and higher rate of income tax cause real hardship to anyone.  We’d only lose a little of the taxable part of our income.   I’m no mathematician but I believe that penny or tuppence on each pound of our taxable income would make a tremendous difference to our country’s finances.   Yet David Cameron promises that a new Conservative Government would not raise the rate of VAT (he could naturally be expected to prefer indirect taxation that disproportionately penalises the poor).  Much more shamefully, Ed Miliband, Labour leader, promises that if he leads a Labour government, there will be no increase in either the standard or the higher rate of income tax.

            Perhaps the cynics are right and they really are ‘all the same’.  They’ve certainly all got the same ultimate aim.  No – it’s not to make our country a better place in which to live.   It’s to get sufficient compliant MPs elected to enable them to form a government and, having done so, to hang on to power for as long as they can manage to get away with it. 

It’s still worth while to vote though – and our duty to those who in the 19^th and early 20^th Century – laboured and endured derision, arrest and imprisonment for the right to do so.  If you can’t bring yourself to vote for a candidate, then vote against the candidate whose policies you most dislike.  Put your cross against the name of the candidate most likely to defeat him or her!

And, of course, in this General Election we’ll have at least two credible alternatives to those of the three traditional parties.  There’s UKIP and there’s the Green Party.  UKIP consists of Nigel Farage and his followers.  He wants to get us out of the European Union and to limit immigration. For other policies he’ll just jump onto any bandwagon that promises a few extra votes, but generally speaking, his policies are well to the right of the most hard-line Conservatives.  A quite astonishing number of prominent Ukippers – MEPs and other senior party members, have departed from Ukip ‘under a cloud’. I can imagine no circumstances under which a Ukip candidate will get my vote.

The Scots the Welsh and the Northern Irish all have nationalist alternative candidates for whom they can vote.  I shall vote Green because they are working towards a fairer and a more sustainable Britain of which it might truly be said we are all in this together.  They won't achieve this in my time but perhaps my grandchildren’s generation will bring it about. As yet at least, the Greens are not tainted by the determination to achieve office at any price –  and I wish them well.

I’m sorry if any –or all – of the above sounds like a history lesson.  It isn’t that to me.  It’s the story of the United Kingdom during my lifespan, from the first quarter of the 20^th century to the first quarter of the 21^s.  

            

3rd November 2014

Tendring Topics……….on line

Westminster’s Robin Hoods…….in reverse!

            For the seven years I have been writing and publishing this blog I have been banging away about the way in which successive Chancellors of the Exchequer have acted like Robin Hoods in reverse, for ever widening the gap (already the widest in the EU) between the incomes of the rich and the poor, and using the taxation and benefits system to punish the poorest people in Britain in order to reward the very richest.  Now we learn that George Osborne’s austerity programme has failed.  Instead of reducing the national debt he’s managed to increase it.  I have little doubt that it is the poor who will be expected to pay for his failure.

            Last week London Evening Standard columnist Armando Ianucci made all the points that I have been trying to make, but much more effectively than I have, in a feature article on the subject of Punishing Poverty, a practice of which he accuses politicians of all the main parties. Below are the introductory paragraphs: 

It’s now a rite of passage for any aspiring political leader to state that he or she is keen to cut the welfare budget; it’s a mantra as regular as putting a penny on tobacco or vowing to protect the NHS. That’s why it drew no real howls of outrage when George Osborne got up at his party conference last month and declared that to cut the deficit further he needed to find another £25 billion of savings, and that he’d get them from cuts to welfare. You don’t have to be a Harvard-trained economist to know that the last people to have a  spare £25 billion sloshing around are the poor. Yet no one seemed that bothered by the Chancellor’s economics. 

           Similarly Ed Miliband, who has spent the past few years putting his party through intensive social policy reviews, seems to be restricting his public pronouncements to “tough” decisions to limit child support payments and to put a cap on welfare spending.

There’s nothing “tough” about kicking someone when they’re down. In fact, it appears to be the easiest job in British politics. So, even though benefit fraud itself is dwarfed thirtyfold by annual tax fraud by companies and individuals, headlines express more contempt for the shirker than for the City’s creative accountants and financial experts who caused the economic crisis in the first place. There are no poster campaigns asking us to snoop on tax fraudsters; but it’s become a common trope in any portrayal of benefit culture that it’s peopled entirely by women banging out babies to get better housing, and men claiming sickness benefit while out ten-pin bowling.

  

The passage that I have printed in bold type should be written in letters of fire on the walls of the House of Commons and in every newspaper editorial office!  The article in the Evening Standard goes on:

The true picture is a much more sobering one: it’s of an increasing section of society working or trying to find work while living within touching distance of poverty. We may be through the worst of the Great Recession but many have had to drop down in pay level, endure frozen salaries, move to find work at great personal cost, or take themselves off the unemployment register by entering the fickle world of self-employment. This weekend’s figures that show there are now a record 5.2 million workers in low-paid jobs point to a significant section of the community being pushed to the margins.

