Week 41.10 12th October 2010

Tendring Topics……..on Line

‘How will the Chancellor’s child benefit move hit you?’

This was the question posed by the daily Coastal Gazette to its readers on Tuesday 5th October, the day that Chancellor George Osborne broke it to the Conservative Party Conference that from 2013 higher rate taxpayers would not be eligible for Child Benefit. Predictably the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph saw it as yet another assault on ‘Middle England’. Local readers of the Coastal Gazette however seem to have taken the news much more philosophically.

The higher rate of income tax comes into force on incomes of about £44,000 a year. I reckon that a substantial number of Gazette readers think in terms of a weekly wage rather than an annual salary. For them £44,000 a year is roughly £850 a week, not the sort of sum that many of them find in their wage packets on payday. Unsurprisingly they see the Chancellor’s decision as a sound one. Nina Hamilton, who lives not far from me in Old Road, is reported as saying, ‘People who are bringing in about a grand a week don’t really need the help in my opinion. Child allowance makes a big difference to people on lower incomes’. Amanda Snelling, a mother of one, from Great Clacton, made a similar point: ‘I’m all for these cuts for people earning upwards of £40K a year. If they’re on that money then what does a £20 a week benefit really mean to them anyway? It’s good news for the working classes who rely on that money’

Those who definitely will see the Chancellor’s proposals as unfair will be ‘Middle England’ mums whose husband’s income only just comes into that upper tax band and who feel that being at home for their growing children is more important than, for instance, owning a second car, living in a rather posher home or taking regular holidays in the Caribbean. Next door to them, in the leafy suburb in which they both live, may be a family with a total income of £60,000 a year – but it comes from a man and wife both working and earning £30,000 a year each. They will still get their child allowance because no one in the household is on the higher tax band! ‘Fair’, did I hear David Cameron say?

In my younger days, certainly in families from ‘Middle England’ and in many working class ones too, the wife made and maintained the home and looked after the children. The husband was, and was expected to be, the ‘breadwinner’. My mother never had a job other than home making once she was married. Neither did my wife. What a medieval idea that seems today! There was much less juvenile delinquency though in those days, many fewer schoolgirl pregnancies and many fewer teenage sufferers from alcoholism or sexually transmitted diseases.

One thing that has been made plain by those who protested indignantly at the Chancellor’s proposals, and those who thought that they were a good idea, was that everyone welcomes cuts in services and benefits – provided that they always affect other people. And that this is true of wealthy and poor alike! This will no doubt be confirmed when more details of ‘the cutbacks’ are known on 20th of this month. I really don’t envy the Chancellor in his task! He can’t possibly please everybody and he can’t possibly be fair unless he pleases nobody!

Some Cheerful News – for now!

There isn’t much good news about these days but it was nice to spot a small news item on an inside page of the Clacton Gazette announcing that the village of St Osyth has been listed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the best endowed by nature as a place to live. It has, says the report, low levels of air pollution and offers its residents ‘exhilarating sea walks’.

Its outstanding positive feature though is its low rainfall, at 20in or 513mm, the very lowest in Britain and (as I used proudly to claim when I was Tendring Council's Public Relations Officer) was comparable with that of the fringes of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert! If you prefer a nearer comparison, Britain’s wettest spot, Crib Goch in Snowdonia (an area where thousands go on holiday each year) has almost 90 times as much annual rainfall at 177in or 4500mm.

It isn’t quite so good of course for keen gardeners. I remember, in the distant days when I was one of their number, surveying my parched lawn and wilting runner beans after weeks of drought, and reflecting that there were snags about cultivating a garden just three miles from the centre of Britain’s driest location!

It won’t, of course, affect the weather but I reckon that if the present owner of St. Osyth Manor gets his way and doubles the total number of homes in the village, St Osyth will become a lot less desirable place in which to live. Perhaps though, as Britain’s population grows, expansion on those lines is inevitable. I won’t be around to see it, but I think it possible that before the end of this century the village community will have been swallowed up in Clacton and will have become one of the town’s more attractive suburbs. 'Oh brave new world!'

Chip off the old block?

It can be disconcerting to find traits in your offspring that are replicas of your own. It can, of course, also be extremely satisfying. I have been more than pleased that my two sons have both chosen socially useful careers motivated by job satisfaction rather than by financial gain, and that my three grandchildren have followed in their parents’ footsteps. I am pleased too that, although no longer ‘go-to-meeting’ Quakers, my sons pursue what I consider to be the Quaker values of honesty, plain speaking and concern for others. In that respect I fear that it was their mother rather than I who set the example.

