Week 26 2013

Tendring Topics………on line

What's really wrong with the economy? - an expert speaks.

          A recurring theme in Tendring Topics…..on Line has been my conviction that the current financial crisis is not the result of the previous government’s over-spending on benefits to the poor and disabled, but of the greed and selfishness of the wealthy.  I believe that the way to get rid of that deficit about which we are always hearing is not to cut expenditure but to make sure that everyone in the land bears a proportionate burden of taxation.  I am appalled when I hear the leader of the Labour Party, the only possible alternative government, proclaim that his party in power would pursue a very similar policy to that of the present government – but would do so more effectively and, if market forces permitted, a shade more humanely; hardly the kind of policy that inspired the pioneers of the Labour Movement to brave dungeon dark and gallows grim, and whose lifeblood dyed blood-red ‘every fold of the peoples’ flag’!   No wonder neo-fascist movements like Ukip, BNP, and English Defence League are gaining popular support.

            I am not an economist and am unable to substantiate my conviction.  I was delighted therefore to read an article by Dr Alan Storkey, economist and sociologist, in the Church Times (not generally thought of as 'loony lefty'!) of 14^th June declaring that ‘It is the rich, not the poor, who are the problem’  and backing that claim with hard facts and figures.

            Dr Storkey writes that Public Sector net debt was 36 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in April 2008, and then doubled after the banking and other crises.  It is still climbing. The banks were and are a big part of the problem, and the Conservatives pushed for deregulated banking. The Government claims to have had a greater impact on debt than is the case.  It still climbs by about £100 billion a year.

            Yet, Labour would have cut back nearly as much as the Conservatives, and could not have kept the economy from what the Archbishop of Canterbury has rightly called a depression.

            The budget deficit requires the Chancellor, George Osborne, to save perhaps £80 billion a year.  Supposedly, it is the poor on benefits who are the problem.  But the underlying issue is that, over several decades, the rich have been milking the state of hundreds of billions of pounds.

            While the cost of benefits to the poor is less than is generally believed, the rich have received big handouts.  The first is tax, where, as the Office of National Statistics has declared, the poor are subsidising the rich.  The bottom 20 percent of the population pay proportionately 5.8 percent more tax than the top 20 percent (38.2 percent rather than 33.6).   If the rich paid the same proportion of their income in tax as the poor, it would bring in another £100 billion a year.

            That is not all.  Higher income groups have benefited from public-sector contracts, high public-sector incomes and bonuses.  For example GPs (family doctors) received a new contract in 2004, giving them an increase in pay from less than £80,000 to more than £100,000 a year for doing less work.  This cost the NHS more than £2 billion annually.

There has been no revaluation of house prices for council tax since 1993.  Over the past two decades house-price increases have mushroomed, but they are not reflected in council tax, which gives another bonus of tens of billions to the wealthy.

The big corporations avoid much VAT, evading tax to the tune of tens of billions.  The personal income of some of the top ten percent exceeds that of the whole of the bottom 50 percent, but some of this moves to tax havens, removing more billions from revenue.  Tax avoidance and evasion is estimated by the Tax Justice Network to amount overall at £70 billion a year.

In addition the banks have received profits through seigniorage, the windfall that comes through creating electronic money, amounting to between £20 and £30 billion a year, beside receiving government support while they run tax havens and give dud payment-protection insurance.

These losses of revenue are an overwhelming explanation of the Chancellor’s woes, and their solution.  Moreover, the way these funds are hoarded, moved and have created debt, explains why the economy is depressed, and will remain so.

Dr Storkey’s article in the Church Times concludes with the hope that, since the wealthy and the political establishment will not debate these issues, it is time that the Christian Church did so.       Why not?   Our God is one who ‘puts down the mighty from their seat and exalts the humble and meek………scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts ………fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich empty away’ -  and the Anglican tradition of Christ’s Universal Church now has a leader who probably has as wide a knowledge and experience of the realms of high finance and low dealing, as anyone either in our Government of millionaires or its supine and spiritless opposition.

The wrong sort of publicity! 

           I have never gone along with the idea that all publicity is good publicity.  There is a difference between ‘fame’ and ‘notoriety’ and it is the latter that has been showered onto Clacton and the Tendring District during the past year or so.

            Quite beyond the control of either the county or district council has been the amount of violent crime – including murder and attempted murder – in and around Clacton during the past year or two, one such incident less than a couple of hundred yards from my front door!  We’re hardly comparable with the Midsomer of Inspector Barnaby or the Oxford of Inspectors Morse and Lewis, but it’s quite disturbing enough in an area that we had thought of as being quiet and peaceful. 

Then there has been the revelation that the Brooklands Estate in Jaywick is Britain’s most deprived area, and that Clacton’s Pier Ward  is a ‘benefits ghetto’. In Pier Ward, the very centre of our holiday town, the UK’s fifth largest number of people on state benefit survive in former boarding houses converted into buildings with multiple ‘bed-sits’.  More recently we have learned that schools in rural areas and seaside towns (that means every one of Tendring’s schools) have an appreciably poorer academic record than those in large inland towns.

            There’s not much that we do about local violent crime. Perhaps the Commissioner we elected a few months ago will make a difference, though I’m not holding my breath!  Michael Gove, the government’s Education Secretary, really tries very hard, reaching back into the past even as far as my school-days, to find a model to solve education’s ills.  Perhaps he’ll succeed one day.

            The government is determined to ‘cut the red tape of planning legislation’ to free developers to ‘create wealth’ and help pull Britain out of recession.  In the ‘80s Mrs Thatcher’s government did much the same thing to free the bankers, wealth creators and financial risk-takers. Nobody at the time thought to mention that the risks were taken with our money!  We have to live with the result today.

            It occurs to me that the planning laws may need to be strengthened rather than weakened. Stronger and more firmly enforced planning legislation could have prevented Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate being transformed from a holiday township with basic facilities suitable only for short-term occupation during the holiday season, to an urban slum with cheap sub-standard homes occupied all the year round.  Is it not possible too that similar laws might have prevented the boarding houses of Clacton’s Pier Ward, being converted into cheap single-room bedsits in a Benefits Ghetto?

            Don’t be in too much of a hurry to cut all that red tape.  It may be all that is holding our fractured society together!

Another ‘bottom of the class!’

          It must have come as something of a shock to Tendring Councillors to know that after over twelve months operation of their reconstructed recyclable and unrecyclable refuse collection service, Tendring Council’s collection of recyclables was the lowest of any local authority within the county of Essex!

            Prior to April 2012 every household in the district had been issued with a green plastic box with lid and a supply of black plastic bags.  The black bags were for non-recyclable rubbish and the green boxes were for paper, cardboard and plastics of all kinds for recycling.  Householders who had more recyclables than would go into the green box could put them in an any-colour-but-black plastic bag or sack and put it on top of the green box.  Filled green boxes and filled black plastic sacks were put on the boundary of the property to be removed on the day of collection.   It worked pretty well though there was a minority of householders who ignored the green box and just put all their refuse in a black sack or sacks as they had done in the past.  Most of us, I think, co-operated.

            That all changed in April 2012.  All 60,000 households were issued with a red plastic box and two smaller green plastic boxes with lockable lids.  Our old green boxes were now to be used only for plastic milk bottles and plastic bottles that had held domestic cleaning fluids.  Other plastics – yoghurt cartons, food containers, plastic bags and so on – were henceforth to be put with the non-recyclable refuse, in the black plastic bag for landfill.

