Week 33 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

It wasn’t ‘too good to be true’

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

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

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

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

Still living with Mum at 21? - and 31?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later News

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

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

I hope and pray that someone can! 

           

Week 5 2013

Tendring Topics.......on Line

‘The Isle of Avalon’ – in north-east Essex?

          Viewers of the tv serial Merlin will recall the penultimate scene in which the apparently mortally wounded King Arthur was being transported across a lake to the Isle of Avalon where, according to legend, hail, rain and snow are unknown and the wind never blows coldly.

             The Tendring District, of which Clacton-on-Sea is the biggest town, is hardly a second Avalon on the southern East Anglian coast.  We’re certainly not free of cold winds, though we prefer to think of them as ‘bracing breezes’!  There’s no doubt though that we do escape most of the extreme weather conditions that regularly afflict other less fortunate regions of England.   We had much more rain than usual during last year’s summer and autumn – but we had no floods like those elsewhere.  We did endure something of the cold snap that brought much of England to a standstill at the beginning of last week but, once again, we didn’t have such a heavy snowfall as elsewhere, nor did the snow lie on the ground for so long.

            Snow – falling snow and lying snow – is the one circumstance guaranteed to keep my ‘iron horse’ (my mobility scooter) in its stable.  It did so on Sunday 20^th January and again on Monday and Tuesday, 21^st and 22^nd  but that (so far!) is all.   In Clacton the snowfall began at about noon on Sunday and carried on continuously for several hours.  On Monday morning about 2in of snow was lying on gardens, highways and footpaths but it was slowly beginning to thaw.  There was rain on Monday night that didn’t freeze as it hit the ground and on Tuesday the thaw continued.   Not bad – compared with the way in which snow caused havoc elsewhere.

            Considering the fairly limited amount of snow that fell in our area, it does seem extraordinary that 14 schools in the Colchester area and 10 in the Tendring District closed on Monday 21^st January and others opened late on that day.  Iain Wicks, Essex Development Manager for the Federation of Small Businesses felt that these schools had let parents down.  He is quoted as saying ‘It seems after the first flake of snow, some schools hit the self-destruct button’.  In my own-school days in Ipswich in the 1930s I don’t recall my school ever closing because of snow.  Nor do I recall my sons’ schools in Clacton during the 1960s ever closing for that cause, though there were some pretty severe winters during those decades.

            It is suggested that circumstances are different now because many children live further from their schools.  That may be so – but between 1931 and 1937 when I was at secondary school, I used to cycle three miles each way to and from school daily.  The reason most frequently cited for school closure is ‘health and safety’, giving the impression that some bureaucrat (probably in Brussels!) sends out a directive demanding school closure if there is snow on the ground.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The decision to close a school or to keep it open is that of the head teacher. A possible reason for closure can be the head teacher’s not unreasonable fear that if a child falls and suffers an injury in a frozen playground, the parents will sue for damages and if a teacher does the same thing he or she will also sue!

        
               In my day it was accepted that accidents did sometimes happen, and that if anyone was to blame it was the victim, who should have taken more care.  This isn’t so today.  Watch daytime commercial tv.  You won’t have to wait long before a benign gentleman (or lady) will appear on the screen to advise anyone who has ‘had an accident that wasn’t their fault’ to contact so-and-so specialist solicitors who will pursue their claim for damages. Furthermore, they assure affected viewers, ‘you’ll receive every penny of the damages awarded, because the person or organisation from whom you are claiming will have to the pay the legal costs’.   The implication is that there is no such thing as a genuine accident.  Someone or some organisation is always to blame and they are going to have to pay damages.  No wonder some head teachers decide to play safe and close the school rather than risk an accident and an expensive damages claim!

            A less worthy – and perhaps more probable – reason why a head teacher might decide to close a school is the dreaded School League Table.  A snowy day will mean that some children will genuinely find it difficult to get to school.  Others will welcome the snow as an excuse for playing truant.  Genuine and non-genuine absentees will all be regarded as truants – and the number of truancies is an important factor in determining a school’s position on that Table. A school that is closed can have no truancies!

