Week 33 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

It wasn’t ‘too good to be true’

          Regular blog readers will know that I have been concerned about the fate of Meriem Ibrahim, the young North Sudanese mother who had been convicted of the ‘heinous crime’ of abandoning Islam for Christianity (she had, in fact, been brought up by her Christian mother and had never been a Muslim) and sentenced to death by hanging.  Before being hanged she was to be flogged with 100 lashes for marrying a Christian and having a child by him.  Such marriages are forbidden by Sharia law and are condemned as ‘adulterous’! At the time of her condemnation she was heavily pregnant with her second child – a baby girl who was born while her mother was shackled to the floor of her cell.

            Following world-wide protests an appeal against the sentence was successful but she was prevented from flying with her family to her husband’s home in the USA on the pretext of a faulty passport. A fortnight ago a report on BBC tv announced that the whole family had been allowed to fly to Italy where they had met the Pope who had congratulated Meriem on her steadfast refusal to abandon her Christian faith, a course of action that could have earned her freedom.  Sadly this report was never confirmed or taken up by the media – and a search on line by Google discovered no news of Meriem later than her re-arrest at Khartoum airport when she had tried to leave the country.  I concluded that the news of the family’s flight to Italy was ‘too good to be true’ and this gloomy opinion was reinforced by a news report that the family had taken refuge in the United States Embassy in Khartoum and that her father (who had left her mother to bring up her baby alone!) was urging the reinstatement of the death sentence.

 Home – at last.  The Ibrahim family re-united in the USA.  Baby Maya, born in a Sudanese prison cell, is in her mother’s arms and her toddler son in the care of his Grandpa.   

 It has now become clear that that early BBC report was true.  The whole family had clandestinely flown to Italy with an Italian government minister.  They had met the Pope and Meriem had been congratulated on her refusal to renounce her faith despite the dire consequences that could have followed that refusal.  It seems too that that hasty departure from the American Embassy and from North Sudan, was not a moment too soon.  A lynch mob had been threatening to storm the Embassy and seize its prey!  At a time of bloodshed and violence and of the persecution of Christians throughout much of the Middle East and large areas of northern Africa, the Meriem Ibrahim story is one that has a happy ending!  Latest news reports confirm that Meriem, her husband and two children have flown to her husband’s home in the USA where they have been given a heroes’ welcome.  It was one story that wasn’t too good to be true!

Still living with Mum at 21? - and 31?

          Members and supporters of the present government never tire of complaining about the ‘terrible mess that the previous Labour government left us to clear up’. Well, I was never an enthusiast for New Labour but the Governor of the Bank of England who has recently retired always insisted that it was the Bankers and money-lenders, not the politicians, who were to blame for that mess.

            One of the messes that the New Labour government inherited from the Thatcher years – and failed to address – was the iniquitous right to buy legislation that compelled local authorities, but not private landlords, to sell their council owned houses at a fraction of their market value to sitting tenants  Inevitably council houses in pleasant rural areas were quickly bought up and sold on - often at an enormous profit – directly this legally became possible.  Equally inevitably, since councils were unable to build houses for letting ­to replace them, there were no properties for letting at reasonable rents in many rural villages.   Young couples, whose forbears had lived in that village for generations, found themselves compelled to move away.  Many villages consequently became ‘dormitories’, with their inhabitants commuting daily to the nearest town, doing much of their shopping there, and taking no interest in local life and local affairs.

            Mrs Thatcher and her successors, in pursuit of their dream of home ownership for all changed public attitudes so that, as Paul Honeywood, Tendring Council’s ‘housing boss’ told a Clacton Gazette reporter ‘Council homes are often looked at as a last resort for the unemployed and people in financial trouble but’ he added, ‘we are trying to change that perception and offer it as an alternative for those wanting to set up on their own or start a family’. What Mr Honeywood is urging is in fact, a return to the system that existed and worked satisfactorily for a century before the advent of Thatcherism – when local authorities, without interference from national politicians, built houses for letting and allocated them to those in need.  There was then no stigma attached to ‘living in a council house’.  When I was appointed as a Public Health Inspector by Clacton Council in 1956, my family and I were happy to live in a Council House in Holland-on-Sea until, after a few months, we purchased and moved into the bungalow in which I am living today.

