Week 15 2013

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new……’

So declared the dying King Arthur according to Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem The Passing of Arthur.  If there is any historical basis for the Arthurian legend, it is that Arthur was a Romanised Briton struggling to save a remnant of Roman civilisation in a country overrun by Anglo-Saxon barbarians.  Many decades were to pass and much blood shed before our land again became a civilised united kingdom comparable with the Britain of Roman times.

 There was a similar end of an old order and its replacement by the new just a week ago, on 1^st April.  The final nails were being hammered into the coffin of the caring welfare state established by my generation in the wake of World War II.  It was being replaced by a new brutal barbarism, devoted to the service and worship of its false god Mammon, to whom it is determined to sacrifice our poorest and most helpless citizens in the interest of a favoured minority.  It was on 1^st April (and how appropriated that it should have been on April Fools Day!) that the government’s austerity cuts, and the radical reconstruction of the NHS increasingly opening its doors to ‘the private sector’, came into force and the direction in which our country is being led became abundantly clear.

I have little doubt that many years and a great deal of suffering will have to be endured before we return to a Britain comparable with that of Clement Attlee, Harold MacMillan, Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, in which Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear for all our citizens were the objectives of all our political leaders no matter how different may have been their means of achieving them.

The Chancellor and his supporters claim that the government’s policies encourage those who work hard to support themselves and their families.  Yet two of the measures that came into force last week will penalise low-paid workers as much as, if not more than, the unemployed.   As a former local authority Housing Manager I find the new ‘bedroom tax’ particularly objectionable. Yes, I know that the government dislikes that designation but I’m afraid they’ll have to learn to live with it just as their predecessors had to live with the ‘poll tax’ that they found equally objectionable and that brought about their downfall.

The bedroom tax clearly labels tenants of ‘social housing’ (Councils and Housing Associations) as second class citizens.  Owner/occupiers can, of course, have as many bedrooms as they like and so can occupiers of publicly owned ‘tied houses’, provided they are posh enough.   Nobody asks how many spare bedrooms there may be at either 9 or 10 Downing Street or at Chequers. It is only Plebs who live in Council Houses who must pay extra – or get out – if they have a spare bedroom to accommodate an occasional guest, or a grown-up son or daughter who sometimes comes home to spend a weekend with  mum and dad.

They have got it all worked out.  Single or widowed, and married or ‘living together’ tenants with no children, need only one bedroom.  If they have one child, two of the same sex, or two of the opposite sex but under ten years old, they need only two bedrooms, and so on.  When I was Clacton’s Housing Manager we used to encourage elderly tenants whose children had left home, to move into smaller accommodation – and many of them did.  We never dreamed of compelling them or of penalising them if they failed to do so. Nor did we ever suggest that they should move into less roomy accommodation until we had such accommodation to offer them.  They may have lived in one of the Council’s houses but it was their home and the (Conservative) Council respected that.

Nowadays those who seek ‘social housing’ are not allowed the privilege of transforming their council houses into ‘their homes’.  Tenancies are all to be ‘short term’ and, unless they are prepared to pay extra for the privilege, they’re just offered minimal shelter from the elements. No, of course the local authority or housing association can’t be expected to have smaller accommodation for those who simply can’t pay that extra ‘bedroom tax’.  ‘They must find that for themselves – or sleep rough as many others have to.  The Salvation Army or some other lot of ‘do gooders’ will make sure that they don’t actually starve – and the weather will surely warm up eventually’.

Another measure that will affect the employed as much as the unemployed relates to Council Tax.  From last Monday thousands of disabled or otherwise disadvantaged house-holders will be liable to pay their full Council Tax for the first time.   This imposition of central government is particularly clever as Councils are permitted to continue any existing rebates provided they can make up the short-fall elsewhere.   Thus it will be local and not central government that gets the blame.

And the wider picture

            Just as the members of the government are penalising the poor for failing to move into non-existent smaller homes, they are penalising the unemployed for failing to take up non-existent jobs.   The cap on benefits and restriction of cost-of-living increases to one percent when inflation is over twice that rate are all justified as helping to break the ‘dependency culture’ and encourage the unemployed to work for their living.   The biggest and best encouragement that the poor can have is for there to be plenty of properly paid work for them to do.  Not until that situation exists is the government or the popular press entitled to denigrate the unemployed as ‘work-shy’. How extraordinary that those who believe that the poor can only be persuaded to work by holding over them the threat of homelessness and starvation, simultaneously believe that the very wealthy can only be persuaded to give of their best by the promise of substantial bribes,  euphemistically referred to as bonuses!