A little while ago I confessed in this column that I was an opinionated old man and one who was not content to keep his opinions to himself. Pete, my elder son, is beginning to display similar symptoms. I tend to spread my opinions via this blog and in the correspondence columns of the press. He – more usefully perhaps – shares his with his member of parliament. I should perhaps mention that in many respects, the present Prime Minister would consider Pete to be an ideal role model. Made redundant from a very senior post in local government housing administration, he launched his own IT consultancy, gathering round himself a team of IT experts experienced in public administration, to solve the problems of local, police and other public authorities. HUB Solutions Ltd ( www.HUBSolutions.co.uk ) now has satisfied clients throughout England and Scotland and an office in Glasgow as well as in London. This doesn’t mean that, any more than I do, he supports all – or even many - of the policies of David Cameron and the coalition that he heads. Very shortly after the General Election he wrote to his local MP, Lib.Dem. Lynne Featherstone about the coalition’s axing of the school building and renovation programme and received a very rapid and positive reply. Now he has written again in the wake of policies announced at the Conservative Party Conference. Below, slightly abbreviated, is his letter.

Dear Lynne,

I wrote to you shortly after the General Election, in which I voted for you, concerned at the decision your Government has made to cut the entire School Building Programme. I appreciated your prompt reply. However, I feel that policy pronouncements of the last week require me to tell you that the latest decisions of your partners in the Coalition seem to me to move so far in the wrong direction, that it is difficult for me to understand how you can remain a party to such a regime.

I am sure that I am not alone in noticing, that while the Prime Minister says that the burden of cuts must be shared by all, in fact a particular sector of the community – those with children in their care – has been relentlessly singled out for sacrifice. This anti-child policy started with the immediate and apparently careless decision to cut the school building programme. Since it became apparent that this could not even be accurately listed, it could hardly have been carefully assessed.

The Chancellor, in his first speech to the House, announced a cap on Housing Benefit, knowing that it would mainly impact upon families with several children living in central London properties, who would, as a result, be forced to move out – possibly away from extended family and schools, which are so important to children. I am sure that you are aware that it is practically impossible for a Benefit claimant to start a private tenancy on a high rent, as very few landlords would allow that. Therefore, the arbitrary cap would mainly affect those who were working and suffered misfortune such as illness, separation or redundancy.

The Chancellor this week announced two further policies that deliberately and quite carelessly extend this strategy, placing an arbitrary cap on Benefits receivable, and removing entitlement of Child Benefit from households in which any member is paying the higher rate of tax.
I have yet to see any attempt to share the “national sacrifice” with single young people and childless couples, who often have a high disposable income much of which is spent on entirely unnecessary luxuries. Just as relevant, if we are genuinely concerned about people who should be more motivated to get a job, I haven’t seen anything to encourage single young people, neither in work nor in full time education, who are potentially highly mobile and who have very little justification for claiming benefits, to seek employment.

I believe that decisions such as these which focus on the most vulnerable in our society are not just a matter of political judgement – or misjudgement – but are quite immoral in their motivation, carelessly indifferent to the impact of their application, and nothing whatever to do with the financial crisis.

I admire the loyalty that Liberal Democrats have shown to the concept of a coalition in the national interest, but morality demands that loyalty must have its limits. It doesn’t look as if the Liberal Democrats were even consulted on any of the policy pronouncements I have listed and I would urge you to consider the threshold at which, from a Liberal Democrat point of view, the Coalition is no longer serving the National interest. I believe that you can compromise on judgement, but not on the issues of fundamental morality to which I have referred..

Yours sincerely

Peter Hall

It is all stuff that I would have been happy to have written myself, except that I hadn’t realized the effect that capping housing benefit would have on poorer households in central London. But there, I haven’t had experience of housing administration in central London. Pete has. I am glad too that he has drawn attention to the fact that well-off ‘singletons’ and the DINKY (Double Income, No Kids Yet) Brigade seem so far to be escaping the cuts that are threatening those with families.

Looking at the bigger picture, it leaves me wondering whether financial measures affecting the great majority of us who are neither the seriously wealthy nor even residents in the very comfortable ‘Middle England’ of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, should be under the control of a Chancellor from a privileged background who has never experienced poverty or been in a situation where every penny (or even every fiver!) counts.

A Bungled ‘Rescue’

I can’t stop thinking about that Aid Worker, full of compassion for the Afghan people; kidnapped by those she was trying to help and then killed by our NATO allies in a bungled rescue attempt. The final indignity was surely the ever more detailed lies that were told about the manner of her death. (‘The embrace of death’, ‘Clutched to the bosom of a suicide bomber in the hour of rescue’) until, so it appears, photographic evidence suggested that she was killed by a fragmentation grenade hurled by one of her rescuers into the room in which she was held captive. Resolutely casting aside such thoughts as ‘trigger-happy Yanks’, there are two or three questions to which I would dearly like to know the answers.