            Clacton, and the Tendring District generally, is particularly in need of social housing available for letting at a reasonable rent.  The housing charity Shelter has discovered that one third of Tendring’s 20 to 34 year olds, despite being in work, continue to live in the family home with mum and dad.   They simply can’t afford ‘to get their feet on the housing ladder’ with house properties at their present level – and there are no longer, as there once were, council houses available for letting.

            Tendring’s position is worse than that of other neighbouring local authority areas.   In Colchester 6,064 (22 percent) of 20 to 34 year old are still living in the family home, in Braintree 5,770 (28 percent) and in Tendring 4,801 (37 percent) Typical of such a ‘stay-at-home’ is 22 year old Natasha Fuller of St Osyth who works full-time as a hairdresser.  She told a Gazette reporter, ‘I still live at home with my parents even though I have a full-time job.  I don’t earn enough to save for a mortgage or rent on my own home while running a car at the same time’.

Shelter representative Campbell Robb told the Gazette ’The clipped-wing generation are finding themselves with no choice but to remain living with mum and dad well into adulthood.  And those who aren’t lucky enough to have this option face a lifetime of unstable, expensive, private renting.  The government knows that the only way to turn the tide of the housing shortage is to fill the gap between the homes we have and the homes we need’.

And the only effective way of doing that is to repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation and – as in the pre-Thatcher past – encourage local authorities to build the homes their district needs, and to let them to local people who need a home, without interference from ‘Nanny knows best, dear’ politicians!
 .       
ISIS is still with us!

          The blood bath in Gaza, the downing of the Malaysian air liner over eastern Ukraine and the centenary commemoration of World War I have driven ISIS and its determination to establish an extremist Islamic Caliphate throughout Syria and Iraq (and that’s just for a start!) from the news headlines during the past week or so.  They’re still there though and although they don’t seem to have made any progress towards taking Baghdad, they’re consolidating their strict Islamic rule over the territories that they have taken and are edging forward whenever they have the opportunity to do so.

            A recent effect of this has been to drive tens of thousands of Christian Iraqis from their homes in areas where the Christian faith has flourished for centuries.  Many in northern Iraq had been protected by the semi-independent Kurds but their protectors have now been driven out and the new extreme Islamic regime has offered the choice of death, conversion to their own extreme version of Islam, or a crippling tax payable by all non-Muslims. nearly one hundred thousand have fled and are now trapped on a barren mountain without shelter, food or water..  They urgently need the help of their Christian brothers and sisters in Europe and elsewhere. ISIS has changed its name and now likes to be called simply IS, standing for Islamic State.  Its members haven’t changed their nature though.

            Successive British governments’ no-doubt-well-intentioned meddling in Iraq, Libya and Syria has prepared the ground and earned recruits for extremists like IS and Al Qaeda.The Christian faith is being eradicated from the very area that gave it birth, and the whole of the Middle East and large areas of Africa, are now areas in which Britons visit, live and work in danger of their lives!  

            I wonder if Tony Blair and his successors are proud of the results of their activities?

Later News

         Since I wrote the above, only a day or two ago, events have moved quickly.  The USA and the UK governments have heeded the call for help of the thousands of Christian Iraqi civilians in their barren mountain refuge.   We are co-operating with the Americans in dropping water, food and the means of providing shelter to those refugees and the USA is also carrying out air strikes on the IS forces, though both governments insist that there will be no ground forces involved.

I applaud wholeheartedly the provision of humanitarian aid though, quite apart from the morality of the action, I doubt very much whether air strikes alone can be expected either to make it possible for the refugees to go peacefully to their former home free from persecution, or to pass through territory IS holds to a place of safety. Obviously the present situation cannot continue.  We can't supply those refugees indefinitely - and winter is approaching.  I wish that I could envisage a happy non-violent ending to the present situation.  I can't and, if I'm to be absolutely honest, I can't  imagine a violent one either.

