Week 19 2012

Tendring Topics.........on Line

 ‘Deja vu’

             As I get older and older I find that practically everything that happens around me reminds me of an incident in the distant past. ‘There is nothing new under the sun’, as the author of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes remarks.  A few weeks ago the government’s crass handling of a possible petrol shortage included the potentially lethal advice to motorists to have a jerrican or two of petrol stored in the garage.  This triggered a memory of the coining of the word ‘jerrycan’ during the winter of 1941/1942 to refer to portable steel petrol containers captured from the German Army in the Libyan Desert.

            The current heavy rain and flooding in the midst of a serious drought might have been thought to be a unique occurrence.  It again took me back in memory to the Libyan desert; this time a few months after the naming of the jerrycan.  There can be few places on earth more arid and barren than the Libyan desert in the area of Tobruk.  A wilderness of rock and sand extends for mile after desolate mile.  Through it,  from the barren desert in the south to the sea in the north, run a number of deep valleys or ‘wadies’, carved out centuries earlier by now-dried-up rivers at a time when Libya’s climate was very different from that today.

            In one such wadi the 231^st Medium Battery RA was stationed in the spring of 1942 to oppose the advance into Egypt of General Rommel’s re-equipped and reinvigorated Afrikakorps.  Our eight 6in howitzers, pointing westwards, were in protective gunpits dug into the valley floor.  Round them were the bivvy tents of the crew, erected over widened slit trenches that afforded a measure of protection from bombardment and made them relatively comfortable sleeping quarters. From time to time one or other of the two troops of four guns would be ordered out into no-mans-land (officially it was called ‘the operational area’) for a day, to shell and exchange fire with unseen enemy gun positions or troop concentrations a few miles to our west.   Both sides were testing the other’s strengths and weaknesses in preparation for a major offensive.

A flooded gunpit near Gazala, Libya, March 1942. The gun barrel is almost concealed by camouflage netting swathing the whole gunpit.           

We were sure that it never rained in the Libyan desert. Very occasionally though, it does! One night, I think it must have been in March, black storm clouds blew in from the Mediterranean.  Amid flashing lightning and the crash and rumble of thunder the heavens opened and rain bucketed down, perhaps for a couple of hours, perhaps longer.   It was long enough to transform our wadi from a long-dried-up river bed, to an active fast-flowing river.  The gunpits quickly filled with water which rose to above the wheel axles of the guns.  The trenches over which our bivvy tents were erected were inundated, soaking our bedding and spare clothing. 

            Had Rommel attacked that night there would have been little resistance. The weather though is non-partisan.   Rommel’s troops were rendered impotent by that same storm.  The Afrikakorps was as incapable of attacking as we were of defending.

            That morning there was not the usual, ‘Stand to on the guns!  at first light, with every gun crew ready for action.  Dawn broke.   The rain stopped, the flood subsided, draining away into the desert sand.  The guns, our bivvies and – eventually – our clothes and bedding, dried out in hot North African sunshine.

            By sunset we were more-or-less back to normal.  The evening ‘Stand to!’ took place without incident.  Much worse things than that were to happen to us before we saw England again. It was just an unexpected incident, with no harm done.   It was an incident that has been brought to the forefront of my memory by recent floods on our own thirsty land.

Legacies!

          Spokesmen for the Coalition Government complain ad nauseum about the terrible financial legacy left them by their predecessors.   It’s true that they took over at a time of financial crisis; thugh it was not one created by the previous Government, but by the greed and incompetence of the bankers.  I remember that in the last months of the Labour Government, Britain’s economy was showing signs of the green shoots of economic recovery. We were beginning to pull out of recession. I wouldn’t suggest that that Government deserved any special credit for those signs of recovery – but their successors certainly bear some responsibility for destroying them with their blindly applied brake on public expenditure.

            I wonder if the members of today’s government ever give thought to the legacy that they will leave their successors.    They hope that they will have reduced substantially the national deficit, the gap between government expenditure and government income from taxation. Whether they will succeed is uncertain – I think it unlikely until the seriously wealthy can be persuaded (or coerced) into carrying their fair share of the burden.