            The two plastic boxes with lockable lids were for food waste.  The smaller (‘the caddy’) was to be kept in the kitchen for the immediate receipt of food waste.  The larger was to be kept outside for reception of the food waste  when the caddy was filled.  The black plastic bag and filled container of food waste were to be put on the boundary of the property every week, the green box with some plastics and the red one with paper and cardboard were to be put out on alternate weeks for fortnightly collection.

              The situation was made worse by the fact that, presumably to save a few pounds, the red boxes for paper and card had no lids!  This inevitably meant extra litter blowing about the streets.  It also meant that when it rained between the box being put out and the arrival of the collectors, the saved paper and card became a soggy mess.  After receiving scores of angry letters, the Council bought 12,000 lids for those red boxes and left them to be picked up by householders at several centres throughout the Tendring District.

            The new recycling collection scheme was described by Tendring Councillor Nick Turner as ‘a Rolls Royce’ service but opposition Councillor Gary Scott wrote in the local daily Gazette ‘It is more like a Robin Reliant Service!’  For householders the system is complicated and, particularly for the old, time and energy consuming.  A kind neighbour carries my filled black sack and two filled plastic boxes (waste food and either the red or the green box) from my back door to my front boundary every week.  I find filling the sack and two plastic boxes every week and putting them by my back door completely exhausting.   Yes, I know that I am very old and am consequently feeble and lacking in energy – but then so are a great many other Tendring householders.  Don’t forget us. We pay our Council tax and we vote!

            Complicated, exhausting and incomplete (tons of salvageable plastics go into landfill) the system is much more ‘Robin Reliant’ than ‘Rolls Royce’.   A stroll down any residential road on ‘collection day’ for that area will reveal that a great many, possibly a majority, of householders simply ignore it and put out two three or four black plastic sacks filled with refuse of all kinds for landfill disposal.   I’m not at all surprised that Tendring District Council is ‘bottom of the class’ where collection of recyclables is concerned.

It is only fair to mention that the Essex County Council has done its bit to discourage recycling by closing Martin’s Farm Disposal and Recycling Centre in St Osyth, and reducing the hours of opening of their other centres.  No wonder there’s an increase in fly-tipping and that there are always queues of motorists at Clacton’s Rush Green Road Disposal and Recycling Centre.

            I expect that both county and district councillors are expecting a pat on the back for having ‘kept the Council Tax down to a minimum’.  I reckon that many voters will feel as I do that we would get better value for our money if the Council spent a little more and provided us with a better service. 

   

S more than £2 billion annually.

Week 24 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘Cash for Questions?'

            ‘Goodness me - No! That would be quite contrary to the standard of integrity expected of ‘honourable gentlemen’ and ‘noble lords’ of both Houses of Parliament. Remember all that fuss there was a few years ago about twenty pound notes in little brown envelopes? Cash for Questions is definitely not on the programme.  Cash for Consultancies? – well, that could be quite a different thing.’

            According to reports on tv and in the press, conversations on the lines above took place a few weeks ago between some of our parliamentary representatives and under-cover journalists who pretended to represent well-heeled business interests.   It seems that the MPs and/or members of the House of Lords involved were - perfectly legally – offered well-paid spare-time consultancies and agreed to further unobtrusively the interests of their paymasters ‘in the House’.  There would be nothing so blatant as ‘cash for questions’, nor so squalid as ‘bulging brown envelopes’.  But the consultant could organise an all-party group of parliamentary friends and colleagues who might raise matters of concern and perhaps ask questions of the relevant Minister.   No-one would suggest for a moment that those friends received any payment for this but (who knows?) they too might be glad of a favour one day.

            David Cameron (who actually foresaw this kind of problem before the last election!) has been spurred into action.  All ‘lobbyists’ (professional benders of MPs’ minds!) are to be registered and steps taken to limit their activities.  Big business will no doubt be relieved to learn that the working poor are also to be prevented from using theiir meagre contributions, entrusted to their trade unions, to influence the minds of MPs! The members of the Government really do imagine that they are thus ensuring that, we’re all in this together!’

            Cash for questions, fiddled expenses and now ‘cash for consultancies’; is there no end to it?  Ordinary members of the public may be astonished that men (no women have so far been involved in the latest scandal) who are in the public eye and who, by most people’s standards, are handsomely remunerated for representing us in parliament, should behave in this way for a few extra quid.  It is surely a result of the general market-driven conviction of the past twenty or thirty years that the desire for money is humankind’s sole motivation; that the rich can only be goaded into action by the promise of even greater wealth, while the poor are kept working by the threat of homelessness and starvation. Everything and everyone has a price! We haven’t yet reached a state that justifies the cynical trans-Atlantic comment that, an honest politician is a politician who, when he’s bought – stays bought!’  - but we’re getting there!

New Labour’s ‘Bright Ideas’

          ‘New Labour’ might almost be called ‘New Conservative’ because, when they achieve power, they seem to have a penchant for conserving the results of their predecessors' actions – no matter how disastrous they may have been.  They didn’t, for instance, repeal the disastrous ‘right to buy’ legislation that compelled local authorities to sell off their community’s housing legacy at a fraction of its true value. Despite its malign effects becoming more and more obvious as the years have passed, Ed Miliband has even apologised for the Labour Party’s having opposed that legislation while in opposition!   Similarly, the new hard-line Conservatives of Mrs Thatcher and her successors might well have been called the ‘New Revolutionaries’. They had no qualms whatsoever about systematically destroying everything established by a Labour Government chosen by returning‘victorious’ servicemen and women from World War II; thus changing the nation’s zeitgeist from service and co-operation to greed and cut-throat competition.

            Ed Miliband has made it clear that, should he become Prime Minister, he will continue in the tradition of Tony Blair and his New Labour colleagues.  There will be the same old devotion to the cut and thrust of the market place, the same deference to the money-changers in ‘the city’, the same preference of private to public enterprise.   He’ll try to make the whole system just a tad less unfair, a little less deferential to cosmopolitan multi-millionaires, perhaps even just a shade more efficient than the present cowboy setup.

            He will, for instance, stop the payment of the winter fuel allowance to those who pay the higher rate of income tax.  He will stop payment of children’s allowance to households where one member has an income above £50,000 a year.  The latter seems a good idea until it is realized that the household of a family with a member whose income is just over £50,000 a year might include a mother who stays at home, making a home for the family and bringing up her child herself, instead of passing the baby to the care of a child-minder while she makes more money.  That family would lose its child allowance while next door may be a couple where husband and wife each earn £45,000 and pass their child on to a day nursery at the earliest opportunity.   They’d keep their child allowance!

            Hasn’t it occurred to Ed Miliband, to George Osborne, or to anyone concerned with the nation’s finances that there is one way of making all ‘universal’ benefits fairer – and that is by making them subject to income tax?  This wouldn't penalise the poor in any way while the better off would be asked for no more than they can afford.  The state retirement pension, a universal benefit if there ever was one, is taxable.   There’s really no reason why children’s allowances, winter  fuel payments, disability (or whatever they’re now called) benefits, attendance allowances (that would affect me, but I’d gladly pay tax on it if all benefits were similarly taxed)  job seekers allowances and so on, should not all be subject to income tax.  Even with our income tax system as it is today it would make for fairness – and bring extra revenue to the government.  A reformed system taking a fixed proportion of the gross income (it’s between the gross and the net that all those wonderful tax avoidance schemes operate!) of every one of us, the poorest as well as the wealthiest, could make our income tax assessment the only means test to which any of us need be subjected – and it would mean that we really were all in this together

Art for Art’s sake

'Modern Art - in Jaywick

Folk of my generation tend to be dismissive of what I believe is known as ‘conceptual art’.  We can see no artistic merit whatsoever in, for instance, an unmade bed, a disembowelled sheep, a light flashing on and off, a pile of bricks, or the ‘acclaimed work of art’ resembling a half-finished poultry shed (on the left!) on which residents of Jaywick were able briefly to feast their eyes a year or so ago.  What’s more, we’re inclined to think that everyone sees them as we do, but that members of a younger generation (as with ‘The Emperor’s new clothes’) don’t like to say so.