I hope and pray that someone can! 

           

Week 19 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line          

‘Call the Midwife!’

          Clacton isn’t a town noted for its political activists and its violent (or even non-violent) marches and demonstrations. It is astonishing therefore that there were two protest marches, for the same cause, one on Saturday 26^th April and one on the following day. The cause was the hospital authority’s decision to close the Maternity Units in the Clacton-on-Sea and in Harwich and to concentrate maternity services in Colchester.   The reason is not because of shortage of midwives or other staff in either Clacton or Harwich – but because of a shortage of midwives in Colchester!   They need Clacton’s and Harwich’s midwives to make up the numbers.

            This is said to be a ‘temporary arrangement’ but we suspicious Clactonians suspect that it’s one of those ‘temporary arrangements’ that go on for longer than expected – until, in fact, everyone comes to accept them and it is then decided to make them permanent. `

            No-one likes to see a local service closed down and local people compelled to go further to a larger more distant centre, but the nature of the maternity service and the geographical situation of both Clacton and Harwich make it doubly undesirable in our Tendring district. A glance at a large-scale map of south-eastern East Anglia will make it clear that the Tendring peninsula is almost-an-island bounded by the estuaries of the rivers Stour and Colne, a relatively narrow isthmus extending from Colchester to Manningtree, and a wide length of coastline with the port of Harwich/Parkeston and the popular holiday seaside resorts of Dovercourt, Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton-on-Sea, Holland-on-Sea, Clacton-on-Sea, Jaywick Sands, St Osyth and Brightingsea.

            The only road access is through that Colchester/Manningtree isthmus from which highways fan out to serve resorts which attract motorists from London, the Midlands and the whole of East Anglia to their safe, sandy beaches, seaside holiday attractions – and the lowest average annual rainfall in the United Kingdom!  It follows that throughout all the summer and at weekends in the spring and autumn (particularly bank holiday weekends) those roads are often clogged up with holiday traffic, sometimes reduced to a snail’s pace by sheer numbers, or by the occasional road accident.

            Tough on the mother in labour, perhaps with her first baby, stuck in a traffic jam somewhere between Clacton – or Harwich – and Colchester!  I don’t suppose that the time-and-motion experts who calculated that under ‘normal circumstances’ neither journey should take much more than half an hour, even thought about that.  Babies in a hurry to be born know nothing about normal circumstances, holiday traffic or traffic jams.

            I’m not surprised that Clactonians have protested, marched and demonstrated against this stupid and thoughtless decision of the hospital authorities.  Why though were there two almost identical marches with two lots of protesters?   The Saturday march was the Conservative march, organised and led by Conervative Tendring District Council.  The Sunday march was the Labour march and was organised by the local Labour Party and led by the prospective Labour candidate Tim Young..  The closure of Clacton and Harwich’s maternity units is not a political issue.  Gilbert and Sullivan wrote in one of their comic operas ‘Every little man-child that is born alive is either a little Liberal or a little Conservative’.  Luckily they don’t know that and, luckily or not, nowadays it isn’t only male babies involved, nor is it limited to just two parties.

            I think it a great pity that the two main parties hadn’t got together for a united protest march, thus demonstrating that compassion and common sense aren’t the sole prerogative of one party, and that they can unite when the occasion demands it.  They might have persuaded some of the others to join in – the Lib-Dems, the Greens and the Ukippers (I’m sure they’re convinced that it’s all the fault of ‘Brussels’) might well have joined them!

Those Market Forces

            I don’t like living in a society with an economy reliant on Market Forces.  I believe   that co-operation is better than competition, that we shouldn’t all be trying to get as much as we can for as little as we can get away with, and that we shouldn’t need to follow the advice to ‘shop around’ and change our power supplier, our banker, our savings account, whenever it may seem that it would pay us to do so. Old people - and there are a lot of us in this area - don't like unnecessary change. The cheapest is rarely the best and the supplier or the banker may change his charges as soon as you put your phone down. In the 17^th and 18^th century Quaker businessmen – grocers, brewers, bankers, manufacturers – made their fortunes by declining to yield to market forces.  They bought in or made the products they sold, added just sufficient to make themselves a reasonable living and stuck to that price and to that quality of goods.  Quaker businesses may not always have sold the cheapest goods but customers could be quite sure that they hadn’t been watered down or adulterated, that the price wouldn’t be put up if there were to be a sudden shortage and  that there would be no hidden ‘extra charges’.   That policy benefited both the buyer and the seller.

            Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  The ethics of the market place have made us a nation of cynics.   We’re interested only in prices.  The only ‘value’ market traders recognise is the highest price that goods or services can command at any given time ‘in the open market’.   A diamond ring commands a higher price than a shovel (though there are situations in which a shovel could save your life and a diamond ring would have no value whatsoever), and a merchant banker (a money lender) can demand a higher price for his services than a brain surgeon!

            Market prices depend upon supply and demand.  Increase the demand for any desirable product without increasing its supply will raise that product’s price as surely as night follows day. 

            It was this axiom that made me predict confidently in this blog that the government’s help to buy scheme for would-be house buyers would have the effect of raising house prices.  You will recall that a major factor in the creation of the financial crisis from which we hope we are now emerging, was the unwise lending of large sums of money for the purchase of homes.  Because there were not enough homes for hopeful would-be purchasers to buy, the price went up…and up, until it toppled over.

            Many house-buyers had taken on a debt they couldn’t hope to pay off.  Hundreds were rendered homeless and lenders were left with bad debts that could have rendered them bankrupt had the government not bailed them out – with our money!

            Determined not to make the same mistake again, banks and building societies increased the deposit they required from would-be buyers to as much as 25 percent of the price of the property, effectively putting home ownership out of the reach of most first-time buyers.  However David Cameron and George Osborne, determined to pursue the chimera of ‘a nation of home-owners’ introduced their ‘help to buy’ scheme which offered an additional loan to help with that deposit so that the initial sum required by the house-purchaser would be no more than 5 percent of the price of the property.

            This has had two totally predictable effects. Demand for homes once more greatly exceeds supply and – as I had foreseen – house prices are again rising well ahead of general inflation.  The other effect is that the government has, by guaranteeing most of the required deposit, taken on a debt that the professional money lenders had thought was too risky – and, without consulting the electorate – has done so with taxpayers’ money!   This has clearly worried the professionals and they are now asking would-be borrowers a series of very intrusive questions before they will arrange a mortgage. ‘How much do they spend on holidays, on dining out, on alcohol, on entertaining, on children’s education and other financial commitments, and how they would manage their mortgage repayments if – or rather when - interest rates rise?

            The best response?  It’s surely to accept that home ownership is not everybody’s obvious choice.  Repeal the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation and encourage local authorities to build homes for letting as they did for a century before the advent of Margaret Thatcher – and allow those same authorities to allocate those homes as they think best.  In a word; to restore some of the democratic local decision making that is an important aspect of the ‘localism’ to which the government pays lip-service but has been systematically destroying since taking office.

Week 47 2011 29.11.2011

Tendring Topics……on line

'What goes around, comes around'

            There was a time – I remember it well – when the maximum loan for house purchase that Building Society and Bank Managers would approve for house purchase depended upon the income of the main wage earner in the applicant’s family.  That was in the days before it was assumed that both members of the marriage or other partnership would continue in full-time work even after a baby or babies arrived.   Then, provided one of the couple, usually the male, had a steady job they could buy their new home with a twenty or twenty-five years mortgage and a deposit of ten percent of the total cost.  If the local authority were prepared to act as guarantor and the applicant’s job seemed very secure, then a five percent deposit might be acceptable.

            When, way back it 1956, my wife Heather and I bought our bungalow in Clacton (the one in which I am writing these words) we had thought we could manage the monthly mortgage payments on the kind of home that we needed (I had just been appointed Additional Public Health Inspector by Clacton Urban District Council).  Raising the deposit though was a major obstacle.  We had been married for ten years but during that time Heather had suffered a life-threatening illness and had had a crippling operation.  We had two young children, and a loan to repay on the car I needed for my work.  My pay had been adequate but we had virtually no savings.   The Council was prepared to act as guarantor and we had only to raise five percent of the value of the bungalow.  It seems a totally piffling sum now but we were able to raise it only by selling Heather’s solitaire diamond engagement ring that I had bought eleven years earlier with a considerable proportion of the army back pay I had accumulated as a prisoner of war.