            What is certain is that we shall have become a nation of debtors, with every university graduate carrying a lifelong burden.  Joining them, from the other end of the social scale, will be the former council tenants persuaded to take out mortgages in pursuit of the dream of ‘home ownership for all’ and to ensure that, with council tenancies being now on a temporary basis only, they secure for themselves a home for life..   

 Already evident is the creation of a disillusioned and disheartened population, including a vast army of young, bored and impoverished unemployed people, rapidly becoming unemployable and completely alienated from society. Their only legal hope of escape from a life of poverty is the very remote possibility of ‘coming up on the lottery!’  It will need only the spark of unjustified police violence for them to explode into the kind of rioting that we experienced last year.

            Other legacies will be a run-down public service with depleted and embittered staff, shabby and neglected public buildings, parks and gardens, council housing estates degenerating into slums, vandalised properties, graffiti polluted walls and badly policed town centres resulting in a wave of petty, and not-so-petty crime. The neglect of our roads and footpaths is an example of the public squalor that is already making itself  apparent.

            I have referred before to Clacton-on-Sea’s potholed roads and broken and dangerous pavements.  Last week in the Clacton Gazette there were two angry readers’ letters on the same subject.

            One drew attention to a ‘very large and deep pothole’ in the middle of the road at Clacton’s busy St. John’s roundabout. The writer says that if a motorcyclist, unaware of its existence rode over it, the rider would be thrown into the road and into the path of oncoming traffic.  The letter-writer reported the pothole on the County Council’s website on 11^th April and received an automatic acknowledgement – but there’s no sign of action.  The other letter was from a St Osyth motorist warning of an unexpected pothole that took his car off the road and into a telegraph pole. He was not seriously injured but his car was a write-off.  The telegraph pole has since been replaced – but the pothole is still there!  Tendring District isn’t unique.  Similar circumstances must exist nation-wide

            Highways are, of course, a county council, not a central government responsibility.   But central government has cut grants to local authorities, demanded that they make economies and urged them not to raise council tax.  I’d like to see more money spent on highways but I am well aware that, if it is, there will be less to spend on the care of the elderly or of the very young.   

            Oh – to be absolutely fair to the government it must be added that a tiny minority really have benefited from their policies.  While most of us have become poorer the seriously wealthy have become even wealthier!

            It takes only two or three years for communities to degenerate into lawless slums.  It could take decades to get them back onto their feet again and to restore their civic pride.  I don’t envy the government, whatever its political complexion that has the task of dealing with the legacy likely to be left by the ‘arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk’

‘If you want to know the time – ask a policeman’

          Thus advised a popular Edwardian Music Hall song, adding in explanation, ‘every member of the force has a watch and chain of course, so, if you want to know the time – ask a policeman’.  Nowadays most of us wear wristwatches day and night, taking them off only in the shower.  At work if we aren’t wearing a watch someone else within shouting distance certainly will be.  There’s at least an even chance that there will be a radio-controlled watch or clock available giving accurate time to the second.

This apparently is not so in County Hall, Chelmsford.  Perhaps I was over-generous to Essex County Council in suggesting above that they might only be able to give our roads and pavements the maintenance they need by cutting down on other vital services.  According to the daily Gazette a Freedom of Information request has revealed that between April 2011 and January 2012 county council employees dialled the Speaking Clock 1,349 times, clocking up a bill of £566! This was not a vast sum of money compared with those that, a few years ago during the reign of Council Leader Lord Hanningfield, some county councillors were claiming in unaudited expenses, but it was surely completely unjustified. In over thirty years in the local government service I certainly never dialled the Speaking Clock myself, nor do I recall anyone else ever doing so.

            Possibly more justifiable was the sum spent on calling directory enquiries. During that same period there were 5,705 calls made to ‘118 numbers’ (a few would have been reasonable enough – but nearly 6,000?). The cost of these – with the £566 for time enquiries – came to a total of £22,768!  I reckon that would have paid for filling in several potholes!   A ‘council spokesman’ is reported as saying, ‘We strive to keep all costs at a minimum and do not endorse the use of the talking clock, and we actively encourage our staff not to use it’.  So that’s all right then.