This kind of ‘art’ (though, I think, a rather more attractive form of it) is found in the Orient too.  Here is a photo, sent to me by my niece in Hong Kong, of a giant inflatable duck that has been seen floating in the harbour there for several days.   She tells me that it has also been seen in Sidney Harbour in Australia.  Perhaps one day it’ll turn up in the Thames – or even perhaps in Harwich Harbour!

 

A giant duck in Hong Kong Harbour

Thinking about the far-flung members of my family made me realize that a completely original, and of course deeply meaningful (aren't they all?), work of modern art might be created by joining them up by pencilled lines on a globe.  There’s niece Christine in Hong Kong, grandson Christopher in Taipei (in Taiwan).  Then there’s grandson Nick who regularly commutes between London and Brussels. His journeys could make an art-work of their own.  He’s founder and Managing Director of an international tourism consultancy, SE1 Media Ltd.  (www.se1media.com) and on any given day is as likely to be found in Beijing or Brasilia as in either Belgium or the UK.

The ancient grandfather ('monarch of all he surveys!)

Then there are second cousins in Canada of whom I learned only through Facebook, and an even more remote relative (my grandsons’ Aunt) in Western Australia, plus a granddaughter in Sheffield and, right at the centre of the web in sunny Clacton-on-Sea, the ancient patriarch, the not-yet-quite-moribund nonagenarian grandfather!  I can’t wait to get those lines drawn to reveal the artwork of the century!  Where, I wonder, should I apply for an award – and perhaps a cash grant?

    

Week 13 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Happy Easter to all Blog readers!

          This week is an important one for all of us.  There has been – at last – agreement among politicians on the way in which the press should be regulated following the publication of the Leveson Report.  We will have had time to digest the effects of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Budget, which was presented to Parliament last Wednesday the day after last week’s blog was published, and it is the final week of the 2012/2013 Financial Year.  The main force of the government’s austerity programme will begin to be felt a few days into the following week.

A depiction of Christ’s Resurrection in St James C of E Church in Clacton-on-Sea.  The risen Christ is asking weeping Mary Magdalene ‘Why weepest thou?  Who seekest thou?’

           

It is also ‘Holy Week’ the final week of the season of Lent which comes to a climax on Good Friday with the remembrance of the rigged trial and cruel crucifixion of Jesus Christ whom we Christians believe to have been the incarnation of that true light of God that St John declares in verse 9 of the first chapter of his Gospel, 'enlightens everyone who comes into the world’. This is sometimes known as the Quaker Verse because it gives scriptural authority to the Quaker assertion that there is a divine spark, ‘that of God’, within every man, woman and child in the world, irrespective of                                                  their colour, race or creed.

            Fortunately for all humankind the agony and grief of Good Friday was overcome on that first Easter Sunday morning by Jesus’ resurrection and his appearance to the weeping Mary Magdalene.  Blinded by her tears she had imagined that it was the gardener who was sharing her pre-dawn vigil until Jesus made himself known with those kindly words ‘Why are you weeping? Who are you seeking?’ and with incredulous recognition her sorrow turned to joy.   That miraculous resurrection gives Christians the assurance that, in the end, good will triumph over evil.  Compassion, love and forgiveness will ultimately triumph over greed, hatred, selfishness, fear, and thoughts of vengeance, and the will of God ‘will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven’.

            I hope to join with others in giving thanks for that assurance on this Easter Sunday morning.

 Our ‘Free’ Press

          At the beginning of this blog I mentioned that, at long last, agreement had been reached by the political parties about regulation of the press.  Perhaps that statement should be qualified.  The politicians have indeed agreed, but membership of the group of newspapers to be subject to regulation is voluntary.  The editors (or would it be the owners who make the decision?) of one or two newspapers have reluctantly agreed to join ‘the club’ but others are strongly opposed to it.  Unless a clear majority decide to ‘sign on’ the whole elaborate arrangement could surely collapse.

            I was  interested in the comments of Ian Hislop, Editor of Private Eye a hard-hitting publication that I always enjoy reading, during the course of a BBC tv news programme on Tuesday 20^th May.   He pointed out that the press practices that have caused outrage among both celebrities and members of the general public – phone hacking, bribing or attempting to bribe the police or public officials, using recorded material in stolen mobile phones, unwarranted intrusion into the private concerns of members of the public by means of force or deception, were already criminal offences.  Why was it that they hadn’t been pursued before by the forces of the law?

            I think it likely that it was for the same reason that Jimmy Savile was allowed to get away with his activities for so long, and locally and on a much smaller scale, how Lord Hanningfield’s extravagant expense claims as a member of the House of Lords and Leader of Essex County Council, didn’t attract official attention for several years.  Those who knew or suspected wrongdoing had mortgages to pay and families to support.  The person they suspected had powerful friends who clearly had no such suspicions. They may though have had control of the future of any potential whistle-blower, whose promotion, job and whole future could be at risk. It would be best not to say a word without absolute, cast-iron proof.  Even then, it might be wiser to leave it to someone else to blow the whistle.

This brings me to the question of the ownership and control of our ‘free press’.  It is surely wrong for the means of influencing public opinion and swaying the mind of the electorate to be in the hands of wealthy individuals.   It is even worse if those individuals are not British – whether they be Russian oligarchs or American news media millionaires.  Such owners of the press wouldn’t dream of asking their editors and reporters to print anything that is untrue – but those employees know that their future careers will be enhanced if they select material that supports the newspaper owner’s preferences and prejudices as being newsworthy, and reject or put on a back page material that opposes them.  Meanwhile those owners, or their trusted lieutenants, seek the acquaintance and friendship of top politicians.  They don’t, of course, seek to bribe or bully them – but they leave them in no doubt about which policies and actions would ensure favourable headlines and news stories.

            This is not something that could happen.  It is something that has happened and I believe is still happening.  I don’t know the answer but I do know that a ‘free press’ tightly controlled by wealthy individuals isn’t free in any real sense of the word.  While I’d hate to see a government controlled press, I’d hate even more to live under a government controlled by the machinations of foreign media millionaires.       

‘It's all right for some!’

 On Wednesday 20^th March, most of us were trying to work out whether we would be better or worse off after George Osborne’s Budget.  Beer drinking motorists seeking daytime care for their children, who have been deterred from house purchase by the size of the deposit required, may well be better off – at least for the time being.  

            A few privileged employees of Barclays Bank had no such worries.  For them – despite the banking scandals of the past year – Christmas had come early!  On the same day that Mr Osborne was making his annual Budget Speech, Barclays were announcing that they were paying a total of £38.5 million in bonuses to their top employees.   At the top of the hand-out tree was their Head of Investment Banking who was given shares worth £17.5 million!  He may have had a few personal cash-flow problems – or perhaps he knew something about Barclays that we don’t – because he promptly cashed the lot.

            Barclays Chief Executive didn’t do quite so well.  He pocketed a mere £5.3 million worth of shares of which he cashed only half.

