Week 9 1.3.11

Tendring Topics…….on Line

The Big Society – all from a bedtime story?

I had always imagined that David Cameron had snatched his ‘Big Society’ idea of local communities being responsible for their own services and being independent of Big Brother central government in Whitehall, from his own fertile imagination. Having searched my own memory though, I wonder if, while he was a little child, his mother or possibly his grandmother may have lulled him to sleep at night with stories of a golden age in a golden land where just such circumstances existed.

It wasn’t actually either a golden age or a golden land (bedtime stories don’t have to be boringly accurate!) but it is true that before World War II – which David Cameron’s grandma and perhaps even his mum – may have remembered, local communities did provide and manage services that are nowadays controlled either by central government, enormous private corporations, or large area authorities. They did it by means of local government – but it really was ‘local’ and its functions and responsibilities were very different from what is called ‘local government’ today.

Now taken over by the NHS, this was formerly Ipswich’s Public Health Department where I began my local government career in 1937. It housed a Maternity and Child Welfare Clinic, A School Clinic, and a TB Clinic as well as Health Visitors, District and School Nurses, and Sanitary Inspectors.

My first job was with Ipswich Corporation. At that time the population of the town was under 100,000 (a smaller and much more compact population than that of the Tendring District today). It had its poor and its wealthy but I think that it could reasonably have been considered to be ‘a community’. It was a community that elected its own representatives to its own Town Council. Each member was directly answerable to the electorate and liable to dismissal at the next election if it was decided that he had been a bad choice.

These democratically elected representatives of the local community ran every service that is run by any County, Borough or District Council today. They were much more independent though; deciding, for instance, whether or not they needed to build homes for letting and whether or not they would sell those homes to sitting tenants. In addition they provided gas and electricity, public transport, water supply, a sewerage system and sewage purification plant, social security (called poor law relief), a General Hospital, a Psychiatric Hospital (called a ‘Mental Hospital’ in those days), an Isolation Hospital, a TB Sanatorium and a Maternity Home, a School Medical Service and a Maternity and Child Welfare Service. That truly was a Big Society!

Despite the range and complexity of the Council’s responsibilities, they managed without a highly paid ‘Chief Executive’. They had a Town Clerk, normally a solicitor or barrister, who was the ‘first among equals’ of the professional officers – doctors, surveyors, solicitors, architects, engineers, librarians and so on – who headed the council’s specialist departments and who were responsible to the Council Committee dealing with the provision of that particular service. Even allowing for the massive inflation that has taken place in the past seventy years, their salaries were nothing like those of ‘top people’ in local government today – and they wouldn’t have dreamed of expecting ‘bonuses’ for giving the council the very best service of which they were capable.

The rot set in with the advent of that first Labour Government after World War II. I helped vote them into power and I agreed, and still agree, with their stated objectives. They believed that all public services should be publicly owned and managed. Sadly, they imagined that this could be achieved only on a national scale. They dismembered existing community owned-and-managed services like public health, social security, water, gas and electricity supply, sewerage and sewage treatment and handed them over to giant state-owned corporations. They and their Conservative opponents, called this – whether in praise or in derision – ‘socialism’. It was, in fact, ‘state capitalism’ and lent itself to the sale of our vital services into private ownership (some abroad!) with the advent of Thatcherism. Another blow to the idea of the self-governing ‘community’ came with the Local Government Reorganisation of 1974. The ‘local’ was effectively removed from ‘local government’ as, all over England and Wales, communities with little if anything in common were thrust together into a smaller number of much larger local authorities, more easily controlled from Whitehall. Brightlingsea and Harwich; even Frinton-and-Walton, and Clacton, could have been regarded as integral ‘communities’. By no stretch of the imagination is the Tendring District anything of the sort. A further development was the pernicious ‘right to buy’ legislation that compelled local authority landlords (but not private ones!) to sell off their housing heritage at bargain basement prices. More recently, local authorities were compelled to abandon their historic ‘committee’ administration and adopt either ‘cabinet’ government or – central government’s preferred option – a single all-powerful executive Mayor!

If the present coalition government really wants Britain to evolve into a country of self-governing communities with minimal central control, they should begin by breaking up existing local authorities into much smaller community-based units and according them something like the degree of responsibility and autonomy that local authorities enjoyed prior to World War II.