            It is possible to understand the motives of head teachers who close their schools when there is snow.   It is rather less easy to understand the Railway Company’s action in cancelling trains running to and from Clacton for no other reason than the threat of snow!  On Monday 14^th January, six days before Clacton had its snowfall, a 30 mph speed limit was imposed on a number of trains leaving the station and others were cancelled, leaving commuters in the lurch. This was because although there was no snow in Clacton there was snowfall in other areas through which trains might have to pass. ‘There were flurries of snow in Colchester and Norwich had several inches’.

            It seems that these measures were taken ‘to reduce the risk of snow being sucked into the trains electric motors and damaging them’.  Is cancelling train journeys or slowing them to a snail’s pace really the best or only way to prevent this?   Perhaps the now-privately-run railway companies should consult those who run the Trans-Siberian Railway. This carries passengers and goods across part of northern Europe and the whole width of the continent of Asia from Moscow to the Pacific coast, summer and winter alike.   Electrification began in the early days of the USSR in the 1920s and the last steam engine was pensioned off in the mid-1980s.  I can’t believe that a little snow on that line brings their trains to a halt!

'The Shape of Things to Come'*

            No-one spelt out to me my duties and objectives when I was appointed as Tendring District Council’s first Public Relations Officer in 1973.   It was clear to me though that I should endeavour to persuade the general public to identify themselves with the new Council.   They, the electorate, had voted for the council’s members to be their representatives.  It followed that the council’s successes (and no doubt occasional failures) were their own successes and failures, not those of some remote and alien body, known to them chiefly as a sender of rate demands! 

        
            Although, during the seven years that I was the Council’s PRO I had my small successes and managed, on the whole, to present a positive  picture of the Council and its activities to the local and regional press  radio and tv, I can’t really claim  to have succeeded in gaining that objective. Despite my efforts the electorate continued to regard the council with suspicion – as ‘them and us’.

            Magnify that situation a few hundred  times and you have something like the way in which much of the public regards the European Union.  From most of the national press you would never dream that the United Kingdom was actually a substantial and very influential member of the EU and that this membership had been confirmed by a referendum in the 1970s.  The United Kingdom is represented at every level in the Union and our representatives’ opinions are respected even on matters concerning the Eurozone of which, by our own government’s choice, we are not members.

            Furthermore, the European Union has its own parliament which, since it is elected by a system of proportional representation, is more truly representative of the electorate than our national parliament.  It even has members from Britain’s UKIP whose main, if not sole, policy is to abolish all European Union institutions!  It is surely extraordinary that those who protest most strongly about the activities of the European Commission, because it is not directly elected and is therefore ‘undemocratic’, are also the most determined to deny additional power to the European Parliament that unquestionably is a democratic institution.

            Over and over again we see the EU being presented as an alien and hostile organisation with which we are eternally in a state of ‘cold war’, instead of as respected international organisation of which we are an influential member.

            Now the whole matter is to be settled – at some time in the future!   If the Conservative Party wins the next election and David Cameron is still leader, he will negotiate with other members of the EU to try to ‘repatriate’ to the United Kingdom some of the powers currently vested in the EU (I hope that they won’t prove to be powers that curb the money-manipulators who brought the world into its current sorry state, and the powers that protect the jobs and safety of working people!)   Having successfully done that, he will invite the British public to vote whether to stay in or get out of the EU.  He himself will then support continued membership of the emasculated EU that he will have created.

It is unlikely that I shall still be around to see Mr Cameron face that very first hurdle; winning the election. I certainly don’t expect – or hope – to live to see the fruition of his plans.  What I would like to happen is really of no interest because there is no way in which I can affect the outcome.  I am happy though to place on record what I think could happen as the future unfolds.

            During the next few decades countries of the European Union are likely to draw closer together both economically and politically. They will eventually become a Federation like the USA, with clearly defined Federal Functions and State Functions – saving millions of Euros by transferring many of the present powers and functions of the various national governments to democratically elected local authoriries (real localisation in fact) and transferring others (overall economic planning, foreign affairs and defence for instance) to the new Federal Government formed from a proportionately elected European Parliament.  These will be among the factors that hasten European economic recovery.   The Euro will recover its value (already at the end of January 2013 it was  gaining in value against the pound sterling) and all members of the EU will adopt the Euro as their currency.  The EU (renamed the European Federation or EUROFA) will then be able to co-operate, negotiate and, where appropriate, compete with the USA and the world’s emerging economies on equal terms, and without the dead hand of the UK continually impeding progress.