Meantime, those claiming benefit are evaluated by firms such as Atos and Maximus, charged with keeping welfare costs down. Claimants are subjected to an undignified, demoralising series of tests and conditions which, if flouted, result in a sanction, an automatic suspension of payment.  Fair enough, you might think, were it not that these firms are under pressure to hit targets. There are thousands of examples of claimants sanctioned for missing interviews when they’re incapacitated, or in hospital, or receiving notice of the date after the event, or being sent it on line even if they’ve said they don’t have wi-fi.   You can appeal against a sanction, in case you’re wondering, but the process can take six months, and benefits stay suspended for the whole of that time. 

Even claiming disability benefit draws suspicious looks. The suggestion by welfare reform minister Lord Freud that certain disabled people were not worth the minimum wage can only reinforce a current unspoken prejudice against disabled claimants. There are more and more accounts of people in wheelchairs receiving verbal abuse and worse on the streets.   

We are now in the middle of a shocking rise in poverty in all its forms, most shocking of all being hunger. Since 2012 both Save the Children and the Red Cross, institutions set up to provide charity overseas, have been busy working in Britain. Meanwhile, the number of food banks has grown tenfold in the past four years, with around 1,400 food bank centres distributing food around the UK.

The experiences of volunteers there are not of dealing with skivers or cheats, but with vulnerable people whose dignity has been washed out of them by austerity and who are embarrassed by their situation. Some come admitting they skip evening meals so they have enough to feed their children. Some are children bringing fathers or mothers who are too proud to make the trip on their own. Many are working, sometimes with two jobs, but on low pay.

          

            I think that that is a pretty damning article and one that goes against the policies of most politicians and most of the popular press.  I can only congratulate and thank the author of the article and the editor of the Evening Standard for swimming against the tide.  I hope that this blog will be instrumental in gaining it a wider publication both at home and overseas.  In the UK today hard-working tax payers do not support an idle and feckless poor.  On the contrary, it is the labour of poor people, the majority of whom work hard for long hours for meagre pay (who pay, through indirect taxation, a far greater proportion of their income back to the state than even the richest income-tax payer)  that maintains and increases the wealth of the richest fraction of our society.

           

  Why do you imagine that multi-millionaires contribute so generously to traditional political parties?  It’s to keep them acting as Robin Hoods in reverse!

Some unquestionably Good News!

         

            One has to look hard for unequivocally good news in the news media today.  Murders, child abuse, uncontrolled epidemics, wars and rumours of wars fill the newspapers and the tv and radio news bulletins.   I have to keep telling myself that what is newsworthy is the exception and that most of my fellow men and women are friendly, law abiding and peace-loving.  No-one is going to buy a local newspaper with the headline No-one was assaulted, robbed or murdered in Clacton-on-Sea Yesterday!  It’s the occasional violent crime not the much more usual boring old peace that makes the headlines!

            Yet during the past fortnight we have had what was at least to me, a completely unexpected piece of good news and the possibility of more to come.  Surgeons in Poland (yes, that’s the same country that produces all those unwanted migrants!) had performed an operation on someone whose spinal cord had been severed and who had been told he would never walk again!  The basis of the surgery seems to have been the removal of some tissue from the back of the nose and its transplant in the area of the broken spinal cord.  The British consultant who had carried out the research that had made this possible commented modestly that he felt this was equivalent to ‘A man walking on the moon’.  I think it is far more important to human-kind than that. It offers hope where, in the past, there had been none.  

            Nearly half a century ago, when I was Clacton’s Housing Manager, we had a young newly-married couple in one of our Council Houses.  The young man was very keen on 'keeping fit' and went for a jog and a quick plunge into the sea every morning.  One morning he plunged head-first into what he had thought was 6ft depth of water.  It was actually little over 18 inches – he was rescued and survived, but with a broken neck that left him paralysed from the neck down, and with no hope of ever recovering movement in his limbs.

            The Council moved him into a bungalow specially adapted for his restricted life but, of course, he needed twenty-four hour care.  I felt desperately sorry for his young wife; still in her early twenties. The prospect of being a carer for 24 hours a day 7 days a week had not been in her mind when on their wedding day, only a few months earlier, she had promised to love and support him 'for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health' as long as they both should live.

            Nowadays, thanks to British research and the skills of those Polish surgeons, such a young couple could be offered at least the hope of an eventual happy ending.  Dante knew what he was doing when, at the entrance of his imagined Hell, he put the notice 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here'.  We humans need hope to make our lives worth living.