Somehow though – I don’t think that that is quite what Mr Cameron has in mind. So far I haven’t seen any of central government’s functions being passed down the line to ‘local communities’. However he does seem quite keen to see existing democratically elected district and borough councils stripped of their remaining powers and responsibilities. These are to be taken on by private firms or charitable organisations that may be either local or national (or international come to that!) and certainly won’t, in any sense, be either ‘local communities’ or their elected representatives.

Real community control of local affairs has been and is – ‘Going….going…..gone!’

Revolution in Libya

When, in recent weeks I published in this blog photos taken in the eastern Libyan desert in the winter of 1941/’42, I didn’t dream that that country would shortly be making front page news in our press. It was of course with eastern Libya, Cyrenaica, that I became unwillingly familiar during that time.

It was strange to hear Tobruk, Derna and Benghazi featuring in news bulletins, as they had - though in quite a different context – over seventy years ago! It was in Tobruk, on 21st June 1942, that I met my Nemesis when our defences were overrun by the tanks of General Rommel’s DAK (Deutsche Afrika Korps). The Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a member was preparing to make a last stand when we were ordered by the Garrison Commander (the South African General Klopper) to burn our vehicles, put the guns out of action and surrender.

Derna was a staging post in our thoroughly miserable journey as POWs, in the back of an Italian army lorry to Benghazi and thence, in the hold of an elderly tramp steamer, to Italy. At Derna I was at my lowest ebb. I had been a prisoner of war for about a week. I was unwashed, unshaven and without hope. The ‘prison transit camp’ was a barbed-wire-surrounded Muslim burial ground. I was suffering from diarrhoea and stomach cramps and, for the first and only time of my life, wishing that I had the means to end it. The transit camp at Benghazi was a little better. We did at least have tents to sleep in and sufficient water to wash ourselves. I was only there about a week until about 100 of us were picked out at random and marched through the town to the docks and our transport to Italy.

I saw little of those three Libyan towns, all of which were in the news last week, and even less of their Libyan inhabitants. They are all in an area of eastern Libya, Cyrenaica, the population of which liberated themselves from the clutches of Colonel Gaddafi. How extraordinary that, according to a BBC report, local people should have challenged airborne troops landing on Tobruk’s El Adhem airfield (which I remember well!) and beaten them off.

I wish the rebels all success and sincerely hope that they will succeed in unseating Gaddafi, and in leading their country into a free and prosperous future. At least they have a source of revenue, Libya’s oil reserves, at their disposal. Let us hope that they can distribute that oil income wisely and equitably, for the benefit of all Libyans – not just a ruling elite! They have yet to oust Colonel Gaddafi. That is unlikely to be easy. Watching him ranting on tv brought Adolf Hitler to mind – and we all know how much how much trouble we had getting rid of him!
Meanwhile as I write, a week before posting this blog, hundreds of Britons are stranded while our government belatedly fumbles ineffectively to arrange their evacuation. France, Germany, Portugal, Russia, Belgium and Holland were all days ahead of us. By next Tuesday I’ll no doubt know how effective our efforts have been.

I imagine that the leader writers, and probably most of the readers, of the Daily Mail the Daily Express and the Sun would consider it high treason for me to suggest that if we had been an active partner in a Federal Europe, all our citizens as well as all other EU citizens would probably by now be safely home.

‘Carpe Diem!’

Just another of those Latin phrases that tend to give those who use them a totally spurious aura of scholarship! It means, loosely translated, ‘Seize today’s opportunities – no-one knows what will happen tomorrow’. (I remember it because it is also the name of a very pleasant restaurant in Brussels where my son and grandson have taken me on a couple of occasions!)

David Cameron may have been a little tardy at plucking Brits stranded in Libya out of danger – but no-one can accuse him to failing to seize the business opportunities arising from the crisis in North Africa and the Middle East. He was the very first world leader to visit the ‘new Egypt’ and has been visiting other countries in the Middle East not yet affected by the wind of change there. He lectured those countries’ rulers, most of whom closely resemble those deposed in Egypt and Tunisia (if not being quite in Colonel Gaddafi’s league!) on the joys of free speech, a free press and free and fair elections.