            It’s nice to know that these two gentlemen will also be getting a hand-out from a grateful government next week when the income tax on their take-home pay above £150,000 will be reduced.  Who was it said, ‘We’re all in this together’?

Talking about income tax reminds me………

          …….that one feature of the Chancellor’s Budget will benefit me if I’m still around to take advantage of it in April 2014, when it comes into force.  The first £10,000 of my income will be tax-free.   I’d rather that it wasn’t though.  I don’t think that those whose income is less than £10,000 a year should be ‘freed from the burden of income tax’

            Income tax is the only form of taxation that is levied directly in accordance with our ability to pay it.  VAT and taxes on petrol, alcohol, the lottery and the like are the same for wealthy and poor alike.  Consequently they hit the poor the hardest. Income tax could be properly graded so that it has the same impact on us all.  I’d like to see the same percentage of every adult’s gross income be their first and most important tax demand – an ‘annual membership fee’ for the very considerable privilege of being a British citizen.

            Levied on everyone, from the very wealthiest to those on minimum wage or ‘benefit’, it would of course mean that a much larger sum was collected from the wealthy than from the poor.  But we would all part with the same proportion of our income.  No one would starve or be rendered homeless by having to pay it – and I believe that quite a low percentage of gross income (30 percent perhaps) levied on every adult without exception would make it possible for the minimum wage and unemployment and similar benefits to be higher.   We would all have a stake in the country’s prosperity.  We would truly, ‘all be in this together’.

England’s most deprived area

                                                                         

 An Avenue on the Brooklands Estate taken by a ‘ Guardian’ photographer.  

The Guardian newspaper sent a reporter, Ms. Amelia Gentleman, to Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate  on Budget Day to discover how England’s most deprived area would be likely to fare under Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget.  In her report Ms Gentleman described the Brooklands Estate as consisting, ‘of small houses, some barely bigger than beach huts, packed together along potholed lanes’. Many of the residents were, ‘entirely dependent on the welfare system which the Chancellor described as “bloated”.  With 51 percent of adults receiving benefit, the Brooklands Estate acts as a test zone for the impact of government welfare reform.   Residents here will experience the changes in great numbers as they roll out later this year.  They are already feeling the effects of tightened eligibility to some benefits…………As well as being named the most deprived place in England and Wales in 2011, the area was found last year to have the highest number of young people not in employment or training, with a third of 16 to 24 year olds claiming jobseeker’s allowance, more than five times the national average of 6 percent.

Later in her report she comments that, ‘Brooklands’ population has always been transient but recently officials have noticed a bigger influx of families from London – possibly as a result of housing benefit changes in the capital, which are forcing families to search for cheaper housing elsewhere’.  A house price survey had revealed that Brooklands is one of the easiest areas in the country to buy a house.  Bungalows there are on sale for around £20,000.

            She reported that many people living in the area , ‘would like to sign up to Osborne’s vision of an aspiration nation, and become hard-working home-owning taxpayers’ but that there simply aren’t the jobs in the area to make it possible for them to fulfil that dream. ‘There are 3,500 unemployed people in the surrounding Tendring District competing for just 500 jobs currently being advertised’.

Making the most of the Budget!

A economics expert on BBC Breakfast tv on 21^st March pointed out that, thanks to the Budget, if we drank 10,000 pints of beer – we would save £10!

           

  

Week 14 5th April 2011

Tendring Topics…..on Line

The Problem of Jaywick

For some years Jaywick has been listed as the third most deprived area in England. Now it has been promoted (or should it be 'demoted') to ‘the most’. When ‘Jaywick’ is spoken of in this context it is usually not the whole of Jaywick that is meant, but the Brooklands Estate. There is certainly no air of deprivation about the roads and avenues on Grasslands, the Tudor Estate and the large area of Jaywick before one reaches Brooklands.  Brooklands itself  on the other hand, has narrow streets (all named after cars!) with broken surfaces and an uncared-for look.

They are uncared for because they are ‘unadopted’ roads, never having been taken over by the County Council as Highway Authority. The maintenance of such roads is legally the responsibility of the owners of the properties on each side of it. When they bring such a road up to a reasonable standard, the Highway Authority will usually adopt it and thus become responsible for future maintenance. A glance down any of the Brooklands roads will make it obvious that the property owners there have no hope of ever of bringing them up to standard.

 The housing consists for the most part of cheaply built structures intended in the first instance, for short-term holiday accommodation, not permanent homes. When I first came to Clacton in 1956 there were neither taps nor wcs in most of these homes. Water supply was from an outside stand-tap (as a public health inspector I had to take samples of water from these taps from time to time to test the water’s purity) and there was a ‘nightsoil’ collection service to empty the latrine buckets from each home. Appalling? But those homes were originally meant for holiday accommodation for a week or a fortnight for people from the towns who wanted an economic seaside holiday. For many it was a fairly comfortable alternative to camping. And, although these services would be considered unacceptable even on a camp site today, in the late 1930s they would have been thought to be perfectly acceptable for temporary use during the holiday season.

 Now they are nearly all used for all-year habitation. A study of the houses for sale in the local newspaper will reveal that they exchange hands for what, for most properties, would seem an absurdly low price. They can be a last refuge for families facing homelessness since (thanks to the iniquitous ‘right to buy’ legislation) there is a woefully inadequate amount of ‘social housing’. Some of these homes are dilapidated ruins. Some have been demolished and their sites have become depositaries for rubbish! Some though have been extended and modernised by their owners who understandably are fiercely protective of homes that they have created, often with their own hands.

What’s to be done about it? The former Clacton Urban District decided to try to solve the Brooklands problem in the final years of their existence by declaring it to be a ‘Clearance Area’ under the Housing Acts. Had this been confirmed, house owners would have been paid compensation up to the value (determined independently) of their houses, the Council would have found accommodation for those who needed it (this was in the olden days when councils could build their own houses where they were needed!;) and the whole area would then have been flattened and redeveloped. What a valuable development it would have been too, immediately behind one of the best beaches in eastern England!

It didn’t happen. There was fierce opposition from the house owners, particularly of course, those who had bought their own homes, and had turned them into very pleasant villas beside the sea. There was a public enquiry and the council was defeated. I reckon that the same thing would happen if a similar attempt were to be made today.

Nobody yet has found a satisfactory answer to the Jaywick problem. The residents seem to think that bringing the roads up to standard, providing proper street lighting and ‘investing in the area’ (but on what?) would solve their problems. I doubt it. I think that a great many of those ‘holiday homes’ need to be demolished to make way for new development. Large-scale redevelopment is likely to be strongly resisted, not by irresponsible residents who are content to live in a slum and whose life-style makes it even slummier, but by worthy and responsible people; those who do whatever they can to improve the local environment and who have made their seaside homes ‘desirable residences’. They don’t want to see them demolished to make room for a new development however beneficial it might be. Who can blame them?

 Mr Douglas Carswell, Clacton’s MP says that ‘Jaywick is very wealthy in terms of Civic pride and community spirit’. Sadly that isn’t a kind of wealth that can be put in a bank. He claims that the area has been ‘impoverished by poor decision making, by remote officials and statutory bodies for years. We need to remove many of the obstacles that have trapped Jaywick in a downward spiral’. I take it that ‘the obstacles’ to which Mr Carswell is referring are the planning laws which the present government would to like to see scrapped ‘to free enterprise from strangling red tape’. It is strange if he does think that, because it is obvious to me that if the planning laws had been stronger and/or more rigorously enforced, a colony of holiday homes intended only for short-term summer use, would never have been permitted to develop into cheap residential accommodation used all the year round. Today’s Jaywick problem simply wouldn’t have arisen.