Week 13 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘The paths of glory………’

          Last week in this blog I discussed the approaching referendum on the future of Scotland.  All residents in Scotland over the age of sixteen (now that is a revolutionary change in electoral law!) will be given the opportunity to declare whether they want their country to remain part of the United Kingdom or become an independent sovereign nation-state.  The UK government has stated that the majority decision will be accepted and acted upon, whatever it may be.

            Just over a week ago a rather similar referendum was taking place in the Crimea about the future of that peninsula.  Crimea is a federal state of the Ukraine and voters were invited to declare whether they wished to remain part of the Ukraine or to become part of the Russian Federation.  That was certainly not an option that they were given in 1954 when Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Government had decided, presumably on the grounds of administrative convenience, that Crimea would no longer be part of Russia as it had been from the days of the Tsar, but of the Ukraine.  It had made little difference then, because both Russia and the Ukraine were constituent republics of the USSR.

             The referendum has been declared by Barak Obama to be ‘illegal’ (it may have been 'invalid', but how can establishing whether voters would prefer to be Russian or Ukrainian possibly be against any law?), William Hague, our verbally belligerent Foreign Minister described it as ‘a travesty of democracy’, and our Prime Minister has declared colourfully, but with no evidence whatsoever, that the result was obtained 'under the barrel of a Kalashnikov!'  I have seen no reports of ballot-rigging, multiple voting, or bullying of potential voters, as there have been after elections in Afghanistan and countries in the Middle East and Africa. We can be quite sure that any such reports would have been given full publicity by the Russo-sceptic press. The pro-Russian majority of 96 percent established what had already been made obvious  The way in which the Crimeans had welcomed Russian troops and had voluntarily displayed Russian flags; provided ample evidence that the population of Crimea preferred a future with Russia rather than Ukraine.    Since ethnic Russians are said to comprise only some 58 percent of the population of Crimea, that enormous majority suggests that quite a few ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars also voted for the Russian option.

            It would be that sort of majority we would expect to get if the inhabitants of Gibraltar were asked if they wanted to be citizens of the United Kingdom or of Spain  – and for much the same reason.

            Russia’s subsequent ‘annexation’ of the Ukraine has been described as an illegal ‘land-grab’. Perhaps it was, but it was surely unique in the fact that the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the land that was ‘grabbed’ had wanted it to happen. It has also been unique in the fact that so far (even, it seems, after the forceful Russian take-over of the Ukrainian naval base reported this, Monday 24th March morning)  has been achieved with remarkably little bloodshed – less bloodshed, in fact, than in the violent demonstrations in Kiev that had preceded the Russian action.

            I recall that when it was decided to support the separatists in Kosovo (where I doubt very much if a referendum would have revealed over 90 percent of inhabitants wanted to break away from Serbia) the campaign included the RAF's bombardment of Serbia’s capital, the City of Belgrade.  When the UK government, after deceiving parliament and the British public about Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, decided to join the USA in enforcing a regime-change in Iraq, the campaign began by inducing ‘shock and awe’ with terror air-raids on Baghdad.  As a direct result of that illegal invasion thousands of innocent lives were lost. Iraq is still a divided country in which terrorism flourishes; the same terrorism that perpetrated 9/11 and had been unknown in Iraq prior to our invasion.  I really don’t think that Crimea faces a remotely similar future.   I have referred in earlier blogs to the USA’s illegal blockade of Cuban ports, the use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War and the totally unprovoked invasion of Grenada in the West Indies (then part of the British Commonwealth!)

            No doubt Russia has broken international rules by recovering its lost Crimean province without having first attempted negotiation, but ‘Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone!’

            I was not impressed with Vladimir Putin’s triumphal announcement of Russia’s recovery of Crimea in the Russian Parliament. Painstakingly staged, it resembled too closely George Bush’s premature announcement of victory in Iraq from the bridge of a US aircraft carrier.  All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Successful leaders surround themselves with flatterers who feed their egos and lead them on into folly. To suggest that Putin is another Stalin is ridiculous, but I do think that he may see himself as ‘Vladimir the Great’, a worthy successor of the Romanov Tsars.

            He has promised ‘to put the glory back into Russia’. I can only hope and pray that the eight million Russian dead of World War II remind him that the paths of glory lead but to the grave.  The rest of the world's leaders, every one of whom is too young to have personal memories of World War II, also need to remember it.

The Budget

          I once would have described myself as a ‘democratic socialist’. I was for a short while a member of the Labour Party and was, in fact, accepted as a Labour candidate for a county council election.  How glad I am now that I withdrew my candidature, believing that I could do more for the causes that I support in my weekly Tendring Topics column in a local newspaper, than in the Council Chamber at Chelmsford, where I’d have been expected to toe the party line.