Last week’s local elections

          Last week’s local elections (in which our own Tendring District was not involved) confirmed my belief that more people vote to keep one or other of the candidates out than to get their own preferred candidate in.  The strong Labour vote was, I think, the result of disillusionment with the coalition government rather than a conviction that Labour can cure all the nation’s ills.

            I was glad that the Green Party did relatively well, their candidate coming third in the London Mayoralty election, in front of the Liberal Democrat candidate. I am delighted that the British National Party was virtually wiped off the political map, but am sorry to see UKIP flourishing.  I am sorrier that Boris Johnson won than I am that Ken Livingstone lost.   It seems that Boris has ambitions to be Party Leader and made a not-too-heavily-veiled criticism of David Cameron in his victory speech.

            I was unreservedly glad that seven out of the eight local authorities that had a referendum on whether or not they wanted a Mayor, rejected the idea decisively.  They will continue with their ‘cabinet style’ administration.  I am only sorry that members of the public were never offered a referendum on the central government’s decision to insist that all local authorities should either have an all-powerful Mayor or adopt ‘cabinet government’, copying Westminster in having policy decided by a tiny clique of the ruling majority party, to which all party member on the Council are expected to give their unqualified support. I believe that if public opinion had been tested in referendums, a substantial majority would have opted for a continuation of the old ‘committee’ based local administration, in which every issue was discussed openly in committee before being presented to the Council for further debate and a decision.

            The old system may have been more cumbersome and time consuming – but it certainly came closer to expressing the will of the electorate.

           

           

Week 16 2012 19.4.2012

Tendring Topics......on Line 

Recycling

            Recycling has, for many years, been one of my enthusiasms.  At one time I had three compost bins in which I converted every scrap of kitchen and garden waste into compost. I had a shredder that made my tree and shrub prunings compostable. Seaweed harvested from Clacton’s beaches enriched the contents of my bins! Some of my used newspapers, soaked in water, I would use to line trenches destined to be filled with compost and grow sweet peas or runner beans or courgettes. I was very proud of the results!

            Sadly, my gardening days came to an end but I was pleased when Tendring Council introduced its recycling collection service.  I conscientiously sort out my newspapers, magazines, circulars, plastic bottles and empty food and drink cans, put them in the green box that the council provided and put it, together with the black plastic bag containing non-recyclable refuse, at the entrance to my driveway on the appropriate day of every week.

            Had I been asked how the service could be improved I would have suggested including glass bottles and jars to the recyclables. There are a number of bottle banks in the area (I am fortunate in having one less than a quarter of a mile away) but jars and bottles are heavy and bulky for a pedestrian or cyclist to carry and using a car to make the journey surely defeats the purpose of the exercise.  I take my bottles and jars on my mobility scooter when I have to make an occasional visit to Magdalen Green Post Office, very near the bottle bank.

            Tendring Council launched last week its new and improved recyclables collection scheme.  Its purpose is to separate papers and card from potentially contaminating plastic milk and household domestic cleaning bottles, and to add the collection of food waste (leftovers, vegetable peelings and so on).  For this last purpose householders are provided with two containers – a small plastic ‘caddy’ to keep in the kitchen for the immediate reception of waste, and a larger storage bin, with hinged lid, to be kept outside and to receive the contents of the caddy.   The larger of these bins will be emptied every week into the collecting vehicle and should be put out on the boundary of the property, at the same time as the black plastic bag containing non-recyclable refuse,

            Every household has also been issued with a red salvage box.  This is to be used, with the green box we already possess, to separate the recyclable materials.  The red box is to be used for paper and cardboard only and the green one for metal cans of all descriptions and plastic bottles (milk bottles and bottles used for bleach and other household cleaning materials – not for yoghurt pots or containers used for margarine, cheese or other spreads, and salad vegetables or fruit)  The filled red box and the filled green box are to be put out for the collectors on alternate weeks and we have all been given a little calendar showing clearly which box is to be collected each week.

            Thus, if everything goes according to plan, on ‘collection day’ outside each house there will be the  black plastic sack containing unrecyclable refuse, a green storage bin with a hinged lid for food and kitchen waste and either a red or a green box with the other recyclables.

