Week 16 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘Fifty-three quid a week!’

 I can remember a time when £53 a week would have seemed to me to be wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.   In the circles in which I moved in the 1930s anyone with an income of £5 a week or more was reckoned to be ‘well to do’.  My dad supported my mum and I on much less than a fiver a week, even counting in the weekly pension payment he received for his twenty-one years army service.

            Over eighty years later though, things have changed.  Such has been the progress of inflation that nowadays £53 a week is roughly the amount that someone who is unemployed can expect to get from the state in ‘benefit’. In contrast I’d be very surprised if the take-home pay of Mr Ian Duncan-Smith, Work and Pensions Minister is less than £150,000 a year or £2,800 a week - rather more each week than an unemployed man gets in a year!  He says though that he could live on £53 a week if compelled to do so – and has been challenged by his critics to prove it.

            I think it probable that he could manage it, almost certainly for a week and possibly for several weeks.  It wouldn’t be a fair test though because all the time Mr Duncan-Smith would be well aware that the discomfort and deprivation – even hunger – that he’d be feeling, was only temporary.  He would know that in a week or two things would be back to normal.  He’d be back to his comfortable home and life-style and his no-doubt ample and well-balanced diet.  What’s more, he would have proved to his own satisfaction, if to no-one else, that he could endure without complaint exactly the same hardships as those constantly moaning plebs.

I have never tried to live on the equivalent of £53 a week.  I think though that during the winter of 1942/1943 in a large concentration camp for other-rank PoWs in northern Italy (Campo Concentramento Prigioneri di Guerra No. 73) I did experience and survive conditions that were  as bad as any poverty experienced in this country, at least in the 20^th and present century.  We were ill-clad.  We were cold.  We were louse-infested. We were constantly hungry.  We had a small maize-flour loaf (scarcely larger than a bread roll) between two of us each day, plus about a pint of a thin rice or macaroni soup in which there would sometimes be shreds of an unidentifiable meat.  The Red Cross Parcels sent from England, whose contents (powdered milk, tin of spam, butter, biscuits, coffee or tea) kept us alive, turned up only spasmodically.

There were 5,000 of us in the camp.  Rarely a week passed by without one of  us dying of a hunger-related illness. A mate and I had the opportunity of having our photos taken and sent home to our parents.  My mother glanced at mine and tore it up.  She couldn’t bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow I had become.

Most of us survived because we had one thing that many of today’s benefit claimants lack and that Mr Ian Duncan-Smith would have in abundance if he ever did put his boast to the test.   That was the hope of better things to come.   Most of us PoWs, certainly all those who lived to go home, had the firm conviction that the war would end – that year, the next year, perhaps the year after – and that we would go home again to England to be with those we loved.  We even dared to hope that when the war was over we’d play a part in creating a fairer, peaceful, more equal United Kingdom that would set an example to a war-weary world.

Our hopes sustained us and half our hopes were realized.  The war did end and we did get home again.  We have though conspicuously failed ‘to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’.  In 1944 not even the most incorrigible pessimist among us would have imagined that nearly seventy years later there would be wars and rumours of wars worldwide, and that in our own country there would be hunger, homelessness and unemployment, with the poor and disadvantaged depending on soup runs and food banks for survival.

‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’, insisted poet Alexander Pope.  According to St Paul, Hope,  Faith and Love, are the qualities that endure when everything else has failed.  Sadly, in the United Kingdom today, hope appears to be fighting a losing battle against despair.

Postscript

          It seems that if, as I suggested above, Government Minister Ian Duncan-Smith does have an income of ‘only’ £150,000 a year, he is pretty poorly paid by ‘top people’ standards. 

            You’ll remember that in the general banking collapse that triggered our current economic crisis and age of austerity (yes, as the Governor of the Bank of England has told us again and again, it was  the banks that dug the hole in which we find ourselves!)  one of the first to fall and one that fell the furthest, was HBOS (Halifax/Bank of Scotland).    Thousands of share-holders (including me, though fortunately on only a small scale!) saw the value of their shares tumble - and the government bailed the bank out with millions of pounds of our money.