            One of those causes (regular blog readers will probably be all too familiar with some of the others!) arises from my conviction that many, perhaps most, of Britain’s problems arise from the enormous and ever-widening gap between the richest and the poorest in our society.  To the New Labour Party’s shame that gap widened during their ten years in office and has continued to widen ever since.   I think that I am well qualified to comment on this subject because my own income and possessions are sufficient for my life style. At 92 the opportunities for extravagant living become somewhat limited! I have no desire for more than I already possess – and I certainly wouldn’t be happy with much less.  I now describe myself, not as a socialist but as an egalitarian and I don’t much concern myself with how greater equality could best be achieved. In some fields public ownership (either national or local) would probably be the best way forward, but co-operative ownership and employer/employee partnerships may also have a valuable part to play.  I support – very modestly – the Equality Trust www.equalitytrust.org.uk  that works toward that end.

 My idea of a ‘good Budget’ is one that narrows the gap between rich and poor and a ‘bad Budget’ is one that widens it.  It follows that it is many years since I have seen a ‘good Budget’ and I despair of ever seeing one produced either by our present government or any currently conceivable successor.

Both parties in the coalition government are eager to claim the credit for taking ‘millions of low paid workers out of the tax system altogether’ by raising the personal allowance (the level at which income tax becomes payable) from £10,000 to £10,500 a year.  It does, of course, help low earners but it also helps everyone who pays income tax (including me!) right up to those on £100,000 or more a year.  What’s more it perpetuates the false idea that there’s a hard-working group of ‘tax payers’ whose labours subsidise an underclass of non-taxpayers.  It’s not true.   The non income-tax payer pays tax (VAT) every time he has his car, or his bike or his house repaired.  He pays tax every time he buys himself a pint, fills up the petrol tank of his car or motor bike, or is foolish enough to buy a lottery ticket or scratch card, to put a few bob on a horse, or to play commercial bingo!   He probably pays a higher proportion of his income in tax than bankers or stock brokers with their inflated salaries and bonuses! 

Regular blog readers will know that I believe that every adult citizen, from the poorest to the wealthiest, should pay the same percentage of his or her gross income in income tax as their annual membership fee as a citizen of the UK – and that those who go abroad to escape that responsibility should automatically forfeit that citizenship.

A somewhat controversial feature of the budget would permit those who are saving for a pension on retirement to withdraw all or part of that ‘pension pot’ without financial penalty, at any time.  Fears have been expressed that ‘live-for-the-day’ fifty-year olds might draw out the lot and spend it all on a cruise to the Caribbean or a glorious boozy party, rather than leave it to  mature for a meagre pension that they may never live to enjoy!  I think there’s a much greater danger that responsible middle-aged people faced with a domestic crisis, might draw out a smallish sum from the ‘pension pot’ to deal with it, rather than go to a payday loan firm – or a loan shark.  No-one would criticise them for doing so -  but it wouldn’t take many such crises to empty that ‘pot’! 

I don’t think Mr Osborne and his colleagues realize how their policies have brought so many families to the edge of a financial precipice – and how little it could take to render them jobless,  homeless and relying on the local food bank for their survival.  But then I don’t suppose that the members of a government of millionaires who spend much of their time with fellow-millionaires can be expected to know much about the struggles and the anxieties of the less well off.

Week 3 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

Climatic Change

          A fortnight ago I commented in this blog that four damaging storms in the one month of December were more than just coincidence.  I had no doubt that they were part of a world-wide pattern resulting from global warming and climatic change.  If the New Year has brought in any change it has been a change for the worse.  Cornwall and Wales have had an almost continuous battering by wind and sea for day after day.

There have been deaths and flooding both from the surging sea and from drenching rain falling on already sodden ground.   The Somerset Levels have filled with flood water and supplies have  had to be taken by boat to some inland communities.  Meanwhile, a blast of Arctic Air is producing polar conditions through Canada and the northern half of the USA with hospitals having to deal not only with hypothermia but frostbite!  Temperatures lower than those at the South Pole have been recorded! Our tidal surges, damaging gales and floods are just a small part of a global problem.

            This had all been foreseen.  As I pointed out in my blog; The signal fires of warning, they blaze but none regard.  And so through night to morning, the earth spins ruinward’.  A Cambridge University professor, interviewed on tv explained that as long ago as the 1980s, scientists had warned the world’s governments that climatic change, largely the result of human activity, would produce extreme weather conditions world-wide – and so it has.  Desperately trying not to appear to criticise the government, the professor said that of course the prime minister and chancellor had wider economic issues to consider. He did regret though that they had found it necessary to cut the grant to the Environmental Agency, striving to alleviate some of the worst effects of these extreme conditions.  A much-travelled Blog reader, on his way to Cornwall on business, sent me this email:

This kind of weather is exactly as predicted in my Climate Change booklet I got from the UN in Geneva.