The need for her rescue was said to have been urgent because she had been about to be transferred across the frontier into Pakistan. Isn’t the Pakistan government supposed to be our loyal ally who has recently fought a vastly expensive (both in resources and in human life) campaign clearing their border area of Taliban terrorists?

Why on earth were fragmentation grenades carried by troops engaged in a rescue mission? Stun grenades and stun guns, certainly – automatic rifles and hand guns, probably – the rescuers wouldn’t have known what armed resistance they might have encountered immediately before or after the rescue attempt. Tear gas or similar grenades, possibly. Surely not fragmentation grenades, deadly weapons used at relatively close range and guaranteed to kill or maim anyone, friend of foe, in their immediate vicinity!

Had it not been for that photographic evidence, we would still believe those lies about that aid worker’s death at the hands of her dastardly captors as the heroic rescuers drew near. How many other lies have we been told, I wonder, about this unwinnable war that is looking more like ‘Vietnam’ (except that then there were no British troops involved) as every day passes?

Week No. 37.10 14th Sept. 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

Prophetic Topics?

Hardly; the fact that likely future events mentioned in this blog often actually occur a week or so later, doesn’t mean that I have the gift of second sight. It is simply that the probable result of some political actions is blindingly obvious to anyone endowed with common sense, devoid of party dogma and immune to the headlines of the popular press.

I wrote, some time ago, that since much of the private sector depends upon the public sector for its work, savage cuts in the public sector were likely to affect private firms before their public authority customers. And so it has. Recently I learned that 5,000 small private firms, contractors of services to local authorities, were already in financial difficulties. The private and public sectors were, I said, like conjoined twins – whatever, good or bad, is done to one of them will inevitably affect the other.

That was just small contractors. Now we learn that the division of the giant building maintenance organisation Connaught, that deals with the upkeep of social housing countrywide, is in financial trouble with thousands of job losses. That is just the immediate result of the cuts. The other, and less easily remedied, effect will be neglected repair and regular maintenance and the descent of social housing into irredeemable slums.

On a recent tv news programme the presenter asked randomly selected members of the public if they would prefer the government to try to reduce ‘the deficit’ by cutting benefits, or services. Most, no doubt inspired by press headlines about ‘benefit cheats’, unhesitatingly replied ‘benefits’ – until they were reminded that ‘benefits’ included child allowances, rent and tax rebates, retirement pensions, free tv licences, bus passes, winter fuel allowance and so on. Many of those interviewed imagined that ‘benefits’ just meant large sums of money paid to ‘other people’ the majority whom were layabouts and/or cheats.

A very great many people (I am among them) are in receipt of some kind of benefit. It can’t be too strongly stressed that, just as the vast majority of young people are not violent drunken hooligans, and the vast majority of Muslims have no sympathy whatsoever with terrorists, the vast majority of people in receipt of benefit are not cheats.

What should have been asked was, would you prefer the government to reduce the deficit by cutting benefits and services to the public, or by modest increases in direct taxes such as income tax, inheritance tax and capital gains tax?

Cutting services, reducing benefits and increasing indirect taxes like VAT and excise duties on such items as tobacco, alcohol and petrol, disproportionately penalise the poor. Income tax rises would affect a wide swathe of society from some with relatively low incomes (they would certainly affect me!) to the seriously wealthy. They would claw back some of the ‘benefits’ from those who didn’t need them and – by their very nature – they are only demanded from those who are able to pay them.

Funny thing, the idea of an extra penny in the pound on the standard rate of income tax, which would reduce no one to penury but would raise a great deal of money, appears not even to have been considered.

I would find it easier to accept all this stuff from the present Chancellor about belt tightening, what the country can and cannot afford, and how we all shall have to suffer, if I could only forget that, just a year or two ago he and Lord Mandelson (then a Labour Government Minister) were together enjoying the hospitality of a multi-millionaire on his luxury yacht. I wonder how much discomfort, never mind suffering, their then host will have to suffer?

Clacton’s Water Feature is back

Recently I expressed my regret at the fact that Clacton’s much criticised and crisis-ridden water feature seemed to have been turned off forever. It had had a short ‘normal’ life during which it had brightened up the town centre. On warm days adventurous children had plunged through its jets to the entertainment of passers by. Sadly though, it appeared that by doing so they were risking their health and safety. The feature didn’t have an adequate water purification plant. Goodness knows what dire pollution may not have been introduced into the ever-circulating water by stray cats, dogs and passing seagulls!


Last summer it made a brief appearance behind a steel fence, intended to protect those of the younger generation from their own bravado. It was anything but an asset to the town centre. Amid universal derision the fence was removed and the jets switched off. This year the Council brought cutting-edge electronic wizardry to its aid. There was no fence. The water feature was switched on - but if any one, adult or child, approached too close to the jets, they faded and died. Sadly, some of the younger generation discovered a blind spot in the defences and a way through the metaphorical minefield. Once again they endangered their health by venturing through the jets. The feature was again switched off. This time I feared, for good.