            There came a housing shortage.  It was destined to be made much worse by Mrs Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ legislation that, within a short space of time, markedly reduced the amount of social housing available for letting.  With rents prohibitively high in the private sector, young couples yearned to get their feet on the first rung of the home ownership ladder.

            It was a time of low unemployment and relative prosperity.  Married women, including young mothers, carried on working, leaving their children in day care.    Banks relaxed their rules and made loans based on the total income of the applicants – not just that of the highest earner.  Many more became eligible for mortgages.  But, of course, there was no commensurate increase in the number of homes available for purchase.  The price of houses began to rise, and rise – and rocket!   The housing boom had begun.  Soon house price inflation soared well above general rise in prices.

             Banks competed with each-other in making tempting offers to would-be buyers.  Ninety-five percent mortgages became commonplace.  Soon there were one hundred percent, and eventually one hundred and ten percent loans to help prospective house buyers with their legal costs and their removal and furnishing expenses!

            It couldn’t, and didn’t last.  The bubble burst.  Home buyers (they had imagined they were ‘home owners’ but they weren’t!) or their partners lost their jobs and half their incomes.  They couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments and either sold their homes at a loss, or were dispossessed by the Bank. House prices plummeted. The homes thus recovered by the Banks were often worth only a fraction of the sums originally loaned on them.  Some Banks would have been declared bankrupt had they not been bailed out by us taxpayers.     

            Right now we have stagnation.  Few new houses are being built.  Skilled and experienced building workers – bricklayers, plumbers, electricians – are unemployed.  Many people are homeless or inadequately housed. There is an acute housing shortage and there is nothing like sufficient social housing available for rent.

            There is, of course, an obvious solution – repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation and encourage local authorities and Housing Associations to build housing for letting, fund them adequately and leave them to solve the housing problem in their own areas – as they did successfully for a century before the advent of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatism and its pale-pink New Labour shadow.  That would have been true ‘localism’.

            Is that what the Coalition Government is going to do?   Not likely; they are going to encourage remaining council tenants to buy their own homes with discounts as high as 50 percent (well, it isn’t their money they’re giving away!) and guarantee,  with taxpayers’ money, part of the mortgage on  homes newly built for sale at affordable prices.    This, it is hoped, will encourage Banks to reduce the level of that difficult deposit and bring home-purchase within the scope of ordinary people again. This, so they declare, will stimulate the building trade and thus get the general economy moving.  I hope that it will!  It seems to me though to be offering to bail out the banks before they are even in trouble, and bringing us back to a situation similar to that at the beginning of the house price boom.

‘Ere the winter storms begin’

          The harvest hymn tells us that, ‘All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin’.   And so it should be – but those of us who live in towns know that bringing in the harvest is not the only task that needs to be performed before the winter storms, the ice and perhaps the snow are with us again. Among them are repair of the damage done to our roads and footpaths by the last two hard winters.

Well, here are a couple of local examples of road and footpath disrepair that need urgent attention.  They are by no means the only examples of highway neglect in Clacton and they are almost certainly not the worst, but they are examples that I see regularly.  The footpath is beside Old Road and is regularly used by pedestrians (and mobility scooterists) on their way to Morrison’ supermarket.  It is a positive danger to those unsteady on their feet or with impaired sight, and a source of bone-shaking discomfort to scooterists.  I speak from personal experience!

            The pothole is in Beaconsfield Road, near its junction with Skelmersdale Road.  If it doesn’t receive attention it will get much worse, and more dangerous, in the coming winter.  Unspectacular work like this is far more worth-while than, for instance, the wholesale reconstruction of the seaward end of Pier Avenue last winter – when the dust had scarcely settled on the precious reconstruction!

The ever widening incomes gap!