Flooding and Wind disasters have gone up around the world massively in the last 10 years, and are set to continue to get worse as there is more and more heat energy in the atmosphere.

But your MP thinks it’s all a load of rubbish! Let’s hope his home is flooded out.

Well, I do try to avoid having such uncharitable thoughts about our MP and I don’t think it at all likely that either of his comfortable homes will be flooded.  I do wonder though if he has now considered the possibility that the Australian authority on whom he based his climate-change-denial might just possibly have been wrong and virtually all other scientific opinion right.

Whatever else our Prime Minister may be, he is certainly neither stupid nor ignorant (though his grasp of 20^th century history sometimes seems to be a bit shaky!)  I have no doubt that he is well aware of the accelerating effects of climate change and of the urgent need for all nations in the world to work together to counter them.  However he is constrained by the need to hold his Party (which has its fair share of ‘neanderthalers’) together, to keep on the right side of the millionaires who control the popular press, and to do nothing to imperil his Party’s chances in the now-not-so-distant General Election.   Today (8^th January) he has publicly conceded that the extreme weather we are experiencing may be the result of global warming.  The next few weeks could make it clear whether David Cameron really is a great statesman with his country’s, and the world’s, interests at heart – or whether he is just another successful politician.

Our Iron (hearted?) Chancellor

            I do wish that George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, could manage to have a less self-satisfied smile on his face as he tells us that, despite the growing economy and falling jobless figures, we’ll have to endure increasing austerity for two years after the next general election.  This will involve making further billions of pounds of savings, a large proportion of which will have to come from ‘welfare’. His previous forecasts have been mostly wrong so we can always hope that this one will be too – not least with regard in the assumption that he’ll still be chancellor after the next election.

Once again the poor (they’re the ones who’ll be affected by cuts in the welfare budget) will be the ones to suffer.   The lengths to which Mr Osborne will go to prevent the really wealthy from experiencing even the slightest inconvenience is really astonishing.   You’ll recall that one of his early acts as Chancellor was to reduce the tax payable by those liable for the highest rate of income tax.  That’s people with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year (roughly £2,885 per week!)   I am tired of hearing the oft-repeated tale that if the government dares to ask the wealthy to pay the same proportion of their income in tax as the poor, they’d simply up sticks and leave the UK.

                                                                           

Let them go if they want to; but I suggest that those who care so little for their native land that they’ll live abroad rather than pay their fair share of meeting its financial needs, should automatically lose their British citizenship – which would be restored to them only after they had paid the income tax for which they were due.

Here are some ideas to raise a few extra million (or possibly billion) pounds that, unlike his austerity measures, would make no-one homeless or unable to feed their family or buy them the necessities of life:

Restore that extra payment on the highest band of income tax and reduce the level of liability for that tax from £150,000 to £100,000 a year, a figure that is much more than twice the average income in the UK. This is surely a very moderate and reasonable suggestion.

Make all universal state benefits liable for income tax. Those, like myself, with a supplementary pension from our former employment, already pay tax on our state retirement pension, so why shouldn’t we pay it on winter fuel allowance, attendance allowance, free tv licences, free bus passes and so on?  This would mean my paying a little more income tax  for my fuel allowance, attendance allowance (paid because of my limited mobility), and tv licence – but it wouldn’t seriously impair my living standard.   Others might have to pay rather more but folk whose income was so low that they were not liable to pay income tax would be unaffected.

How much those two measures would raise for the exchequer I don’t know. They would, of course, raise much more if we had a properly graded income tax system in which we all paid a percentage of our gross income in tax.  However much or however little it raised, it would make those with low or average incomes (those hard-working taxpayers top politicians are always on about!) feel that perhaps we are all in this together and the whole thing isn’t just a ‘Robin Hood in reverse’ conspiracy to rob the poor and give to the rich, as it seems to be at present.

‘What’s in a name?’

            ……..asked love-sick Juliet Capulet in what is probably Shakespeare’s best-known play.  There can be quite a lot, as our Clacton MP Douglas Carswell may have found out when he invited readers of his Newsletter to describe him in two words.  I wonder what he was hoping for – Clacton’s Crusader, the People’s Voice, Brussels’ Scourge perhaps?   I wonder if they were among those that he received.

            Hardly surprisingly, his request was greeted with derision by his opponents. Norman Jacobs, described in the Clacton Gazette as a ‘respected historian and Labour supporter’ said that the two words that came to his mind were ‘diddly’ and ‘squat’, words that had been used together by former Tendring Council leader Peter Halliday to describe his opinion of Mr Carswell’s contribution to the town.  I have been acquainted with Norman Jacobs for some years, often supporting his point of view – sometimes opposing it.  I really believe that he could have done better than that – and I wondered if I could.  Stringing words together into a readable narrative is the only real skill I have ever possessed.  Could I summarise our MP’s qualities in just two words?