            In the UK a triumphant Conservative/UKIP coalition will hold an in/out referendum on membership of the EU and will decide to withdraw its membership. Scenes of widespread national rejoicing in England will be followed by Scotland’s declaration of independence from the UK and its application for membership of the by-then-established EUROFA.  The USA will transfer its ‘special relationship’ from the now-reduced UK to EUROFA.  World markets – China, India, the USA, Latin America – will find trading with a united Europe having a single currency and a unified economic policy simpler and more straightforward than with the previous proliferation of nation-states and currencies.  They probably won’t even notice that there is another once-powerful country that has voluntarily put itself outside Federal Europe’s frontiers, clamouring for their attention.

In Britain our great-great grandchildren will live to regret the way that their parents and grandparents voted in that second referendum – and a movement urging yet another referendum (‘Why should we suffer as a result of a stupid referendum held way back in 2018 – or whenever’) would be launched.

            It’s not a very enticing prospect for us Brits.  Never mind.  I am sure that the leader writers of the Express, Mail and Sun would offer quite different possible futures.  Only time will reveal which of us was right.  It is quite likely that none of us will be.  It is a far from remote possibility that accelerating climate change, still denied by some, will make nonsense of all our current hopes and fears.   In any case, who in 1921 the year in which I was born, or indeed in 1945 at the end of World War II, could possibly have foreseen what our country, Europe and the world would be like in AD 2013?

* 'The Shape of Things to Come' was a work of Science Fiction, written by H.G.Wells and published in the early 1930s..  It purported to forecast the history of the world from the late 1930s to the beginning of the 21st Century.  Parts of it were remarkably accurate.  He forecast the outbreak of World War II in 1940 over a border dispute between Germany and Poland about Danzig and the Polish Corridor, but was wildly out in many of his later surmises.  Fortunately perhaps, although we travel forward in space we travel backwards through time and can only see what is already behind us.  I don't suppose that my, or anyone else's, attempted glance into the future is any more accurate than that of H.G.Wells.

Week 47 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

Taking a Sledgehammer (if not a Pile-driver!) to crack a nut!

   Last week, a headline of the local Daily Gazette read ‘Use too many black bags and you risk a visit from the recycling snoopers’.  

            In fact there’s no such risk just yet, but the Gazette reports that, ‘From early next year, waste collectors in Colchester will begin using a new hi-tech computer system to log how much waste is left out for them.  Householders repeatedly caught leaving out too much trash in black sacks will get a visit from council wardens to ‘educate’ them on recycling.  Those wardens will go through the household’s black sacks and explain which items could be recycled instead of going into landfill.

            ‘The hope is’, Matthew Young, Head of Waste Services, says, ‘that we educate people and, collectively, the amount of waste going to landfill is cut massively’.

            I applaud Colchester Council’s aims but I can’t help feeling that they could have achieved their objectives much more easily without all the hi-tech computer activities, without having to rummage through other people’s refuse, and without kindergarten style lessons to householders on what can and cannot be recycled.  All of that seems to me like using the latest third-millennium technology plus the techniques of a seedy ‘private eye’ to teach grandmothers how to suck eggs!

            I don’t suppose that the residents of Colchester Borough are markedly different from those of our own neighbouring Tendring District and, in particular, my own town of Clacton-on-Sea.  Driving, cycling or, in my case, mobility-scootering round Clacton’s residential streets on refuse and salvage collection day will reveal a number of households where the Council’s requirements are fulfilled to the letter.  On the boundary of the property will be a black sack containing non-recyclable land-fill waste and a smallish green plastic box with food waste for recycling. These are collected weekly.  There will also be either a larger green plastic box containing plastic bottles and metal food cans, or a red box containing cardboard and paper waste.  These are collected on alternate weeks. Each householder has been supplied with a chart showing which box is to be put out on each particular week.