At the same time the arms dealers in his entourage were, no doubt, impressing on those rulers’ lackeys the superiority of British-made water cannon, tear gas, rubber bullets, shot guns and stun grenades. This, of course, would be just in case Mr Cameron failed to persuade those rulers of the benefits of liberal democracy, and their subjects decided, like the Egyptians, the Libyans and the Tunisians, to take matters into their own hands.

Today is certainly be a good time to be selling the means of effective crowd control to Middle Eastern despots.

‘OLDER PEOPLE WILL BE CONSIDERED FOR ADOPTION AS
GUIDE LINES ARE RELAXED’

That, believe it or not, was a headline in the Daily Telegraph a week or so ago. What a vista of new career opportunities it could have opened up to we oldies! I had a vision of a 'professional' Grandad (I think that that may be a little more ‘Public School’ than Grandpa) living comfortably in his corner of the luxurious mansion of the new-rich family who had adopted him. A dignified figure, white haired and leaning heavily on a stick, he would emerge from his lair when required to be introduced to visitors, ‘Grandad’s one of the old school you know’. He would help himself to a large whisky and soda, dispense homely wisdom, inject something of the past into the very brief history of his new family, and then his adoptive 'grand-daughter' would explain, ‘Grandad gets tired very quickly these days’, and he would retreat to the familiar comfort of his den.

It sounded too good to be true – and it was. The Daily Telegraph’s sub-editor hadn’t been quite as familiar with the subtleties of the English language as lone might have expected. Older people will be considered as possible adopting parents, not for adoption. Never mind. I wouldn't really have wanted to be a professional grandad. Being a real one - and a great-uncle - is far more satisfying.

Week 7 15.02.11

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Another trip through Space and Time!

A few weeks ago I published in this column some photographs taken in North Africa in 1942 that had transported me in mind and memory across a continent and an ocean to the Egyptian/Libyan border area of nearly seventy years ago! There was a picture of one of the 6in howitzers with which I had served as a gunner in action – and also semi-submerged in a flooded gun-pit after a tropical storm. There was a group picture of a gun-crew which could have been – but wasn’t – the one of which I had been a member.

I have now received from the same source a picture that I am finding even more evocative. It is again a photograph of a gun-crew standing round the ‘trail’ of a 6in howitzer during the winter (despite the sunshine we all have jackets on!) of 1941/’42. This time though it really is the gun crew of which I was a member. It was nearly seventy years ago and I have, and have always had, a bad memory or faces. However I can recognise and name five (including myself) of those on the picture. Sgt. Peter Harris and Lance Sgt. ‘Busty’ Taylor are the first two on the left. Fifth from the left is Lance Bombardier Alfie Bloomfield, sadly destined to die of diphtheria in a POW Camp in Benghazi later that year. I am the one, seventh from the left, wearing a woolly hat. Behind me, to the left of me in the picture, is a Gunner Fletcher who, in his early thirties, was some ten years older than most of us, while at the very end is Dick Pulford, former manager of a seed store in Woodbridge, with whom I shared a ‘bivvy-tent’

On the picture, though I can’t positively identify him, must also be Jim Palmer, a former Ipswich milkman. He and I remained together while prisoners of war and arrived back together in Ipswich on 18th May 1945, ten days after VE Day. It was my twenty-fourth birthday!

Also there, must be ‘Ferret’ Hawes, a fisherman from Orford. He and I were good mates. I have a picture of myself with him in a rickshaw in Durban, where we enjoyed a brief ‘shore leave’ on our outward voyage to Egypt in August 1941.

‘Ferret’ Hawes (left) and myself in Durban. The rickshaw man never pulled that rickshaw. He just stood around smoking (you can see a fag between the fingers of his left hand) until British soldiers came along wanting to be photographed with him. There must have been hundreds of similar photos taken!

I can’t say that I ‘enjoyed’ either the time I spent in the army or as a prisoner of war. Both though were experiences that, looking back over my life, I am glad to have had.


Prophetic Topics

A month or so ago, when I learned that the Government, were ‘taking on’ the bankers whose activities triggered the current financial crisis, who had been rescued from bankruptcy with millions of pounds of our money and who were once again proposing to hand themselves astronomical salaries and bonuses, I suggested in this blog that it was a conflict between the representatives of the British people and the High Priests of Mammon. Furthermore I predicted that whatever smooth words and phrases might be used to make a defeat sound like a victory, it would ultimately be Mammon’s servants who would come out on top.