            The two characteristics that come to my mind whenever Douglas Carswell’s name is mentioned are his fervent Europhobia and his conviction that, if climatic change is taking place, it is part of a natural cycle and nothing whatsoever to do with human activities.  It follows that all this business about finding renewable sources of energy and reducing the ‘greenhouse gases’ in the atmosphere is waste of time and money.

             ‘Climate change denying Europhobe’ uses twice as many words as those requested in Douglas Carswell’s invitation.  Then it came to me – I’m not really sure if it is one word or two but it certainly sums up succinctly my view of our MP.  How about Crypto-Ukipper,* a Conservative MP who prefers Nigel Farage’s outlook to that of David Cameron?

* Ukipper is pronounced You-kipper. You won’t find it in any dictionary yet, but give it a year or two………

           

             

           

Week 31 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

Grandfathers

          Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, was born on 14^th November 1948.  I well remember hearing the official announcement of his birth on the radio. My 24 year old wife Heather and I had been married for two and a half years. We were living in a bungalow just off the Norwich Road in Barham, three or four miles north of Ipswich. In the autumn Heather had been diagnosed as suffering from laryngeal and pulmonary tuberculosis.  She was confined to her bed and we were waiting to learn when she would be transported to a sanatorium at Nayland near Colchester..  There she was to spend more than a year, a period punctuated by six weeks in Papworth Hospital, where she underwent life-saving but  disabling surgery (thoracoplasty) involving the removal of eight ribs. This permanently collapsed her left lung allowing it to heal.

Visiting Heather in Nayland Sanatorium in summer 1949.   Patients having thoracoplasty were expected to lose a stone in weight during the surgery, which involved three operations with rests of a fortnight after the first and second. They were therefore required to put on a stone beforehand.  Heather was taken to Papworth for surgery a day or two after this photo was taken.  It is my only photo of Heather in which she appears to be 'plump'!  

In November 1948 we had our own worries and. I can’t pretend that we were particularly interested in the royal birth. I do though remember the BBC announcer telling us, with a plummy accent (BBC radio news-readers all spoke posh in those days!) that Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth ‘has given birth to a Prince’.  I remember thinking - and probably saying to Heather, ‘Fancy her giving birth to a prince.  I thought that members of the Royal Family had babies just like the rest of us!’

             Heather was discharged from the sanatorium ‘cured’. Despite her subsequent lifelong frailty, four years later she gave birth at home, to the first of our two sons. They, in due course, gave us three grandchildren, two boys and a girl.  Heather died at the age of 82, three months after our diamond wedding anniversary.  She had lived to see all three of her grandchildren grow through schooldays and adolescence and  graduate with good degrees at universities.

            Now, the baby prince who was born while Heather was waiting to be transported to the Sanatorium is himself a grandfather.   His grandchildren (I have no doubt that he’ll have more!) will have privileges ours have never known – but they certainly won’t have the freedom to choose their careers, their friends, their partners and their paths through life that ours have had.  I hope that if, like me, he reaches his nineties, he will be as proud of the progress of his grandchildren as I am of mine.  

My grandchildren!

           The youngest of my three grandchildren has just celebrated his thirtieth birthday. This means that they are all beyond the first flush of youth and are making their way in the adult world.  I very much hope I’ll remember their birthdays, and that they’ll be pleased to receive my birthday greetings of love and good wishes for as long as I draw breath.  Here they are on the left – Chris, the oldest, Nick the youngest and Jo in the middle, with just a year dividing each of them, as they were years ago when they really were grandchildren. Below, now young adults, they are with me on the recent occasion of the family wedding of my son Pete (Chris and Nick’s dad and Jo’s uncle) and Arlene Esdaile.

        

All three are graduates (their grandma and I were both proud to leave school at 16 with our General Schools Certificate and Matric. Exemption!)  Jo is the real intellectual.  She is already an M.A. and an M.Sc.   She has been working as a Social Worker seconded to the Renal Unit of a large  Sheffield Hospital and  she has now been accepted for a Ph.D. Course studying clinical psychology at Sheffield University.  She’s a beauty too;  it’s really not fair

 on all the other girls!

            Chris has been teaching English in Taiwan for almost a decade. A few years ago he was named ‘Teacher of the year’ by the educational organisation employing him.  He speaks Mandarin like a native and I notice that on his ‘Facebook’ page he now puts messages in Chinese calligraphy!  He graduated in Fine Art and has produced pencil portraits of family members using old photographs as references.  One of his drawings of his grandma as the school-girl of 15 that she was when she and I first met, almost reduced me to tears when he gave it to me.

Heather Gilbert (destined to become Heather Hall) aged 15 – drawn over 65 years later by her grandson Chris!    