National politicians and the popular press seem to imagine that if only Tendring Council were to adopt a Can do! attitude they would solve the Jaywick problem with no trouble at all. The fact is that restrictions on local authorities’ freedom of action imposed by governments of both main parties over the years, have made sure that regenerating Jaywick is a strictly Can’t-do task. Possibly Mr Carswell, as well as telling us how the Jaywick situation arose (the phrase about teaching your grandmother how to suck eggs comes to mind!) can offer one or two practical, and legal, ideas about how to solve the problem of its redemption. I am quite sure that the Council would be prepared to listen to him.

Speed does kill!

Do you remember the elation of a vociferous part of the ‘motoring lobby’ when last year several Highway Authorities switched off all their speed cameras in an attempt to save money. ‘It’s not speed that kills!’ they insisted. Those cameras were simply another way in which Councils extracted money from the pockets of ‘persecuted motorists’. They did nothing for road safety. They probably caused accidents as drivers were looking for speed cameras rather than keeping their eyes on the road ahead.
Well, that's what those opposed to speed cameras said.

 It seems though that removing those cameras may well have saved money – but has cost lives! Oxfordshire and East Midlands are two highways authorities that are replacing and reactivating their speed cameras because they had found that, since they were switched off, there has been a substantial increase in the number of road deaths. That is surely what common sense would have told us was the likely outcome of removing the cameras.

Right and Wrong

One item of national news that caught my eye last week appalled me. The ‘morning after’ contraceptive pill will now be dispensed free of charge from Welsh pharmacies to girls below the age of sixteen, provided they can persuade the pharmacist that they know exactly what they are doing!

I am well aware that a very different standard of behaviour was expected in the mid twentieth century (in which I spent my childhood and youth) from that of the early 21st century. I have no wish to lead, or join, ‘a back to the ‘50s!’ campaign. Goodness knows, there were plenty of things wrong with the mid-ywentieth century!  Surely though, the fact that a child of fourteen or fifteen needs a ‘morning after’ pill is strong evidence that a criminal offence has taken place – or is having sexual intercourse with a child under the ‘age of consent’ no longer a criminal offence? Ought it not to be reported to the Police? Nowadays it seems, we don’t teach children at school that promiscuity, and sexual activity before physical and mental maturity, are foolish, irresponsible, dangerous, and anti-social. We do teach them how to avoid some of the consequences, by explaining and demonstrating modern contraceptives and telling them that the penultimate line of defence is the ‘morning after’ pill!  Penultimate? of course - there's still termination (somehow that doesn't sound quite so bleak as abortion)

In the 1930s there was a George Formby film in which the hero was always getting into trouble because he couldn’t tell right from left. He had a little song (accompanied by his banjo) about this inability that contained the lines:

I may not know my left from right, But I do know right from wrong.

Now that is precisely what young people, and quite a few older ones, don’t know these days. I suppose that to teach them would be considered to be bigoted, judgemental and sectarian and would, without doubt, infringe their ‘human rights’. There’s a rather stark Spanish proverb that comes to my mind.

‘Take what you want’, says God, ‘Take it – and pay for it’.

We imagine that with our antibiotics, our contraceptives, our ‘morning after’ pill, and abortion more-or-less on demand, we have escaped the need for that payment. I wonder?

The continuing Libyan saga

The Libyan situation changes almost daily but it gives me no satisfaction whatsoever to see my gloomiest predictions being fulfilled.

A disorganised and undisciplined rebel army, however numerous and however enthusiastic, can never hope to defeat a disciplined modern army equipped with heavy weapons and a clear command structure.
On the other hand the rebels cannot be finally defeated while they have the support of allied air power.
Support for Gaddafi may be crumbling - but it hasn't yet crumbled!  Those cheering crowds in Tripoli shown on tv seem genuine enough.  They probably believe that Gaddafi is the last bastion against thieving western infidels who want to steal their oil!

Like Iraq and Afghanistan  Libya is proving to be a conflict in which it was easy enough to become involved but from which it will prove very difficult to withdraw.  Give the rebels weapons?   Not really much use unless you also train them to use those weapons - and that would involve having troops on the ground, specifically forbidden by the UN resolution.

From my own memories of conflict in the Libyan desert.  I warned of the danger of casualties from 'friendly fire' because of difficulties of identification in a barren desert terrain.  It has already happened, with NATO planes bombing and straffing a rebel convoy including Red Cross vehicles.  I had forgotten the practice of wasting valuable ammunition by firing small arms uselessly into the air - in celebration?   It happened in Afghanistan and it is happening in Libya.  You can hardly blame the crews of allied aircraft flying overhead, from imagining that that small arms fire is aimed at them - and taking retaliatory action.

There was, I believe, far more justification for our involvement in Libya than there had been for invading Iraq  but it is proving even less popular with the public and the electorate!

It is costing us thousands, perhaps millions of pounds at a time when most of us are suffering financial hardship.  It may well cost David Cameron an election! 

Week37.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Problems with ‘the natives’!

Nobody could accuse Lord Hanningfield and his colleagues on Essex County Council of being timid and unimaginative. Quite suddenly (I suppose that it couldn’t be anything to do with the recent change in the political complexion of Tendring Council?) they have decided to make our holiday coast, ‘as important as it was in the 1950s and ‘60s. Let’s take Tendring back as a place that people want to go to for a day, a weekend or even longer’.

They have certainly come up with some big ideas: a new Marina for Harwich and a second one (why not while we’re about it?) in either the Brightlingsea or Manningtree areas; cash for Walton’s Naze Tower walkway; more attractions in Harwich for cruise visitors, and a major redevelopment in Jaywick. How, you may wonder; is it all to be paid for? That is certainly the question that would have been asked by Lord Hanningfield and his colleagues had the proposals been the brainchild of their political opponents.

The answer, it seems, lies in hopes of funding by the Government, from the usually derided European Union, and from such groups as the East of England Development Agency. But Lord Hanningfield is also reported as saying that the county council is prepared to dip into its own pocket to help make big changes, ‘Essex County Council has got to bite the bullet and so we are going to invest money and do it ourselves’. It should, of course, be remembered that it is our council tax that fills the County Council’s ‘own pocket’. If any ‘bullet biting’ has to be done it will be us who will have to do it!

Jaywick’s residents were cheered to hear that dealing with their problems was to be a priority. It will be recalled that Jaywick has the dubious distinction of being the third most deprived community in England. For years its residents have been pleading for paved streets, better street lighting and better policing. His Lordship’s words though, were just a little chilling, ‘While it (Jaywick) is there it casts a shadow over the whole area’.

His proposals go far beyond mere paving and lighting. He sees a glowing future for a Jaywick restored as a seasonal tourist area. A centre for the arts has already been promised. Now the county council would like to see beach huts and summer chalets for holiday makers, more amusements, possibly a big dipper, perhaps even a theme park.

It is impossible not to warm to this vision of a Jaywick transformed into the brightest jewel of the Essex holiday coast. There’s just one little snag though. It is the one that was encountered in the 18th and 19th centuries by pioneers bringing the joys of western civilisation to the Scottish Highlands, to the North American ‘ Wild West’, and to Australia and New Zealand. What on earth is to be done about the natives, and their clustered and unacceptably primitive homes? Residents of Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate, who had naively imagined that any improvements to their neighbourhood would be primarily for their benefit, have had a rude shock. They, it seems, are a major part of the problem. There really is no place for the chalets of Brooklands and their occupants in this vision of a New Jaywick Sands, Clacton-on-Sea’s reborn and desirable holiday suburb.