And so, it has proved – including the attempt to make defeat sound like a victory. What was the outcome of weeks of negotiation? The top moneylenders (that is what bankers actually do isn’t it?) will still get their million pound salaries and their million pound-plus bonuses, but they have promised to make a few billion pounds more available for loans to businesses, and there’s to be more ‘transparency’ about the salaries and bonuses that are paid. Making a few billion pounds available for loans doesn’t mean that more loans will actually be made. The bankers will still be able to withhold funds from those businesses that are not considered to be ‘a good risk’. It is they who will do the ‘considering’, and they who will set the interest rates and terms of repayment. As for transparency, I don’t particularly want to know who gets those multi-million salaries and bonuses. I don’t think that anyone should get them.

Top people in the public service (any public service) with a large salary are immediately pilloried for getting ‘more money than the Prime Minister’. Quite right too! But I have never heard of anyone working out how many Prime Ministers could be bought with the total remuneration of the Chief Executive of any major bank?

‘Of all the local councils, in all the Town Halls, of all the counties, towns and districts of the UK………’

(Apologies to the late, but unforgettable, Humphrey Bogart)…our District Council of Tendring has to be the one to pick up the gauntlet that the city of Liverpool tried and found didn’t fit. They have applied for and have accepted the ‘Big Society’ partnership challenge of the Coalition Government.

It seems that Tendring got in on the act at an early stage by including a Big Society fund of £500,000 in this year’s budget and by organising a meeting of all local voluntary bodies (or as many as cared to be represented) at the Jaywick Community Centre on 31st January. I am not sure what, if anything, was decided at that Meeting, but I was interested to learn that the representative of one local charity commented that there had been a recent change in the character of their volunteer helpers. They used, at one time, to be the ‘recently retired’ but were now increasingly younger and from among the unemployed.

The main purpose of‘ ‘The Big Society’ idea seems to me to find unpaid volunteers to do tasks (in parks and gardens, in hospitals and care homes, as gardeners care assistants, circular deliverers and so on) previously performed by paid labour. Success in doing this will certainly ensure an ever-increasing pool of unemployed from which to find suitable volunteers! And, as the government has promised that folk ‘on benefit’ will never be better off than those in employment, the incentive to seek non-existent jobs will remain, and quite a lot of money will be saved!

Meanwhile Tendring has been accorded the government’s highest accolade – description as a ‘can-do council!’ Communities Minister Eric Pickles is quoted as saying, ‘Can-do Councils like Tendring show what can be achieved by local government working tirelessly with and for their communities’. Mr Stock, leader of Tendring Council, said, ‘To be working with the Government in this way is a significant coup for the council and the district. We have shown ourselves to be ahead of the game in coming up with our Big Society fund and it has been recognised on a national level’. He added that he looked forward to further details being revealed.

And so do I!


The New Levellers

Towards the end of our Civil War in the 17th Century there was a movement (it never really did become a political party) called The Levellers. There was even a Levellers Manifesto advocating popular sovereignty, an extension of the suffrage (not, of course, going so far as suggesting that all adult men and women should be allowed to vote!) equality for all before the law, and universal religious tolerance. These very modest aims, which we take for granted today, were too much for either King Charles I or Oliver Cromwell. Levellers were persecuted, thrown into prison and executed. Eventually they disappeared from the scene.

If I were fifty years younger (if only!) I would seriously consider founding – or, more likely, trying unsuccessfully to found - a new Political Party, The New Levellers. Its main objective would be to narrow the currently enormous gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest in our country, which (rather than 'Europe', 'the last Labour Government' or even 'the bankers') surely lies at the root of our current ills. This could be achieved only slowly and over a number of years but I believe that when the benefits began to reveal themselves, the pace of change would accelerate.

Already there are at least tentative moves in the right direction, if only in the public sector. It has been suggested that the highest paid employee of any public body should not earn more than twenty times the lowest paid. I have heard it said that while that might be possible in the public sector it would be quite unacceptable in private enterprise – in stock broking or banking for example.