I wrote about grandson Nick’s career in this blog a few weeks ago.  He graduated in Photography and after rising to the very top in the European Travel Agency, has founded and is the Managing Director of his own International Tourism Consultancy (www.SE1media.com) He has a charming Belgian girl-friend, Romy Cywie, who has been welcomed as a member of ‘the family’ (I now make a point of remembering her birthday too!)   Can you wonder that I am proud of my three grandchildren?

The Prince of Wales will be very fortunate if, at my age, he has a family as warm, as united and as supportive as I have.  I am only sorry that their grandma isn’t here to enjoy hearing about their activities and appreciating them all as much as I do.

 

St George of the Exchequer to the rescue!

           Interest on mortgages for house purchase is at an unprecedentedly low level.  Good news for borrowers but not so good for those of us who see our life savings entrusted to banks and building societies. Those savings are steadily decreasing in value as inflation outstrips interest rates. It also means that monthly mortgage repayments are low. They are within the capacity of a great many would-be home owners.  However, financial institutions have recent memories of being saved by government bale-outs from bankruptcy resulting from by unwise lending. To prevent a recurrence they are demanding much larger deposits – perhaps as much as 20 or 25 percent of the total loan required – before granting mortgages.   These are beyond the reach of most young people, particularly those who (thanks to the government’s policies) are already burdened with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt.

            That’s .where George Osborne our Chancellor of the Exchequer rides in like a knight in shining armour, to save the situation.  He is going to lend those eager young couples the money they need for their deposits.  He started the scheme on quite a modest scale but is now proposing to widen the scheme to include purchasers of existing as well as new properties. Prospective home buyers will need to have saved no more than five percent of the money they hope to borrow from a bank or building society. This, he hopes, will not only help those who want to fulfil the Conservative dream of a nation of home-owners, but will also encourage developers to build and thus help Britain out of recession

And perhaps it will – eventually. Immediately though it has increased the demand for houses from those who, thanks to Mr Osborne’s generosity (with our money!) can aspire to home ownership.  It will take many months at least for any building programme to take effect.  In the meantime market forces will ensure that house prices once again rise above the rate of inflation until the bubble bursts and we have yet another financial crisis. This time the government has been warned by the Institute of Directors (hardly ‘loony lefties’!) of the probable results of their policy.   But, of course, ‘Nanny knows best’ and the government will continue pursuing the chimera of ‘Home Ownership for All’. Surely a time in which ‘no-one can expect a job for life’ is not one in which young people should be encouraged to get themselves into long-term debt.   What is needed is not affordable homes to buy but publicly owned houses to let at affordable rents, such as local authorities provided in the century prior to the advent of Thatcher/Blairism.

           It doesn't appear to have occurred to Mr Osborne that if loaning most of the deposit money required for house purchase was too risky for the banks and building societies, it might be too risky for him too.  Perhaps the thought would have crossed his mind had he been taking risks with his own money, rather than ours!

  

Week 27 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘The King was in his counting house, counting out his money’

            These days, of course, it wouldn’t be the king but the Chancellor of the Exchequer.   For me, Chancellor George Osborne lost all credibility and respect when, at the same time as introducing an austerity programme that penalised the poor and disadvantaged, he reduced the liability for income tax of the seriously wealthy; those with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year!   Quite apart from the flagrant injustice of penalising the poor and rewarding the rich, I find it incredible that any Chancellor of a country with a serious deficit problem should deliberately, and despite widespread protest, cut off a source of revenue. That the source consisted of very wealthy people who would barely notice the loss compounds the irresponsibility of the action.

             The Chancellor expects to be credited with ‘helping the poor’ when he raises the threshold of liability for income tax, thus ‘taking thousands of low-paid workers out of the income tax system altogether’. It isn’t only the poor who are helped.  Raising the tax liability threshold benefits all income tax payers, including the very wealthiest.  What’s more, being ‘taken out of the income tax system altogether’ automatically makes those affected into second class citizens, patronised by ‘we tax-payers who have to support a nation full of slackers and scroungers!

            Last week’s financial statement continued the tradition that the Chancellor and his colleagues have established.  Can they possibly really believe that the poor are to blame for their poverty and that that there is work in plenty available for those who genuinely seek it?  Extending to seven days the time that elapses before an unemployed person can sign on to claim job-seekers’ allowance suggests that they do.  Unemployed and penniless people and their families still need to eat, pay the rent, and buy other necessities during those seven days.  How else can those without savings do so without resorting to the ‘help’ of a loan-shark or one of those pay-day loans that are so deceptively easy to obtain and so very, very difficult to pay off.