            A House of Commons Committee investigating the whole sorry business has identified three top officials of HBOS as primarily responsible and suggested that they should never again be allowed to hold a directorship in any company.  One of the culprits, Sir James Crosby, the former Chief Executive of HBOS has bowed to public opinion and has, as the newspapers put it, fallen on his sword.   He suggests that he should be deprived of the knighthood bestowed on him by a once-grateful government and agrees that he should relinquish about a quarter of his pension.

            That ‘sword’ must surely have been one of those collapsing ones sometimes used in costume dramas on stage or tv.  The pension on which he will have to struggle along after this generous act of contrition will be a mere £400,000 a year!  That, I think, works out at over £76,923 a week, which makes Ian Duncan-Smith’s estimated £2,800 a week income look pretty paltry!  If a Chief Executive who admits responsibility for the failure of a bank that cost taxpayers and shareholders millions of pounds can walk away with a pension of £400,000 a year, what on earth do the top people of successful banks expect to get on retirement?  ‘We’re all in this together!’    You must be joking.

‘What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?’

            This was the caption on one of World War I’s most successful recruitment posters. It portrayed an earnest little boy asking his still-young father, after the war-to-end-wars had come to an end, what part he had played in it. He was clearly hoping to hear stories of valour and heroism.   My dad had been a regular soldier and served throughout World War I in France, Egypt and Salonica.   As a child, I took all that for granted and asked very few questions about his military past.  Among his campaign medals, that he brought out and polished for each ‘Armistice Day’ (11^th November), was a French 'Medaille d’Honneur with crossed swords', accompanied by a splendid certificate signed by the President of France.   I now deeply regret that I never asked him how he had earned that, surely unusual, honour.   For the benefit of my own sons and grandchildren (and any great grandchildren I may one day have!) I have written a fairly detailed account of my own totally undistinguished military career from the beginning of World War II till April 1946, almost a year after its end.

            Some seven years ago two Ipswich ladies – a Mrs Diana Watts and a Mrs Jane Bradburn contacted me.  They had learned that I had served in the East Suffolk Territorial 67^th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery.   Their then-deceased dads had served as volunteers in the same regiment and they were researching the regiment’s history and the story of their fathers’ lives during the war years. I was happy to tell them about the two years we had spent in this country preparing to repel the enemy invasion that had then seemed inevitable. That immediate danger had receded and I told them about our voyage to Egypt in the New Zealand liner Rangitiki in August 1941, and our part in actions against the Germans and Italians in the Egyptian/Libyan frontier area from November of that year.  

The gun-crew of which I was a member, with our 6in howitzer, near Hellfire Pass, Christmas 1941

I am fourth from the right – wearing a woolly hat!

We had had our minor triumphs, taking part in the successful sieges and attacks on Bardia, Wadi Halfaya (‘Hellfire Pass’), Sollum and other German and Italian strong-points in the Libyan desert.   In mid-May 1942 the enemy forces, under General Irwin Rommel had launched a major attack.  After several weeks of almost continuous action we became part of the garrison of Tobruk – and were taken prisoner there when the town fell to the German Afrikakorps on 21^st June 1942.

After capture we were all separated but, with the assistance of friends that I had later made in Germany, I was able to help Diana Watts find and contact an Austrian family who had befriended her father in the turmoil at the end of the war.  Diana and Jane were indefatigable in their pursuit of the regiment's somewhat brief history. They managed to track down a number of survivors. They collected photographs and memorabilia.   They organised regimental reunions, and a photographic exhibition at the Ipswich Public Library.  They attracted the interest of the local press.  They welcomed some of the Regiment’s survivors (including me) as visitors to their homes.

           

          

  Sadly, Diana has died but Jane has carried on with their work, amassing a very considerable archive.

 At the Suffolk Record Office in Ipswich on Saturday 25^th May at 2.30 pm she hopes to share the results of her and Diana’s research with sons, daughters, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and friends interested in the wartime story of the men of a Suffolk Artillery Regiment.   Using first hand accounts from veterans and written records, Jane, who is an experienced and entertaining speaker, will tell their story. It is an occasion that shouldn’t be missed by anyone with a relative or friend who served in the 67^th!   The copy of the poster printed above gives details.

                                                                                     

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Week 9.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

Relative Risks

I was delighted to discover that Magnox Electric, the nuclear power organisation, is to pay a massive £400,000 in a fine and costs, for having allowed there to be a leak of radio-active waste from one of their sumps at the Bradwell Nuclear Power Plant over a period of fourteen years! The leakage was discovered only when a member of their staff, during a tea break, noticed that the level of liquid in the sump was just a little lower than it had been.