A big dipper for Jaywick? Surely Lord Hanningfield’s imagination can do better than that! Why not a Jaywick Wheel, rivalling that of Sheffield (illustrated) and the London Eye? Just imagine the breathtaking view from the top!

Genocide and/or forcible dispossession, the historically preferred solutions to ‘the native problem’, are no longer acceptable. ‘The County Council’, says its leader, ‘was working with Tendring Council and housing associations to create more affordable housing within Tendring to encourage people to move away’. I wish them joy. I wonder if the wizards of County Hall are aware that, almost half a century ago, the former Clacton Urban District Council tried and failed to find a legal final solution to ‘The Brooklands problem’.




















This picture and the one below, show the transformation of a piece of wasteland in Jaywick by my friends Janet and Rodney Thomas. They demonstrate what can be achieved with very little money but a great deal of determination and hard work.

It was in the ‘60s that Clacton UDC declared Brooklands to be a ‘Clearance Area’ under the slum clearance provisions of the Housing Act 1936. The whole area was to be cleared and redeveloped. The council would have rehoused the occupants (this was in the days when councils were encouraged to build houses for letting!). Property owners would have been compensated. They however, were fiercely opposed to the plan. There was an appeal and a public enquiry. The appeal succeeded. Brooklands remained and still remains largely unchanged.

Today’s property owners, many of them owner/occupiers are no less determined than those of the ‘60s . John Walton, chairman of the Jaywick Forum, told a reporter, ‘People love where they are. Most of the people down there, the owner-occupiers, have made little palaces of their places’. A possible, rather expensive, solution to the problem is suggested by the quoted words of Mick Masterson, a Brooklands resident; ‘I have got a billion-dollar view. Most people are thirty feet from the beach. What would encourage them to move apart from a lot of money?’

One thing is apparent to me. Essex County Council doesn’t want Brooklands to be improved. They want it cleared. I think that Brooklands residents can bid farewell to their hopes of properly surfaced roads and street lighting.

'Nothing but the night'?

‘Oh no – not another sermon!’ Well, perhaps; it’s just that a news item on the tv last week caught my attention. The government, it was claimed, had relaxed Britain’s licensing laws in the hope it would promote the Continental practice of the moderate social use of alcohol with meals, and thus discourage binge-drinking. It has worked in reverse. We haven’t stopped binge-drinking but Continentals are beginning to take it up. It is already a serious problem among young people in Italy. I’d be surprised if Italy is the only country affected.

In the 1930s regular binge-drinking (drinking for no other purpose than that of getting drunk) was a relatively rare practice engaged in mainly by sad and lonely middle-aged or elderly alcoholics. It was certainly not a regular Saturday night social activity of teenagers and young adults.

What has happened to public attitudes during the past seventy-plus years to make such a difference? I think that a major factor has been loss of faith and hope. In the 1930s practically all of us believed in at least something, and looked toward the future with hope and confidence.

In this country most of us, deep down, accepted the truth of one or other of the traditions of the Christian faith. Many didn’t go to church but church-going was recognised as a natural and normal thing to do. Thanks to universal education with regular ‘Scripture’ lessons, we all had at least a sketchy acquaintance with the contents of the Bible and the basic teachings of Christianity.

We all hoped and believed that, as a result of scientific progress and the processes of parliamentary democracy, life would get steadily better for us all. Most had little doubt that another and better life awaited us beyond the grave. Throughout my teenage years I met only one person who wasn’t at least nominally a Christian; and who proclaimed himself to be an atheist, with no belief whatsoever in a spiritual dimension to our existence, or in an afterlife. He was a classmate and a good friend of mine (with whom I had heated arguments!) at Ipswich’s Northgate School. Atheist he may have been but it would have been quite wrong to describe him as a non-believer. He had a fundamentalist belief in the infallibility of Marxist materialism and a most fervent hope that its propagation would, sooner rather than later, bring us all to an earthly Paradise.

In those days all of us had at least a measure of faith and hope. For some the faith was in things of the spirit; others in the development of scientific knowledge or in political and economic theory. Some hoped for a Paradise beyond the grave and others for one on earth. Me? Oh, I wanted the best of both worlds. As a teenager I was a convinced Anglo-Catholic but I also believed profoundly that we could, by political means, 'build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’, and that we should strive to do so. Did not members of every Christian denomination pray, ‘Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’?

Today, communism is ‘the god that failed’. Sadly in my opinion, democratic socialism is dying too…..perhaps it is due for rebirth! There are no Utopians. Scientific progress seems as likely to lead to disaster as to a better world. How long is it since any science-fiction writer envisaged a future that was anything but a nightmare? The only political groups that are consistently gaining strength are the extreme nationalist and xenophobic ones. Fortunately they are still very small. The Christian tradition that is most flourishing is a charismatic and fundamentalist evangelicalism, for which, try as I might, I cannot feel much enthusiasm.

Generally, I think that the prevailing spirit of the age is of disillusion, disbelief and distrust of all political, religious and scientific leaders. There is a taken-for-granted conviction that ‘those of us who live in the real world’ know that it, and the whole universe, is the product of mere chance (a cosmic accident!) and the world’s multifarious life forms simply the result of blind evolution. Nothing has ‘a purpose’ beyond that of perpetuating its species. Every species though…. and the world….and the universe, is ultimately destined for extinction. Fear, greed and the gratification of the senses are humankind’s only motivations. ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ And death isn’t, of course, eternal life or even eternal rest, but obliteration, total extinction. It will be as if we had never existed. Edward Fitzgerald summarised this nihilistic non-credo in his translation of ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’:

Alike for those who for ‘the day’ prepare.
And those who unto a ‘tomorrow’ stare.
The muezzin from the tower of darkness cries,
‘Fools! Your reward is neither here nor there.

as did A.E. Housman in the second and final verse of his short poem, 'The hollow fires burn out to black, the lamps are guttering low.........'


Never fear lad, nought’s to dread.
Look neither left nor right.
In all the endless road you tread,
There’s nothing but the night!

It is hardly surprising that young people regularly try to blot out the total futility of their existence with drugs and/or by drinking themselves into insensibility. If I shared their disbelief and lack of hope, I’d do the same.

St Paul told the people of Corinth that there were three great abiding virtues; faith, hope and love……and that the greatest of these was love. So it is, but it is also true that a society without faith and hope is heading for disaster.

Week 25.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Jaywick's Brooklands Estate……. a Centre for the Arts?

On the face of it, the idea is ridiculous. Jaywick is said to be the third most deprived council ward in the country. Where are the two even less privileged ones, I wonder? Driving along the road behind the sea wall and glancing down those roads, little more than wide alleyways all named after famous makes of car, gives an impression of deprivation, squalor and ugliness, rather than of beauty or indeed of anything that might attract the attention of an artist.

Yet it seems that there are those who are determined to make Brooklands a great centre for the visual arts. Up to date their efforts have hardly been outstandingly successful. Last year we had that extraordinary timber 'sculpture' by Nathan Coley that looked to me like an unfinished poultry shed. Although costing £40,000, it was (fortunately perhaps) only a temporary structure. I had quite imagined that the timber was to go up in smoke and flame on 5th November, but not so. It is coming back to Jaywick as seating. That sounds like a good idea, provided of course that nobody decides that the seats must be fashioned into modern art….instead of being simply objects to be sat on.