I’m glad to say that, by means beyond my understanding, the blind spot no longer exists. The path through the minefield has been successfully blocked. The jets of the water feature have been restored. Unless there has been another catastrophe since I took this photo (on 9th Sept.), they are happily jetting away now!
Power to the People!

Last week in this blog I commented on what seemed to me to be two totally outrageous ideas suggested by the Policy Exchange ‘think tank’ to alleviate Britain’s housing crisis. They involved bribing members of rural communities to vote against their own instincts in proposed referenda on whether or not development should take place in their villages; and seizing the thousands of homes provided and run by Housing Associations, using their rent to build more houses for sale.

I said that although I understood Policy Exchange to be an organisation close to the government, I felt sure that both David Cameron and Nick Clegg had more common sense and integrity than to think seriously about adopting either of these (currently criminal!) ideas. Now……..I am beginning to wonder.

Policy Exchange’s report has evidently reached Whitehall. This morning on tv I heard a government spokesman explain that among the problems afflicting would-be developers were long delays in the current planning procedures. They would prepare and submit their plans for housing estates, supermarkets and so on. The district or borough council concerned would consider these plans. They might be passed, passed subject to conditions, or rejected. If they were rejected or it was considered that the conditions were unreasonable, the Developer could appeal – Central Government would become involved and the procedure might drag on for months.

This, as the spokesman said, was clearly unsatisfactory. It might have thought that a government devoted to ‘giving power to local communities’ would decide that, to speed up the process, there should be no appeal for most proposed developments. The decision of the democratically elected district council, taken in consultation with the parish or town council where there was one, should be final. I say most proposed developments because if it were a universal rule, there would be no refuse disposal plant, no sewage works, no penal institutions and no provision for ‘travellers’ anywhere. These are developments that most of us agree are essential but none of us want in our backyards!

That was not the solution favoured by the government spokesman. He suggested that decisions should be passed to local communities and decided by a public referendum, adding that it might be possible to provide ‘inducements’ for the local community to accept the development! His words could have, and possibly did, come straight from the Policy Exchange report.

As it happens just such a development as the government spokesman had in mind is being considered within the Tendring District at this moment.

The owners of St Osyth Priory, a historic stately home in a picturesque and historic village had, to the villagers’ consternation, proposed the building of 200 homes on their land. They were to be part of a scheme needed to raise millions of pounds to restore the Estate. Even more recently that number has been doubled, increasing the number of proposed new houses to 400 This, say the villagers, would increase the number of homes in the village by 50 percent, totally altering the community’s character!

I was particularly interested in this proposed development because in 1974, in the immediate wake of the local government reorganisation of that year, Mr Colin Bellows, the then-new Tendring District Council’s Engineer and Surveyor and I, as Public Relations Officer had visited every town and parish council in the district to familiarise their members with the responsibilities of those local councils under the new Act of Parliament.

I spoke about the newly formed District Council, serving the whole of the Tendring Peninsula, and its relationship with parish and town councils. Mr Bellows explained the new planning laws. These for the first time gave such councils the power to examine and comment on the plans of any proposed new development in their area, before the Tendring Council, as Planning Authority, made its decision.

It was thirty-five years ago and there is only one of those meetings that remains in my memory. It was in the village hall in St. Osyth. An elderly parish councillor had stood up and expressed his regret that we had wasted our time coming to see them. ‘St. Osyth’, he said, ‘already has all the development that is needed and the parish council is opposed to any more whatsoever’.

It seems that that old gentleman’s spirit lives on today. An unofficial poll of local residents taken by the Save our St. Osyth Group after the earlier proposal to build just 200 new homes, revealed that 90 percent of villagers objected to the scheme. Now that the proposed number of homes has been doubled, I would expect there to be even more objectors.

I reckon that it would take a pretty hefty inducement to make that lot change their minds!

The Paradox of Life

The September issue of the Southern East Anglian Area Quakers’ newsletter contains quotations from ‘The Mahabharata’ on life’s paradoxes. Reality, the quotations insist, is composed of opposites. To assert the one is to assert its opposite as well.

Here are a few examples: The paradox of having is that the more one has the greater is one’s discontent. There is a paradox of limits – one becomes aware of one’s limits only by transgressing them; there is no known way by which one can know one’s own limits in advance and The paradox of the self is that without the other, the self would be inconceivable.

These made me remember some paradoxical thoughts on happiness that have developed in my mind over what is now a very long life.

Those who spend their lives seeking their own happiness are destined never to find it.

We realize how happy we have been only when we are happy no longer.

It is our happiest memories that are most likely to bring us to tears