            There will be a number of properties where there isn’t a red or a green box, either large or small, in sight.  There will though be up to as many as half a dozen filled black plastic bags put out for collection for landfill.  These are the homes of those who don’t co-operate with the council’s scheme, have never done so, and probably have no intention of ever doing so.  It doesn’t take hi-tech equipment to discover them and there really is no point in opening any of those back plastic bags and pointing out which items could have been put out for recycling.  The vast majority of non-co-operating householders know perfectly well what can and what cannot be recycled.  They simply won’t, or perhaps can’t, sort them out, put them in the appropriate box and take them to the boundary of their property on collection day.  It’s far simpler and easier just to put everything in black plastic bags. If the council supplies only one bag for each week, they can buy some more from the nearest supermarket.  They’re not expensive.

            An official should call on each one of those householders and find out why they are not co-operating with the council’s salvage collection scheme.  Some may have a perfectly valid reason.  Sorting out what is salvageable and what isn’t, putting it into the appropriate container and taking the correct filled containers to the property boundary each week will be beyond the capabilities of many elderly or frail people – and our Essex Sunshine Coast has a great number of these.  I am one of them!  By the time I have got the plastic sack and appropriate boxes ready for collection, I am exhausted and incapable of conveying them the few dozen yards to the end of my drive-way. A kind neighbour does so for me.  Not every one is so fortunate.

            Others may find that holding down a job, looking after a home and perhaps bringing up several children, leaves them with neither the time nor the energy to undertake an extra task.  Sorting out the refuse and salvage and taking it to the property boundary would, in their case, be the final straw that would break the camel’s back!  The Council may be able to help some of them by, for instance, arranging for the refuse to be collected from outside the back door instead of the front gate.

            It is those who could co-operate but choose not to on whom local councils should concentrate their efforts, first by persuasion and, if that fails, by rewarding those who co-operate and penalising the others.  Now that, despite talk about empowering local communities, local authorities have become little more than agents of central government, their ability either ‘to wield the stick or offer the carrot’ is probably extremely limited.  Nevertheless, that path – rather than by the hi-tech plus patronising educational efforts being attempted in Colchester – is the only one that can hope to bring the proportion of recyclables to that of land-fill to an acceptable level.

Another ‘Time Traveller’ finds himself in trouble!

          I sometimes feel that I am a kind of Time Traveller, a cheap ‘economy version’ of Dr. Who.  I am a mid-twentieth century man, with mid-twentieth century attitudes and a mid-twentieth century vocabulary, who finds himself in the twenty-first century and sometimes gets into trouble as a result.  As L.P. Hartley says in the first sentence of his novel The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’.

            It seems that I am not alone. Tendring Councillor Michael Talbot, the respected leader of the Independent Group on Tendring District Council (although I think several decades younger than me) appears to be a fellow time-traveller. He has got himself into serious trouble by using a phrase that was common enough in the time of my youth, and presumably in his, but is totally taboo in 2012

In a public meeting Mr Talbot used the phrase ‘the n……….in the woodpile’ and thus provoked shock and horror among his fellow councillors and some council officials.  He realized at once that what he had said was unacceptable and apologised to the Meeting, saying ‘It’s an old-fashioned term and I put it down to my age that I used it at all.  I understand that it has caused offence and apologise to all members of the Council for this slip on my part’.

The Daily Gazette explains that the offensive phrase was a figure of speech meaning, ‘a fact of importance that is not disclosed’.  It in fact a phrase that had its origins in the USA and has the wider meaning of an unexpected and usually unpleasant surprise concealed among otherwise harmless or beneficial material. It is similar in meaning to ‘the fly in the ointment’ or ‘the spanner in the works’. I can well understand that it is a phrase that would cause deep offence to black people, but in the 1920s and ‘30s many of us had never met or even seen a black person (I never had until I joined the army) so we used the phrase casually, totally unaware of its offensive and hurtful potential.

Following his immediate verbal apology Mr Talbot sent an email to his fellow-councillors apologising even more profusely for having used ‘what is a quite unacceptable expression regarded as being racist, in the conduct of a public meeting’.