            It isn’t likely that very many people will criticise the decision to deny the winter fuel allowance to elderly Brits. living in countries enjoying milder winters than those in the UK. It hadn’t even occurred to me that those who choose to live permanently overseas had been receiving it!  The countries affected are residents in European Union countries bordering on the Mediterranean, including France but excluding Italy.   At first glance that seems ridiculous. Surely winters in, for instance, Calais and Rouen must more closely resemble those in Britain than do winters in Naples or Palermo?

            Probably so – but the decision is made by a comparison between the average winter temperature in south-west England and the average winter temperature throughout the country concerned.   Italy’s average winter temperature is brought down by the permanently snow-capped Italian Alps and by the peaks of the Apennines extending down ‘the spine’ of Italy. I doubt if many, if any, ex-pats live among those peaks…………… but rules are rules!

            I really don’t understand why the Chancellor is so reluctant to use income tax to make winter fuel allowance and other benefits fairer, and yield revenue to narrow that deficit much more easily and painlessly than anything that he has done so far.  The state retirement pension is subject to income tax.  I can see no valid reason why all benefits (in fact, all sources of income) shouldn’t be similarly taxed.

            The only conclusion that I can reach is that the Chancellor’s political outlook, and that of his colleagues sees something morally wrong  in the idea that we should be taxed in accordance with our ability to pay.   A couple of pence in the pound on VAT or customs duty may lose a few votes, but it is tolerable because ‘the rich man in his castle’ and ‘the poor man at his gate’ pay exactly the same amount.  That clearly is the government’s idea of us ‘all being in this together’.

            A tax for rich and poor alike based proportionately on ability to pay?  Unthinkable – that’s the road to red revolution and the end of civilisation for ‘people like us’ (with a Rolls in the garage, a yacht in the marina, and a second home in Majorca).

            Mrs Thatcher must have had much the same idea when she replaced the rating system for the local financing of local government by the Poll Tax.   Rate demands had, admittedly very imperfectly, reflected the wealth or poverty of the householder.   The poll tax was the same for us all, the millionaire, the slum dweller and the rural cottager.  A late 14^th century version of the Poll Tax triggered the Peasants’ Revolt.  The late 20^th century version triggered revolt against Mrs Thatcher and her government and led to her eventual downfall at the hands of her own supporters. I think it unlikely that I shall still be around to see the eventual consequences in the 21^st century, of robbing the poor to make the wealthy even richer.

Clacton County High School

          My two sons were both pupils at Clacton County High School in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.  Both did very well there and I have always followed the progress of the school with a warm interest.

            I was very pleased therefore to read in the Clacton Gazette that the CCHS is in the top twenty percent of schools for raising pupils’ educational standards from admission at 11 to completing their GCSE examinations at 16.   Sue Williamson, chief executive of the Secondary School Admission Test education group, is reported as saying ‘Clacton County High School should be congratulated for their stunning performance in adding value to their students’ achievements.  It is one of the best schools in the country in outperforming expectations for their pupils and improving their future prospects.  There is plenty that other schools could learn from their success’.

            So far, so good.  It isn’t quite the whole story though.   On a back page of the same Gazette are to be found tables showing the percentage of pupils from each school and educational  establishment in Colchester and the Tendring District who went on to University or other Higher Education Institution.  These give a rather different picture.   Out of 110 school leavers from Clacton County High School 44 percent went on to Higher Education Institutions but only 6 percent went to the top third of these (that is, to a good university).  Not a single pupil from any school or other institution within the Tendring District gained admission to either Oxford or Cambridge Universities.  Things have been very different in the not-too-distant past.

  Peter Hall B.A.(Cantab) aged 21, on his graduation day. Selwyn College Chapel is in the background.  He was subsequently made an M.A.     

My elder son left Clacton County High School in 1970 at the age of 17, having sat and passed his ‘A’ level exams with outstanding results,. He had been  accepted by Selwyn College, Cambridge to begin his life there as an undergraduate from September 1971. He would then be just 18.  He spent his ‘gap year’ working in the store room of the Eastern Electricity Board HQ in Clacton, learning something of the ‘real world’ of work before he began his studies.  In 1971 he was one of  at least four CCHS sixth formers who became students at Cambridge University, all of whom graduated with honours.  Those four I knew about personally.  There may well have been others whom I didn’t know who started at either Oxford of Cambridge that same year.

       I don’t believe that young men and women of Clacton at the end of the 1960s were cleverer than those of the first decade of the 21^st century.  While it is possible that they were prepared to work and study harder (there certainly weren’t the distractions then that there are today) I think that their expectations and those of their teachers were higher, and that their teachers were more inspiring – and perhaps more skilled.

            Clacton County High School has proved itself brilliant at instilling a basic education into what may sometimes have been unpromising and perhaps resistant human material.  I believe though that the low percentage of pupils gaining admission to the best Universities – and none at all to Oxford and Cambridge – demonstrates that the school is failing its more gifted and hard-working pupils.   

           

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