A spokesman for Magnox, interviewed on tv, made much of the fact that there had never been any risk to the public from this leakage. He clearly couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about. If there has been no risk to the public this has obviously been simply due to good luck and was in no way to the credit of Magnox. The evidence produced in this case of negligence and disregard for public safety doesn’t give the public a great deal of confidence in the care that is taken when handling and storing highly dangerous radioactive materials.

Magnox should be getting used to this kind of thing. On 1st June 2001 they were fined £100,000 and ordered to pay £28,000 in costs after pleading guilty to six offences relating to unauthorised discharges of radioactive waste from their nuclear power stations at Bradwell and at Bridgewater in Devon.

Now we are told that there are proposals to reactivate the nuclear power stations at both Bradwell and Sizewell, just a few miles to the north of us on the Suffolk coast. I am astonished that a proposal to construct half a dozen totally innocuous wind turbines almost a mile from residential properties should have produced so much public outrage, and the construction of a potentially highly dangerous (remember Chernolbyl?) nuclear energy plant a few miles to the windward of the Essex holiday Coast and its many residents and visitors, so little.

I suppose that it is a case of out of sight (though across the Colne estuary from Jaywick, Bradwell Power Station is clearly in view) out of mind.

More Power to Local People

I am always pleased, if a little sceptical, when I hear politicians proposing to give ‘local communities’ more power and make them less dependent on instructions from Whitehall. It is, I have observed, the kind of promise that is much more often made by politicians in opposition than by those actually in power.

Perhaps this time the Conservative Party has a whole raft of proposals that will achieve this very desirable aim. I can’t say though that I am deeply impressed with the two proposals that have caught the attention of the news media.

One is that larger authorities at least should, like London, have directly elected mayors with considerable executive power. I don’t quite see how putting more power into the hands of one man can possibly be giving ‘more power to the community’ than giving it to an elected council representing every shade of political opinion in the area. It may well produce a more efficient authority, perhaps (since only one person will need to be persuaded) an authority more compliant with the will of the national government. It will certainly be less democratic though, just as the present administration in London is less democratic than the previous Greater London Council or the old London County Council.

If the government, or the opposition, really wants to put more power into the hands of local people they could try restoring to local authorities some of the powers that they once had and that have been taken away from them. One such measure might be to repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation* and permit local councils (every bit as democratically elected as members of the House of Commons) to decide whether or not to sell their council houses to sitting tenants. ‘Right to buy’ with its false promise of ‘home ownership for all’, bears at least some responsibility for the feverish rush to get onto the property ladder that triggered the present economic crisis.

The other proposal that has received the attention of the media? That’s the idea that local residents who decide that their council tax demand is too high should be empowered to hold a referendum on the subject, the result of which would, presumably be binding on the local authority.

Goodness me! Don’t we all always think that the Council Tax (not to mention VAT, fuel, alcohol and tobacco duties and income tax) is too high? This idea would lead to a referendum at the beginning of every financial year and to municipal services reducing year by year until they disappeared altogether! Perhaps that is precisely what some national politicians would like.

Mind you, the idea of a referendum on unnecessary or undesirable public spending has its attractions. Could we perhaps have one on whether we really need to spend millions of pounds keeping nuclear powered and nuclear-armed submarines prowling the world’s oceans?

* I am glad to see that Bob Russell, Colchester’s Lib.Dem. MP is currently calling for the repeal of ‘Right to Buy’ legislation and the restoration of local authorities’ right to build houses for letting. I had thought that I was a lone voice crying in a wilderness created by the Conservatives and perpetuated by New Labour.

Custodians of our Money.

I am not ashamed of the fact that since I first started writing Tendring Topics…in print in 1980, I have changed my mind radically on several major issues. Twenty-nine years ago I was a great believer in ‘first-past-the-post’ parliamentary and local elections. They ensured a strong government I thought. Now I’m an enthusiast for proportional representation. It may not produce such a strong government but it does produce one that is more representative of the electorate. Having lived through a couple of strong governments (of different political complexions!) I no longer believe that strength in a government is quite as desirable as I had once imagined?