It seems that these apologies were not really enough for Council Leader Neil Stock who had chaired the Meeting.  Calling for Mr Talbot to resign his leadership of the Independent Group he declared that the use of the phrase had left him ‘genuinely stunned’ and said that after the Meeting a Senior Council Officer had remarked that if Tendring had been a London Borough the use of the phrase ‘would not simply have been a matter for the conduct committee, it would have resulted in a full-scale police investigation’. If that is so then we certainly do need Commissioners to make sure that Police get their priorities right!   It seems that, as in my day, there are always a few officials eager to tell influential councillors what they think they would like to hear!

I suppose that Mr Stock’s professed shock and horror couldn’t have had anything to do with Mr Talbot’s earlier criticism of the oafish behaviour of the council’s finance supremo Councillor Peter Halliday whom Neil Stock is supporting as Council Leader when he leaves that post shortly?

‘In days of old, when knights were bold……

            The bad, bold barons of those days could – and did – get away with murder!   Things are different now but one local life-baron does seem to have got away very lightly with some pretty reprehensible activities.

            I have been strongly critical of Lord Hanningfield ever since I started to write Tendring Topics….on line, four years ago.  He was then political leader of the Essex County Council.  I thought that he was pompous, self-important, publicity seeking, always ready to accept graciously any praise accorded to the county council, while hurriedly passing on to someone else any criticism of any of its services, such as – for instance – its failing child protection service. He was always floating brilliant ground-breaking ideas that made headlines in the press but were either wildly expensive, ineffective or unwanted.

            There was the wonderful Essex Bank, for instance, that was going to offer quick and easy finance to Essex businesses.  It turned out to be less helpful than the ordinary commercial banks and was clearly unwanted.  There was the Essex County Council branch office in mainland China that was going to bring vast export orders to Essex firms.   Whatever happened to that, I wonder?  There was the ‘Essex jobs for Essex men and women’ campaign, urging potential employers to employ local staff.  That was followed by the Essex County Council, at Lord Hanningfield’s initiative, outsourcing its IT services to an international enterprise. Its HQ was not only not in Essex but not in the UK!  Members of The County Council’s existing IT staff lost their jobs. Then there was the conference he called of other highway authorities (Essex leads the way!) on combating the effects of hard winters.   The following winter Essex was the very first highway authority to run out of grit and salt!

            It was obvious to me too, that he had a taste for international travel at the tax-payers’ expense.  There was an event in Harwich, Massachusetts to which our Harwich Town Council sent representatives (at economy travel and accommodation rates!).   The County Council, quite unnecessarily, also sent a delegation, headed by Lord Hanningfield.  Its purpose was to encourage businesses in the USA to buy from Essex firms.   They did not travel by the cheapest means and use the most economical accommodation.  Did they bring back any orders?  I never heard of any.  He made similar journeys to China (for the Olympics!), Hong Kong, India, and the West Indies.  All of course were at our expense.

            All this time Lord Hanningfield was attending the House of Lords as a member, and it was in this capacity that Nemesis caught up with him!  In May, 2011 he was prosecuted and found guilty of fiddling his House of Lords expenses to the extent of £14,000 (it was subsequently discovered to be much more than that!) and was sentenced to nine months in gaol.   It was a light sentence and for reasons that have never been made clear, he served only a small part of it.   Shortly after discharge he was re-arrested on suspicion of fiddling his County Council expenses too and released under police bail.  Just last week we learned that no further action was to be taken by the police because of ‘lack of evidence’.  This did mean that all the evidence supplied by Essex County Council was returned to them.  They promptly published details of purchases made on Lord Hanningdale’s corporate credit card, and paid for by the county council, during the last five years of his Lordship’s nine year reign as Leader of the County Council.

            During those five years he spent £286,938 on that credit card – on flights round the world, on luxury hotels and on hospitality in the House of Lords and elsewhere. It was also revealed that the County Council employs three chauffeurs working up to 97 hours a week.   They were often employed to convey the peer to and from his home to the House of Lords!   There was, it appears, no firm policy on the proper use of the chauffeurs and it is difficult, if not impossible, to work out which travel expenses were allowable – and which were not.

            Lord Hanningfield was not the only guilty one.  Senior officers and fellow-councillors must certainly have known of his profligacy – and done nothing about it.  Others took advantage of his generous hospitality (at our expense!).  They must surely bear a share of the guilt.

            I’m not surprised that the present leader of the County Council now wants closure on the past and concentration on the present and future!