Why should it be? The current minimum wage is £5.93 an hour. That gives a weekly wage of £237 for a forty-hour week or an annual income of about £12,000. Twenty times that amounts to £240,000 – not far short of a quarter of a million pounds. That is, as they say, more than the salary of the Prime Minister and should surely be more than adequate for anyone’s needs. I certainly don’t think that any public employee should get a higher salary than that and – unless it is considered that gambling on the stock exchange or large-scale money-lending is of greater value to the nation than the duties of the Prime Minister, or of any public servant, I don’t see why incomes higher than that should be tolerated in the private sector either.

I think that levelling should be at both ends of the income spectrum – raising the incomes of the lowest paid and reducing those of the highest. A variety of means could be employed to do this – the minimum wage; a reformed and progressive income tax; more services and industries being carried out by local authorities, by co-operatives and by employee partnerships like John Lewis; splitting up the big banks and giant business corporations to provide real competition.

Progress would be slow but sure. Neither Socialism nor unfettered Capitalism can, in itself, provide a solution. The important thing would be to persuade the general public that greater economic equality would be to everyone’s benefit, and to work towards that objective.

Utopian? Pie-in-the-sky? Revolutionary nonsense? Perhaps, but that is what was said of the objectives of the 17th Century Levellers and of the Chartists two hundred years later. All of those aims have now been achieved!

Week 47.10 23rd Nov. 2010

Tendring Topics……….on Line

Back to the Wild West?

I have always had quite a warm feeling for the Coalition’s Justice Minister, Ken Clarke. I don’t care for his connection with the tobacco industry. Nor do I share his enthusiasm for Formula One motor racing. He does though seem more human than the average politician and (now that smoking has been banned on all railway trains!) I can imagine that he might be a congenial accidental companion on a long rail journey!

I admired his public opposition to the invasion of Iraq against the policy of his own party and that of the government, and his consistently pro-European attitude that lost him the leadership of the Conservative Party and infuriates such Europhobes as our own MP. I agreed too with his contention that short prison sentences are more likely to lead to relapses into crime shortly after release than to the reformation of the criminal.

I even found it in me to feel sorry for him as he broke the news that the government, rather than defend protracted civil law suits, was paying thousands of pounds in compensation to prisoners and ex-prisoners who alleged that they had been tortured with British connivance. Clearly he had had nothing to do with the interrogations at which the alleged torture had taken place and I doubt very much if he had made the decision to pay out generous compensation.

His arbitrary cutting of legal aid though, was surely a step to far. Find ways of eliminating frivolous law suits by all means. Limit the fees of barristers and reduce the salaries of judges. Reduce the time wasting involved in any legal action. But to make British justice inaccessible to the poor and underprivileged, the very people who most need its protection, is surely inexcusable.

Think particularly of the position of vulnerable spouses and innocent children where marriages or partnerships have broken up and child custody is involved. Those who cannot afford the services of a barrister (a very large proportion of those concerned!) will be denied the judgement and protection of the law. I foresee an increase in cases of domestic violence, of child abuse, of child abduction and kidnapping – perhaps of children being transported, against their will and against the will of ‘the other parent’, to distant lands where customs, cultural and moral values, and human rights are very different from our own.

Nor does it seem likely that the police will any longer be readily available to protect the vulnerable. The maintenance of law and order has always been in the forefront of Conservative Policy. The Party’s members yearn for a return of the days when ‘the policeman on his beat’ was a symbol of the availability of the enforcement of the law and struck terror into the hearts of vandals, hooligans and petty criminals.

That, I fear, is something that under the present government, they are not going to get! Police Authorities all over the country are cutting their budgets. This means that they are not going to maintain even their present standard of policing, never mind improving it. Manchester for instance, not exactly a crime-and-problem- free city, is cutting its police budget by 25 percent. There is no way in which ‘front line’ police services will be maintained after a cut of that magnitude. One might almost imagine that our prison population had already been enfranchised and that the coalition was angling for the ‘criminal vote’! They are certainly creating a brighter future for professional criminals, if for nobody else.

I hope that members of the government aren’t imagining that David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ volunteers will step into the law-and-order breach. It is easy to imagine our country descending into lawlessness resembling that of America’s 19th century Wild West. It certainly won’t be put right by issuing enthusiastic vigilantes with ‘Deputy Sheriff’s stars’, forming them into a posse, and encouraging them ‘to leap onto their mustangs and head off them goldarned thieving rustlers (or whatever) at the pass’

The World of the 1930s

Have you been watching Turn back Time: The High Street, on BBC1 tv on Tuesday evenings? They have been ‘re-creating’ a small-town High Street at various periods of its history. Last week’s (on 16 November) was of particular interest to me as a shop in Clacton’s Pier Avenue – not that you would have recognised it! – was one of the businesses re-created. The date of re-creation was 1938 and it was supposed to be typical of the 1930s generally.