            It will rarely be exactly like that.  I realize that, living on my own, eating frozen or ready-prepared food, and preparing no more than I need for each meal, I have very little kitchen and food waste. A few teabags, half a dozen egg shells and two or three banana skins are likely to comprise my weekly harvest! There must be other ’live-aloners’ in a similar position. Some householders, I have little doubt, will ignore the entire scheme.  They will never use their plethora of boxes and will simply leave outside all their refuse, unsorted, in two or more black plastic sacks!

            The scheme is a bit complicated, but most of us I think, will try to co-operate.  I can see one snag (presumably the result of the Council’s spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar!) that may cause a serious problem.  Our existing green boxes have lids.  The new red boxes do not.  The red boxes are used for paper and cardboard. Many householders will  keep these boxes outside and put cardboard and unwanted paper in them throughout the fortnight.  We all put out our refuse and recyclables for collection at least an hour or so before the collectors arrive. There will thus be plenty of time for high winds to scatter loose paper from the open red boxes, or for heavy rain to to  reduce paper and cardboard in them to a soggy mass!

            There is one simple and straight-forward solution that would not cost the Council a penny.  Swap the purposes of the two boxes, using the green one for paper and cardboard, and the red one for cans and plastic bottles.  The lid would protect paper and cardboard in the green box from wind and rain while the weather would have little effect on bottles and cans in the open red box.

            I wonder if the Council will be prepared to admit that they got it wrong – and will put it right.

 "Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens."

When, many years ago, I was a POW in a small working camp in Germany, we had a tear-off calendar in our ‘barrack room’ with a ‘thought for the day’, in German of course, for each day.  The quotation above, from the German poet Schiller is one of two or three of them that I have remembered to this day.   It means ‘Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain’.

That quotation came into my mind when, a fortnight ago, I commented in this blog on the Prime Minister’s and Cabinet Office Minister’s success in turning the mole-hill of a possible future strike of petrol lorry drivers into a mountain of chaos, bad temper and potential danger when they advised motorists to keep their vehicles topped up with petrol and the Cabinet Office Minister suggested keeping a jerrican or two of petrol in reserve in the garage!  One of their cabinet colleagues had the effrontery to say later that as a result of their advice to motorists we were better prepared for any possible strike than we had been!

A regular correspondent points out that if there had been an imminent strike, the advice would have been every bit as idiotic and even more reprehensible.  If we are ever faced with a petrol shortage he hopes that someone in authority will strongly advise ‘don’t dash out and top up your petrol tank’.  If everyone panic-buys the situation will become infinitely worse.   Think of ways you can use less petrol or avoid using it altogether.  Walk the children to school instead of driving them.  It’s healthier anyway.   Where you can, walk or cycle to your work or other destination. Share your vehicle with others. Use public transport.  Consider, as we were all asked to consider during World War II, ‘Is your journey really necessary?’

That way there should be sufficient petrol for essential services – fire and ambulance for example – and for essential journeys by the rest of us. But I suppose no-one can expect politicians, who rarely open their mouths without considering whether what they are about to say will gain votes or lose them, to give sensible advice like that.

   At the time of the politician-induced crisis I was amused by a report in a National newspaper of a pub with a sign outside ‘Beer Shortage – come in and panic-buy!’

         

Health and Safety

          We have all become accustomed to idiotic restrictions like schools forbidding children from playing conkers, popular play equipment being removed from children’s playgounds and so on, being imposed in the interests of ‘health and safety’. Adults lives too are likely to be similarly plagued. I have heard that there are offices where employees are forbidden to hang their coats over the backs of their chairs because someone had once tripped and fallen over just such a coat!

            Much the same motive lies behind the dire warning enclosed with some proprietary packets of sleeping pills; ‘These may cause drowsiness’.  I wonder that no-one has yet thought of fencing off the sea.  Even those who escape drowning may get their feet wet and develop pneumonia!