Similarly, believing as I did then, that the Commonwealth could be welded into some kind of political and economic unit, I was a convinced Euro-sceptic. Now, I have no doubt at all that the United Kingdom’s best future is within a Europe that is closely united, both politically and economically.

Of one thing though I feel even more strongly convinced today than I did nearly three decades ago; that is that imprudent lending and borrowing is a path to both personal and public disaster. I have made this abundantly clear on many occasions in Tendring Topics both on line an in print. Today I have no doubt at all that it was irresponsible borrowing, only made possible by even more irresponsible lending, that has led to the current financial crisis.

The Clacton-on-Sea Branch of HBOS, in the town's Station Road. It was here that Heather and I obtained a mortgage in 1956 to purchase our bungalow in Dudley Road. Thanks to my spare-time freelance writing, it was paid off by 1971, only fifteen years later.

That being so, it came as something of a shock to find that HBOS (Halifax, Bank of Scotland) had been one of the most imprudent of those imprudent lenders. It was from what was then the Halifax Building Society that in 1956 Heather and I obtained a mortgage to purchase our home. I currently hold a few hundred shares in HBOS (my only stock-holding) and it is to an HBOS savings account that my savings ‘against a rainy day’ are entrusted. I therefore have made a tiny contribution to the stupid and irresponsible behaviour that precipitated the circumstances from which we are all suffering today.

HBOS is now, of course, part of the Lloyds TSB Group, the culmination of a series of mergers that make nonsense of the claims of politicians that we have a greater freedom of choice than ever before. Just a few years ago, those seeking a mortgage or a safe investment could choose between the rival claims of The Halifax Building Society, the Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank and the Trustee Savings Bank; four then-thoroughly-dependable financial institutions. Now they are all just one, and one that is surviving only thanks to Government help!

Practising what I preach!

Another enthusiasm which I have held since the 1980s and to which I have returned again and again in Tendring Topics both in print and on line has been for clean and renewable sources of energy to reduce and ultimately replace our reliance on coal, oil and gas. I don’t think that nuclear energy, with its lethal and indestructible residues, provides a safe and satisfactory answer and have always felt that our salvation lies in wind, wave, tidal and solar power.

The only one of which most of us as individuals can conveniently take advantage is solar power. I have always been heartened when, as in Clacton’s Old Road for instance, I have spotted one or two houses with solar panels on their roofs. These catch the sun’s energy and use it to heat the domestic hot water supply, reducing an otherwise steadily increasing annual expense, and making a small contribution towards ‘saving the planet’. It is, I am convinced, only by millions of such small contributions, as well as the large ones that can only be made regionally or nationally, that our planet can be saved from the effects of global warming.

I have been pleased to see others have solar water heating installations in their homes ……but have never done anything about it myself. ‘It’s still experimental’, I said, and, ‘If I were only twenty years younger, but at my age I could never hope to make sufficient annual saving to repay the cost of installation’.

Now I am taking the plunge. A few decades ago solar was still experimental in this country, but now it has been tried, tested and found effective and economical. It was the financial crisis that really made me change my mind though. It’s true that, at 87, I’ll never recover, from reduced fuel bills, the cost of installation. However, that reduction will certainly amount to more than the pitiful amount that this cost would have currently earned me in interest, and it will, I hope, be adding to the value of my home.

Last Monday morning (16th February) I phoned SunMaster Solar Energy Systems Ltd of Braintree, an Essex firm (that would please Lord Hanningfield!) with branches in Norwich and Kent. That very day their representative called to see me, largely I think to make sure that I was a serious enquirer and not a time-waster. Today (19th February), their surveyor made a thorough inspection and prepared a specification. He confirmed my own opinion (I am, after all, author of several books on domestic plumbing, hot water supply and drainage) that it would be a perfectly straightforward job. Installation will take two days, and I can expect the job to be done to my complete satisfaction some time in the next three or four weeks.

My bungalow in Clacton's Dudley Road. The right hand slope of the roof faces almost due south. It is there, just below the chimney stacks, that the two solar panel are to be sited.

I have been very impressed with the speed and efficiency with which SunMaster dealt with my enquiry and the technical survey. I hope that that augurs well for the future. You’ll be able to judge for yourselves. I intend to record progress and results on this blog.