Not that Nathan Coley's masterpiece was without its fans. For those who think that all publicity is good publicity, it succeeded brilliantly. Jaywick's work of art certainly captured the attention of the news media!

Now though, we have a new and different art project in sight. £60,000 is to be spent on developing Brooklands Gardens into 'a creativity centre; a focal point for artistic endeavour'. How exactly this is to be done has yet to be revealed, but work is expected to begin in October of this year and to take about six months to complete.

It seems that this £60,000 is a windfall grant specifically earmarked for arts and heritage. There's no hope of its being diverted to the provision of things that Brooklands Estate really needs, such as properly surfaced roads and street lighting. If it were not spent in Jaywick it would have to be spent on a similar project elsewhere.

That being the case, I think that Jaywick residents should welcome it. It can't possibly do any harm. Its creation will undoubtedly provide badly needed work for a few, and it may, just possibly, bring some welcome visitors to Jaywick.


The money is being dispensed by Essex County Council. Essex County Council is also the highways and street lighting authority. Perhaps Lord Hanningfield, the County Council's by-no-means-publicity-shy leader might be persuaded to come along to inspect the work (whatever it is) in progress. The opportunity could then be taken to invite him to stroll along some of those unpaved, unlit, and often under water, avenues. Perhaps he would decline to do so. Either way it would make a good story on tv and in the press.


Who is to run elections?

Shock horror headlines on the front page of the Clacton Gazette on 11th June announced the startling news that 68 members of Tendring Council's staff had been employed as Presiding Officers, Poll Clerks and as vote counters in the previous week's county and European elections. They were paid for this work on top of their salaries and they weren't even expected to take a day off their holiday entitlement.

What's more, that didn't just happen in our own district but nationwide. Matthew Elliot, chief executive of the Taxpayers Alliance in London said, 'It's shocking that council employees receive their full salary for days when they were working in the polling booths. They were handsomely rewarded for their election work, so effectively taxpayers have been paying twice. Their job is to serve the local community, they were not able to fulfil that duty when they were working somewhere else and should have taken a day's leave'.

Well, if that is considered shocking by members of the Taxpayers Alliance they must have a very low shock threshold. They overlook the fact that working on the election is serving the local community and that the hours of work at a polling station are from 6.30 a.m. till 10.00 p.m. for poll clerks and rather longer for presiding officers. That is a thirteen and a half hour day with no lunch break – almost twice the seven-hour day of most office workers. 'The count' can take all night, especially if it is a close-run thing and there are one or more recounts. I have done all three jobs, presiding officer, poll clerk and vote counter, in my time. Once I remember, for a parish council election in a remote rural parish I was the Acting Returning Officer, announcing the result to a 'cheering crowd' of at least half a dozen voters. Believe me, I earned that extra money!

The work doesn't have to be done by council officials and I recall one election (I think it was while I was working with the former Tendring Rural District Council) that took place in school holiday time, and most of the jobs were given to teachers. Presiding officers, poll clerks and counters need not be either Einsteins or saints, but they do need to have had a certain amount of office experience, together with intelligence and integrity. The Returning Officer, who is responsible for the proper running of the election, is always a senior local government officer and wisely picks his electoral staff from among those he knows are capable of performing their duties honestly and efficiently.

Contrary to popular belief, most local government employees are not in receipt of enormous salaries. They do not enjoy the bonuses and the perks that go with many similar jobs in private enterprise. I know that, in my time, I was always grateful for the few extra pounds than an election job brought in. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't have minded losing a day's holiday entitlement, though I would probably have resented the council requiring it. I always kept two or three days in reserve in case of a domestic crisis.

Today, retired, I am a council-tax payer and an income-tax payer……..and I don't grudge today's council staff the extra money that some of them get when an election comes round.

Towards a United Europe

A fortnight ago I posted on this blog the copy of a letter that my elder son had written to the Prime Minister on the subject of MPs false claims for 'expenses'. I was astonished at the feed-back that I received. That letter really seemed to strike a chord with blog readers.

There is, I fear, unlikely to be similar enthusiasm this week about a letter that I wrote to the 'postbag' of the Daily Gazette and that was published by the Gazette last Friday, 12th June. I haven't always been a Europhile. I once had a romantic idea that an effective political and economic unit could be forged out of the Commonwealth. It was in that hope that I voted NO in that famous referendum on membership

That idea, never very likely, is now quite clearly impossible. Since I voted NO in that referendum I have seen the disastrous results of our country slavishly supporting American foreign and defence policy and following American economic examples. I made many visits to mainland Europe in the '60s and '70s and have returned there several times during the past three years. I have seen the tremendous progress that has been made during the past three decades and, though I hate having to say so, how many things are now done better there than they are here.


I now firmly believe that Britain's best future lies within a united and integrated Europe. How can we hope to achieve a 'level playing field' for the sale of our goods and services in Europe without Europe-wide legislation? How can we hope to make our voice heard on vital issues like the climatic change without the amplification offered by a United Europe? I think that we need a new national cross-party pressure group to promote European integration.

Here anyway is a copy of my letter published in the Daily Gazette in response to their editorial comments a few days earlier:

I can't agree that the votes of the Europhobes indicated that they were 'interested in Europe'. I suggest that it meant the reverse! Two parties that are interested in a United Europe, the Lib.Dems and the Greens, also did well in the elections.

In Colchester, the Lib-Dems' successes were not 'bucking the trend' as your headline on Gazette Letters (June 9) suggests. Nationwide, they increased their share of the popular vote, while the share of both Conservatives and Labour fell.

It is time that those of us who believe that Britain's best future lies in playing an active part in a politically and economically united Europe, spoke up as enthusiastically (I won't say as stridently!) as those who oppose it. It is not a case of 'Europe and us'. Geographically, historically and culturally we are part of Europe and it is in ever-closer fellowship with the mainland Europeans that our destiny lies.

I know that we 'stood alone' in 1940 (I should know, I was there – and in khaki!) but we might not have done so for long had Hitler not made the fatal errors of invading the Soviet Union and declaring war on the USA.

In today's world we cannot stand alone. We can only co-operate and, on occasion, compete with today's superpowers, China and the USA, and those of tomorrow, Russia and India, on equal terms, as part of a truly united Europe in which we are playing a leading role.

The alternative is to become a satellite, a protectorate, of the USA.

Is that what we really want?

A Truly British Invention

I was very pleased to hear recently on the tv news that the Hovercraft, a truly British invention, was celebrating its fiftieth birthday, that hovercraft are still being manufactured and that there is a steady demand for them.

Summer 1971 – our hovercraft arrives on the beach at Calais to take us home.
In the 1970s my family and I took a number of camping holidays in Switzerland, Austria and the Italian Alps (living in the flattest part of England we always headed for the mountains!). We crossed the Channel from Ramsgate to Calais by the HOVERLLOYD hovercraft service. We found it fast, efficient and comfortable…though I do remember one return crossing when the huge hovercraft was tossed about like a cork on a heavy swell!


The service was discontinued and I had imagined that it was because they were found to be uneconomic or unseaworthy. It appears that this is not the case. Smaller hovercraft…..the only form of transport that can travel at speed over sea, land and marsh are still in demand both by the armed forces and by those exploring or developing areas remote from civilisation. The heavy car and passenger carrying hovercraft are no longer manufactured because there isn't sufficient demand to justify their manufacture. I suppose that the Channel Tunnel will have dealt them a final blow!