            I am glad to see the Christian Churches in this country united in their support of the poor.  Paul Morrison, public issues policy adviser of the Methodist Church told the BBC in a recent interview that the benefit cuts are a symptom of a popularly held belief that the poor ‘somehow deserve their poverty’.  Christian Churches accused politicians and the news media of promoting six myths about the poor:

They are lazy.   They are addicted to drink or drugs.   They are not really poor.  They cheat the system. They have an easy life.  They were the cause of the deficit.     These are false claims that all Christians have a duty to challenge.

An ‘Old Hand’ for a New Job!

In 1974 the Tendring District Council was newly formed from the amalgamation of Clacton, Frinton and Walton, and Brightlingsea Urban Districts, the Tendring Rural District and the Borough of Harwich.  As the new council’s first Public Relations Officer I soon realized that the councillors from Harwich, of whatever their political allegiance, exercised an authority and an influence well beyond their numbers on the new Council. 

That was nearly forty years ago but it seems probable that the recent victory of John Hawkins in a District Council by-election will continue and strengthen that tradition.   Mr Hawkins had been Chief Executive of the Tendring Council. He retired in 2010 after thirteen years in the Council’s top job.

During his election campaign as the Labour Candidate for the vacancy, he had said that he would use his knowledge and experience of local government within the Tendring District to give Harwich a strong voice on the council.  It was after my own retirement from the Council’s service that John Hawkins was appointed to the post of Chief Executive,  so I have never met him.  I wish him well though and I have little doubt that, now that parliamentary style politics have been introduced into the Council Chamber, his experienced voice will strengthen and hearten ‘the Opposition’.

‘Brain Upgrade’ needed?

Do you have a feeling of apprehension when you go to close down your computer and a notice appears on the screen urging you not to switch off because one or more updates are being installed?  The computer will switch itself off when the process is complete.

        I know that I do, because experience tells me that when I  switch on again, something (who knows what?) won’t be quite the same.  I know that whatever it is will make my computer more secure and/or more efficient.  It may also mean though that I will have to perform a familiar task in a different and unfamiliar way – and, at my age, I just don’t like change!

That’s why this cartoon, forwarded to me by my fifteen-years-younger-than-me sister-in-law, speaks to my condition (as we Quakers say)

           

Tendring Topics…..on line

Helping the Old and Disabled
Flatford Mill, once the home and birthplace of landscape painter John Constable, has been one of my favourite destinations for over seventy-five years! In my mid-teens I was an enthusiastic fresh-water angler. Usually I exercised my skills on the River Gipping, near to my Ipswich home. Occasionally though, taking a packed lunch from my mum, I would cycle along the London Road to East Bergholt and on to Flatford, to see what the Stour had to offer. The headmaster of the Northgate School, my Ipswich Secondary School, was strongly opposed to last minute swotting for exams. Accordingly he established a tradition that all candidates for the Matric (the national school leaving examination, usually taken at 16) cycled to Flatford for the day before the exams started (we were all cyclists in those days) and spent it on the river in hired skiffs.


In adult life, although I no longer fished, I found Flatford Mill as attractive as ever, and drove there on a number of occasions with friends and family, sometimes again hiring a skiff for a leisurely row up-river to Dedham. In recent years, I have had to rely on others to provide transport. Both my sons have driven me there on a number of occasions, reviving old memories.

Progressively limited mobility has meant that I can no longer stride over that wooden bridge and stroll along the river bank from which I had, years before, cast my fishing line. I can now do little more than walk, unsteadily and with the aid of a stick, from the disabled car park to the riverside restaurant for refreshment, and back to the car park again. On our most recent visit though we spotted, standing near to the restaurant, an electric mobility scooter with a notice announcing that its use was free, ‘enquire at the Bridge Cottage Shop’.

I have been using a mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) for years. My son enquired, and a friendly and helpful young lady showed me how the controls worked – not quite like mine but easy enough to use. She asked me a few questions, watched me do a short test drive (to make sure that I wasn’t going to drive straight into the river!) and entrusted me with the key!

The range of the mobility scooter is a little limited. The wooden bridge giving access to the Essex bank of the river is, for instance, out of bounds. However one can drive along the lane behind Bridge Cottage and the restaurant and shop, to Willy Lott’s Cottage and to Flatford Mill itself. Because maximum speed of the scooter is that of a comfortable walking pace, accompanying friends and relatives have no difficulty keeping up with it. The Mill has for some years accommodated a ‘field studies’ education centre where my then fifteen-year-old elder son once spent a week with a school party during his final years at Clacton County High School.

From the Mill it is possible to go on a pleasant circular route through the countryside, returning to the Mill and eventually to Bridge Cottage, where the mobility scooter is returned to its owners.