          At last – the gaping chasm between the incomes of the poorest and the wealthiest of us has received the attention of an official investigation and is being brought to the attention of the government.  It seems that the average income of the staff of a top FTSE100 company is £20,000 a year (for many people even that is wealth beyond the dreams of avarice!) while the incomes of Directors and Chief Executives of these companies is – wait for it! – more than three and a half million pounds a year.

            A CBI spokesman explained to us on TV this morning why nothing could – or should – be done about this.  It’s all because of that wonderful Global Market. Profit-making enterprises throughout the world need the very best brains to make them even more profitable.  They are prepared to pay the best salaries, bonuses and other perks, to get them.   If we lesser mortals were to attempt to limit the number of millions our top people receive (I can’t bring myself to write ‘earn’) they would simply up sticks and move elsewhere.  How very convenient, for some, it is to have an economic system that demands that the pay of workers gets ever lower so that we can be competitive in the global market, while that of their bosses has to get ever higher, for exactly the same reason!

Despite the obvious absurdity of this situation and world wide protests about its manifest unfairness and injustice, the Global Market is welcomed by all three of our main political parties!

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

            The government’s policy of cuts in public services and benefits, and of tax increases (in VAT and similar indirect or ‘stealth’ taxes) that particularly affect the less-well-off are really beginning to bite.  The provident, who have ‘nest eggs’ in savings accounts with banks and building societies are worse hit than the extravagant.  Their savings decrease in value as inflation outstrips the meagre interest that they earn.  Some  have lost their homes, many more have lost their jobs and practically all of us are beginning to lose hope.

            There would be one very simple and straightforward way of restoring our faith in the Coalition Government’s handling of the economic crisis and persuading us that the sacrifices we all (except the seriously wealthy) are having to make, have been worthwhile. Why not – perhaps quarterly or half-yearly – reveal by how many (surely millions) of pounds the deficit has been reduced during that period?  Then we would know whether or not the gain had been worth the pain.  As a former public relations officer I am astonished that this isn’t already happening.  Could it be that there has been no decrease?  Perhaps there has even been  an increase in that worrying deficit; one that even the most accomplished spin doctor would have difficulty in attributing to the previous Labour Government, or to ‘Brussels’, or to whom or whatever is the latest popular scapegoat.   

            That is very possible.  The cynical may see it as a reason why no such disclosure has been made.  A blog reader points out that the government, in formulating its financial strategy must have been expecting the national economy to show modest (perhaps 2 percent) growth.   This would have been expected to bring a reduction in the number of benefit claimants, together with increased revenue from corporation tax, income tax and VAT.  In fact the government’s austerity policy has killed economic growth, increased unemployment and suppressed demand.

            It is an unfortunate fact that we have to rely on their political opponent’s estimates of the effects that their policies, and those of their rivals, would have on the deficit.

            The Conservatives claim that Labour’s policy of reversing ‘the cuts’ to stimulate the economy, would increase the deficit by £85 billion a year by the end of the present Parliament.  They may well be quite right.

            Labour has considered Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts from November 2010 together with the latest estimates from independent forecasters, They predict that the coalition government’s borrowing could rise by £11 billion more than planned this year, £22 billion next year, £34 billion in 2013 – ’14, and £42 billion in 2014-’15.

            Voters at the next election will, it seems, have a clear choice.  Vote Conservative, cut even deeper, and increase the deficit, or Vote Labour, reverse the cuts and – though in a slightly different way – do the same thing!

            Well, it isn’t all that likely that I shall still be around for the next General Election to have to make a decision! 

An Affront – or a Lucky Escape?

          A couple of weeks ago members of Tendring Council, together with the local press, were full of indignation at the fact that Tendring was the one district in Essex through which the Olympic Torch  would not be carried next year as it makes its tortuous journey to the Olympic Stadium at Stratford.

            Now I learn that the passage of the torch through Colchester on July 6^th   is expected to cost the district council £30,000 in road closures, crowd control and street cleaning.  Our omission from the route may have been a blow to our local pride but I reckon that in every other respect it was a lucky escape!