Anyway, I wish this British invention 'Many Happy returns of the Day'!

week 18.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

A different glimpse of Jaywick

Where do you suppose these photographs were taken? Somewhere among Frinton’s leafy avenues perhaps…….in one of the posher parts of Clacton, possibly near the seafront in the Gardens Area ……or perhaps in some rural commuter haven near Colchester

Not a bit of it. They were taken in less-than-posh Jaywick, described as one of England’s most deprived areas, better known for squalor and ugliness than for beauty, where even a work of art, commissioned for £40,000, turns out to be at best a joke and at worst an insult. Mind you, this plot hasn’t always looked as it does on these pictures. It was a piece of waste land, adjacent to the home of my friends Rodney and Janet Thomas of Jaywick’s Crossley Avenue, which encapsulated the popular view of Jaywick! It was a depository for broken down furniture and every kind of odorous and unsavoury rubbish! It was when their pet cat proudly brought home the bodies of two adult and six baby rats that Janet and Rodney decided to do something about it.
The result is as you can see……a work of horticultural art, not produced on commission, for a large cash prize, or even for honour and glory, but simply out of the goodness of their hearts to improve the environment in which they live. Janet, as a Quaker and Clerk of our Clacton Quaker Meeting, would possibly say that it was in response to the leading of the Inward Light that is the heritage of every man, woman and child in the world. Still unmistakeably Jaywick - but not Jaywick as it exists in the popular imagination

Nobody’s Darling!

On Budget Days I always remember my mother’s contention: Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he will not be disappointed. Mr Darling’s (what a very inappropriate name for a Chancellor!) Budget was just a little different. This time nobody was expecting any good news. The world financial crisis made sure of that. It was really just a case of who would suffer most and how soon?

I judge Budgets as good or bad by whether they narrow or broaden the gap between the wealthy and the poor. It follows that it has been many years since we had what I consider to be a ‘good’ one. For as long as New Labour honoured its absurd promise never to raise the upper band of income tax, and continued with the previous government’s policy of reducing direct taxation (income, capital gains and inheritance tax) and increasing indirect taxation such as VAT and duties on petrol, alcohol and tobacco, there was no hope of the situation changing for the better.

My spirits were raised, very slightly, when I heard that the top rate of income tax was to be raised from a maximum of 40 percent, to 50 percent for incomes over £150 thousand a year. This seemed to be a move in the right direction. However its impact is reduced by the fact that it will not come into force until April of next year. The lawyers, accountants and financial advisers of the seriously rich therefore have plenty of time in which to work out clever schemes of tax avoidance. These are of course, quite different from the illegal tax evasion, sometimes practised by lesser folk.

It must be remembered too that that 50 percent isn’t half a millionaire’s income. It is only a half of that part of his or her income above £150 thousand a year. The new tax isn’t going to send anyone to the bread line or the soup kitchen!

I heard a financial ‘expert’ on tv claim that raising the income tax of the better off was simply removing the incentive that kept them working hard for us all. How strange that the wealthy have to be persuaded to work with cash incentives whereas the poor are compelled to work by threatening to cut their benefits!

Anyway, unlike the small minority affected by the new upper rate of income tax, motorists, smokers and drinkers won’t have a year’s grace to stock up with their supplies at the former lower rate. They’re going to have to make their contribution to national recovery right away.

Is offering £2,000 toward the cost of a new car to those prepared to have their old bangers crushed, a good idea? It is claimed to work in Germany but, as so often happens, our scheme is half-hearted by comparison with theirs and therefore that much less likely to succeed. In any case, brought up as I was in an environment in which very penny counted and we had no alternative but ‘to make do and mend’, I view with deep distrust the idea of deliberately scrapping an old car that may be perfectly serviceable for a shiny new one.

The staggering burden of national debt? The figures involved are so enormous as to be beyond my comprehension. In this blog I have consistently warned against incurring personal and family debt beyond the capacity to repay. I don’t believe, as a former prime minister claimed to, that managing the national finances is just the same as managing the household ones but on a larger scale. Neither can I believe though that a course of action that has proved to be disastrous to tens of thousands of individuals and households, can possibly be beneficial to a community or a nation.

Late News

The Post-Budget headlines of one national newspaper warned us that the new tax on the small minority of us whose taxable income exceeds £150,000 a year will drive many brilliant entrepreneurs from the City of London to other lands where they can accumulate wealth without having to contribute some of it to the communities in which they live and work.

Since these ‘economic refugees’ will undoubtedly include some of those whose greed and irresponsibility triggered the current economic situation I’m not quite sure whether that is a threat or a promise!

‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George!’

Thus, according to Shakespeare in his play Henry V, the eponymous hero ended the rallying speech in which he urged his possibly less-than-enthusiastic troops ‘once more into the breach’ at the siege of Harfleur. It is sad that in England, St. George, our patron saint, receives nothing like the regard that is accorded to his counterparts in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, particularly since he shares 23rd April with the birthday of William Shakespeare, our greatest national poet, whose work is revered world-wide. Imagine the celebration there would be in Glasgow if St. Andrew’s Day and Burns Night coincided!

23rd April 2009. St. George’s Red Cross Flag flies from the flagpole outside Clacton Town Hall and two miniature versions fly from the Tendring Helpline car parked opposite on the left.

A possible reason for English lack of enthusiasm for our patron saint is that we know so little for certain about him. Tradition suggests that he was a very appropriate patron for a multi-ethnic country like ours. He was probably of Greek origin, born in what is now Turkey. He was a legionary in the Imperial Roman Army and was martyred in Palestine early in the fourth century A.D. during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian. His legendary slaying of a ferocious dragon and the rescue of a fair maiden from its clutches is said to have taken place in Libya. He had certainly never heard of England (there was no country of that name in the fourth century) though he may well have heard of Britain as a damp, windy and inhospitable island on the extreme edge of the Empire.

There must have been something very special about him though, since he is the patron saint of Portugal as well as of England and is also much revered in eastern Christendom, particularly in Greece and Russia. He was an early Christian martyr and has inspired thousands of Englishmen and women over the centuries. Even the mythical image of St. George as a knight in shining armour slaying the dragon has its value as a metaphor of the courageous soldier of Christ struggling against, and overcoming, the forces of evil.

A New Renal Unit for Clacton

I didn’t think that the former Eastern Electricity site in Clacton’s Kennedy Road was at all a good idea as the proposed site of an up-to-the-minute comprehensive Medical Centre replacing existing doctors’ surgeries in both Great Clacton and Holland-on-Sea. It may well though be eminently suitable for a badly needed haemodialysis unit to meet the needs of the many Tendring District patients with kidney problems who currently have to travel three times a week to Colchester for their dialysis treatment.

It is a development that will certainly interest my granddaughter, who has recently been appointed as Social Worker with the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital.

As well as helping Clactonian renal sufferers, an eleven-station unit in Clacton with the capacity to treat up to sixty-six patients will help to take the pressure off the Colchester renal unit. Seventy percent of those treated at this twenty-station unit, opened in June 2006, come from the Tendring District, in or around Clacton.

If planning permission is granted, as it surely will be, and all goes according to plan (which is perhaps a little less certain!) the new unit, with a convenient ambulance drop-off point and ample parking, should be operational by next spring.

I have seen it suggested that it might make Clacton a more attractive holiday destination for kidney sufferers from elsewhere, offering ‘Sun, Sea, Sand and Dialysis’!

Perhaps; but without wishing to be too locally xenophobic, I hope that we’ll make sure that it meets local needs before offering its services nationwide.
,