I think that, combined with the nearby car park for disabled drivers or their passengers, and the adjacent disabled toilet, it provides a valuable service for no-longer-agile visitors that deserves all the publicity it can get. Not many beauty spots and tourist destinations do as much.

Flatford Mill, viewed from the Essex bank of the Stour

‘Thanks be to God!’
On Tuesday of last week (12th October) when I posted the predecessor of this blog on the internet, the release of the thirty-three entombed Chilean miners was imminently expected. Originally it had been thought that the relief shaft through which they were to be lifted to freedom wouldn’t be completed till Christmas. Progress though, had been much better than expected. By 12th October (over two months ahead of schedule!), the relief shaft had reached the man-made cavern in which the miners were confined. A rescue capsule had been designed and manufactured and the liberation of the miners, one at a time, might possibly begin within hours. I had been delighted but had decided not to refer to it in my blog. There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip! I had seen too many unforeseen last-minute disasters!

I woke up soon after 4.00 a.m. on the 13th. It was long before I needed to get up but I knew from experience that there would be no more sleep for me. I wondered what was happening in Chile. There was bound to be something on BBC World News. I switched on my bedside radio to learn that the first trapped miner had already been brought to the surface. The second was on his way! And so it continued all day – a smooth, perfectly organised rescue operation. The target had been one rescue an hour, but this was exceeded. It took less than twenty-four hours for every one of those thirty-three miners to be snatched from what had seemed likely to be their grave.

I watched much of the rescue on tv. It was a wonderful to see the tearful joy on the freed miners’ faces, and on those of their parents, wives or girlfriends, and their little sons or daughters, as they were reunited after weeks of fear-filled separation. Some of the freed miners knelt on the ground and crossed themselves, thanking God for their deliverance. ‘How ridiculous to credit God with this rescue!’ must have thought the disciples of antifaith zealot Richard Dawkins. ‘It obviously owed everything to the skill and determination of we humans, and nothing whatsoever to the imaginary world of the supernatural!

Really? Then who, or what, was it that had persuaded those humans to devote hundreds of thousands of pounds, the experience and skills of an army of rescue workers, and weeks of potentially profitable time, to the rescue of just thirty-three poor Chilean miners? It certainly wasn’t fundamentalist Darwinism. Those miners had lost the possibility of contributing to the infinitely slow evolutionary process of perfecting the human gene – the sole ‘purpose’ of our existence. Put their loss down to experience and get on with living.

Nor was it the service of Mammon, the third millennium’s most popular god. Mammon’s three abiding virtues are Productivity, Profitability and Cost Effectiveness (and the greatest of these is Cost Effectiveness!) Never was there a less cost effective exercise than that of bringing those Chilean miners – thirty-three low value human resource units - to safety.

I suggest that it was what we Quakers describe as ‘the promptings of love and truth in our hearts’ (sometimes called ‘that of God’ or ‘the Inward Light of Christ’), God’s gift to every man, woman and child in the world. It was this that had inspired and urged on those untiring rescuers and those who had organised and funded their efforts. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me!’

Centuries ago, St Theresa had said, ‘In this world God has no hands but ours to do his bidding, no feet but ours to run his errands’

Of course the miners were right to thank God for his goodness. So should we all.

‘The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind’

That answer, provided by Bob Dylan in a famous ‘protest’ song of the early 1960s is certainly part of the answer to the solution of Britain’s energy problems. It could also help solve some of Tendring District’s economic and employment problems.

Tendring Council is bidding, against competition from Germany, the Netherlands and other parts of the UK, for Harwich to be developed as a ‘wind farm port’, building and maintaining the hundreds of wind farms already built, in the process of being built, or planned for the future along England’s east coast.

Council leader Neil Stock is reported as saying that the potential is enormous. ‘It’s a real opportunity for the town and would bring in skilled jobs to revitalise what is a struggling area…..we are talking hundreds of jobs and, with the boost to the economy, it would mean thousands’.

In Harwich’s favour would be the fact that it is already an internationally known port, and its central and easily accessible position convenient for the Continent, with a major wind farm offshore at Clacton, and positioned midway between the wind turbines off the Kent coast, and those off the coast of north-east England. It could be developed where a new container port had been proposed at Bathside Bay. Mr Stock said that the current economic climate meant that that container port couldn’t have been provided ‘for at least a generation’.

INTend, Tendring Council’s private enterprise regeneration agency, has been given the job of turning those ambitious hopes into reality – a brilliant opportunity to prove to its critics (including me!) that it really can earn its keep.

The Council’s bid has the backing of Harwich and North Essex MP Bernard Jenkins. Perhaps it is just as well that Harwich is no longer within the constituency of Richard Carswell – Clacton’s climate-change-denying MP. I fear that he might have been unable to show much enthusiasm for the development of an alternative source of energy.