            The cause of all this pernicious interference with everyone’s daily life is not, as you may imagine, some overzealous bureaucrat in Whitehall (or possibly in Brussels) who devotes his life to creating regulations that make everyone else’s life miserable.   On the contrary it is a product of free enterprise, of the market place and of the carefully fostered conviction that there is no such thing as a genuine accident – every unpleasant thing that happens to anyone is the result of someone else’s carelessness or neglect, and that someone must be made to pay for it.

            Conkers are forbidden in some school playgrounds because there is a remote possibility that one of the conkers might fly off its restraining string and injure a participant or onlooker.  Sue the school for failing to exercise adequate control in the playground!  A child falls off a recreation ground slide or swing and twists an ankle.  Sue the Council for installing dangerous equipment! A motorist takes a couple of pain-killers and crashes his car.  Was he warned that the pills could cause drowsiness? No? then sue the drug company or the pharmacist who sold them!

 Don’t look in Whitehall or in Brussels for those responsible for attempting to eliminate every possible peril (and several that one might have thought impossible) from modern life.  Just switch on your tv set and watch daytime commercial tv for an hour or so.   You won’t have long to wait for a benign character to appear on the screen telling you that if you have been involved in an accident and it isn’t your fault, the chances are that you’ll be entitled to compensation. Get in touch forthwith with this, that or the other firm of solicitors.  They’re specialists and they’ll get you every penny of the compensation to which you are entitled.  It’s no win, no fee, and the ‘other lot’ will have to pay all legal costs!

            It isn’t the bureaucrats, or even the politicians, who have created and fostered the excesses of ‘Health and Safety’.  It is our own compensation culture and the legal vultures who make their own fortunes out of it.

The Local Elections

          Tendring District residents will not have a vote in the forthcoming local council elections because we elect the members of our council all together in a local general election.  It is electors in areas where a third of the members of their Council are elected annually who will be exercising their right to vote early next month.

            Needless to say the national party leaders are having their say, often with old, stale platitudes that we have heard a dozen times before. I am a little tired of David Cameron’s explanation of all that is wrong with Britain today as the result of ‘The financial mess that we inherited from the previous Labour Government’, especially when no less an authority than the Governor of the Bank of England has made clear again and again that the cause of that financial mess was the greed and incompetence of the bankers – to a man (and woman) enthusiastic supporters of Mr Cameron’s party.

            I am very interested in the steady progress of the Green Party.  They already have a majority of voters in Brighton and it wouldn’t need a very big electoral swing in their direction to give them a majority in Norwich and elsewhere.   I note that that among their policies, ranking equally with what we generally think of as ‘Green’ issues, is the urgent need to narrow the enormous gap between the incomes of Britain’s wealthiest and its poorest citizens.

            Regular blog readers will know that this is a cause that has my unqualified support.  Last week I suggested that the time might be right to launch a new political party with that specific aim.  I suggested that it might be called The New Levellers but a blog reader in whose judgement I have the greatest confidence suggests The Equality Party.  I would be perfectly happy with that. In the meantime; I would unhesitatingly support any party working towards narrowing that ever-widening gap, the cause of so many of our nation’s ills.

            For that reason I wish every success to Green local government candidates throughout the land!

           

  

              

           

Week 18.2011 10.5.11

Tendring Topics…….on line


Justice…..or Vengeance?

It is said that at the beginning of the Battle of Waterloo, a British Artillery officer reported to the Duke of Wellington that he had spotted Napoleon within range of his cannons? Should he open fire? ‘Certainly not!’ Wellington is said to have replied. ‘We are soldiers, not assassins!’

Had those cannons opened fire and successfully ‘taken out’ Napoleon, the chances are that the death of their charismatic leader would have demoralised the French troops and the Battle of Waterloo would have been won by the British without the help of Blucher and his Prussian army, and with many, many fewer casualties. Wellington though, drew a sharp distinction between killing enemy troops in battle, and deliberately targeting and killing their leader.

Nowadays we are less squeamish. There is, I think, little doubt that the recent air attack on Colonel Gaddafi’s HQ in Tripoli was aimed at killing him, even though the building destroyed was probably a command point from which troops were being deployed and commanded. Not only did that attack fail to kill Gaddafi, but it did kill his son and two grandchildren. There has not yet been independent confirmation of this says a NATO spokesman. I think though that it is almost certainly true and that it will do much to strengthen the determination of Gaddafi’s supporters, and probably make at least a few of his opponents wonder about the justice of their cause. Whatever may be said about Gaddafi using members of his own family as human shields it was definitely an ‘own goal’ for NATO as well as a tragedy for the families of those killed.

That, and the fact that neither NATO nor the Libyan insurgents will even consider the possibility of peace talks while Gaddafi remains in control makes me feel that we may have already entered the next phase of our progress towards all-out war about which I warned a fortnight ago.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the USA made a deliberate – and this time successful – attempt to assassinate Osama Bin Laden when their special forces attacked the fortified compound in Pakistan in which he had been living. The Americans have certainly learnt a lot since their spectacular failure to free the Embassy hostages in Iran by force and the CIA’s comic opera attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with explosive cigars! It seems that their special forces were told not to hesitate to kill Bin Laden rather than take him prisoner. This they did. He was unarmed but, so it was claimed, attempted resistance – so they shot him. The hundreds of people, men, women and children, whom Bin Laden had conspired to kill had also been unarmed, as The Sun was keen to point out. However, are we really happy that we, or our allies, should model our behaviour on his?

Has ‘Justice been done’? Is the world, ‘a safer place’ without Osama Bin Laden. I think that both are doubtful. If Bin Laden had been captured alive and put on trial, justice unmistakeably would have been done. What what was the advantage to the Americans of a dead Bin Laden, rather than a Bin Laden facing international justice? His death saved the vast expense and time taken by a trial in the international criminal court.  It prevented a long-drawn-out propaganda campaign claiming that Bin Laden was obeying the command of a higher power in his war on the USA.  Above all perhaps, it prevented him from being in a position to publicise worldwide the fact that the USA had launched him and supported him in his career of terrorism for so long as his murderous activities were directed only against the Russians?

Justice may not have been done but vengeance has certainly been satisfied – and it was clear that it was vengeance and not justice that those joyful, triumphal crowds in Washington celebrating the news of Bin Laden’s death, had wanted. Hitler caused worldwide death, destruction and human misery on a scale far beyond the wildest dreams of Bin Laden. Were there similar joyful and triumphal scenes in London, Washington and Moscow when his death was announced? I think not. Such spectacles, I had imagined, belonged to the distant past when defeated enemies’ heads, or their broken bodies, were displayed to a rejoicing mob.

Because it was vengeance rather than justice that was satisfied, the world is not a safer place than it was before Bin Laden’s death. There are those who will be determined to avenge him. The way in which he was killed will gain further recruits to their cause. Western governments are well aware of this and have stepped up their anti-terrorist activities, warning us all to be doubly vigilant. Quite possibly, despite all the precautions, in the USA or perhaps in the UK, there will be an act of terrorism that will give us something else to avenge! I am reminded of Gandhi’s chilling prophecy that if we all demanded ‘an eye for an eye’ we would end with a world full of blind people.

I hope that we will never entirely forget that, while we humans do our best to administer and dispense justice -‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord, ‘I will repay’

The Tale of a footpath

Immediately opposite my bungalow in Clacton’s Dudley Road, is a narrow footpath providing a short cut through to Agincourt Road. It was useful to me when I was a motorist. I could drive the car the long way round into Agincourt Road, leave it for servicing or whatever with the commercial garage there, and take the short walk home again via the footpath. Now that I rely on a mobility scooter for local journeys I save myself five minutes or so by taking a short cut through the passage when visiting a friend in Coppins Road. I notice women coming through it to reach shops in St Osyth Road or to take young children to school. It is in fairly regular use.

That is the positive side of the footpath. Sadly, there’s a negative side too.

The Footpath

It is a handy escape route for perpetrators of any kind of anti-social behaviour. They can run through the passage and, once on the other side, can scatter and disappear. It has been the venue of serious crime. I can recall – admittedly several years ago – two muggings taking place there after dark. I understand that it is used for drug dealing. A ‘customer’ loiters in the immediate vicinity. A car draws up. A quick exchange takes place. The car speeds away and the customer disappears down the passage.

It is regularly a site of minor and not-so-minor nuisance. Litter of all kinds is regularly discarded there (the Council does have it cleared from time to time) and it is often used as a toilet. There was an open space half-way along the footpath that was used as a dumping place for larger items of refuse, until one of the neighbouring residents recently took unilateral action and blocked it off! Users are likely to find the footpath litter-strewn and smelly.

For those living on each side of the passage the final straw came over Easter weekend when someone set fire to a mattress and started a fire there! This seriously damaged fences and put properties and lives at risk.

What is the solution? Closing the footpath is the only effective one that those directly affected can see, It is not an ancient ‘right of way’. When my family moved into Dudley Road in 1956 there was a wide driveway opposite my bungalow, giving access to what had been a Carter Patterson depot. It became a similar depot for British Road Service. Huge lorries regularly came and went (damaging the paved footpath immediately outside my bungalow!) My sons, who in the early sixties were in their pre-teens and great local ‘explorers’ assure me that there was, at that time, no way that it was possible to use that route to get to Agincourt Road, without trespassing onto BRS property. The developer who built on what had once been the depot presumably created the footpath and is its owner today.

I am sure that there are a number of local people, including myself, who would suffer minor inconvenience if the footpath were to be closed. I think though that this is an instance in which, unless some other satisfactory answer can be found, the wishes of those directly affected should prevail.

Election Fever

I can’t honestly say that I am sorry about the defeats of the Liberal Democrats in the local elections. I voted for their candidate in the General Election but I certainly didn’t vote for the policies to which they have agreed with their coalition partners. It may be that we are being unfair to them. Perhaps Nick Clegg and his government colleagues really have modified David Cameron’s policies. We’ll never know how awful those policies might have been without a Lib.Dem. contribution!

But it is hardly surprising that faithful members of the party should regard the acquiescence of their leadership to increases in tuition fees at universities when they had specifically pledged to oppose these increases as a blatant betrayal. Since they had lied over that issue why should anyone believe anything that they say or anything that they promise in the future?

I am moderately pleased about Labour’s very moderate successes. I am sick of hearing Lib.Dems. and Conservatives complaining about the mess that they inherited from the previous Labour Government. The financial mess that the country is in was, as the Governor of the Bank of England has made clear on a number of occasions, the result of the greed and incompetence of ‘the Financial Sector’ from which the Conservative Party gets a great deal of its funds. New Labour’s fault lay in not having taken firm action to curb their excesses. Lord Mendelson said that he ‘didn’t have any problem with billionaires’. Well, he should have. The trouble with New Labour was that, just as Ramsey Macdonald had been dazzled by duchesses and had betrayed the party that had brought him to power, so Tony Blair and his New Labour colleagues had been blinded by billionaires! I am hoping, though without a great deal of confidence, that under Ed Milliband the party will rediscover the idealism that brought it into existence.

I am sorry that the Conservatives have consolidated their control of Tendring Council because I felt that their ‘Tendring First’ predecessors had done a pretty good job. However, these days the main function of district councils, whatever their political complexion, is to take the blame for cuts forced upon them by central government policy. It really doesn’t matter much which lot are in office!

I am sorry too – though not all that sorry – about the overwhelming NO vote in the referendum about the ‘Alternative Vote’. I voted YES because I felt, and still feel, that it would have been an improvement on the ‘first past the post’ system. It was no more than second-best though and Nick Clegg was foolish to make the referendum a condition of his recruitment into the governing coalition. One day, though certainly not in my lifetime, Britain will have true proportional representation and our 1,000 year long evolution from autocracy to true ‘rule by the people’ will be complete .

I have no connection whatsoever with Scotland but I am pleased about the SNP’s resounding victory despite an electoral system that made it very difficult for any party to secure an overall majority! I have never understood why a Scottish national party should be ‘left of centre’, reformist and redistributive, whereas any similar party in England would almost certainly be ultra-conservative and neo-fascist.

My main worry about the possibility of Scotland gaining its independence is the risk that it could leave England with permanently right-wing governments!