Me (left), about 1935, with cousin Ron from London. Ron and I were good friends and occasionally got into terrible trouble together.

In 1930 I was ten years old and moving from primary to secondary school. In 1939, before my 18th birthday, I joined the Army as a Territorial volunteer. The ‘thirties were a decade in which I progressed from childhood through teenage to being almost-an-adult. It was a period in which I left school, started work and joined the army. In 1939 (on the day World War II broke out) I met the girl to whom I was destined to be happily married for sixty years. I well remember those fateful ten years; remember them better, in fact, than the events of yesterday or of last week!

Myself in February or March 1939. Not yet 18, I had volunteered to be a spare-time soldier in the Territorial Army

As so often happens when I watch a documentary or drama set in the ‘30s or ‘40s (Foyle’s War was an exception), they never seem to get the atmosphere or the details quite right.

The High Street grocer in the programme had a very large stock of sweets in jars and these really seemed to be a considerable part of his trade. In 1938 I had progressed beyond sweets and was into fags! In earlier years though my mates and I would never have dreamed of going to a High Street grocer for our sweets. They had them, of course, but they’d have been expensive and the, to us posh, grocers wouldn’t have welcomed unaccompanied ‘scruffy kids’ into their shops To get the most out of our ha’pennies and pennies we’d go to the back-street and corner shops – often the front room of a terraced house well stocked with a few cheap but popular sweets which were sold at a tiny profit to bring the ‘shop keeper’ a few inches above the poverty line.

Heather and I when we first met in September 1939. I was in the army but preferred to wear ‘civvies’ to take my new girlfriend to ‘the pictures’.

High Street Grocer’s shops I remember for their distinctive smell – a blend of the aromas of cheese, ham, tea and coffee; and for the wonderful slicing machines with which they’d cut perhaps just two or three slim slices of ham exactly to customer requirements, and the thin wire with which they would cut huge cheeses into manageable pieces. Then there were the wooden paddles used to shape pounds or half-pounds of butter or lard, and the scoop for flour, sugar or tea – all sold loose and packed into paper bags of course. Selling Groceries in those days was a skilled job, very different from getting packets off a shelf!

Another matter that on the tv programme certainly wasn’t as I remembered it, was the preparation for a street party held on Empire Day (24th May). We did remember Empire Day of course but it wasn’t a public holiday and, it was just an ordinary workday for most people. At school things were different. In my primary school I remember that we marched round the playground and saluted the Union Jack that fluttered proudly overhead. At Assembly the headmaster would pray for the Empire and its people and we would sing patriotic hymns and songs.

At my Secondary School we didn’t do any saluting but we too had a ‘patriotic’ assembly with a brief history lesson about The Empire and we always sang Kipling’s Recessional. As we cheerfully sang ‘Our faded pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre’ we little thought that fifty years on that prophecy at least would be fulfilled – and that most of us would then think that that was a good thing. Also on that day we always had a guest speaker – from India, New Zealand, Southern Rhodesia or some other outpost of Empire – who would tell us about the great careers that beckoned ‘out there’ to ambitious young men prepared to carry the white man’s burden and help the natives toward civilisation. There were certainly no street parties or all-age celebrations.

Despite these reservations I did enjoy last Tuesday’s Turn Back Time. It was an interesting programme that stirred a few memories for me, and would have given younger viewers at least a flavour of the time. I am glad that I watched it.

Never had it so good?

David Cameron really should choose his advisors more wisely. He surely has already enough very-comfortably-off upper middle class folk around him to be well aware of how they are enduring his efforts to solve Britain’s financial problems. What he badly needs is a few opinions from the real world of shabby streets with broken paving stones and obscene graffiti, of crowded and unreliable public transport, of job insecurity, a struggle for survival for the sick and disabled, and of Saturday night binge drinking for the young.

Lord Young, one of David Cameron’s closest advisors, really put his foot in it when he echoed a former Prime Minister who had announced, with a great deal more justification than Lord Young, that most people ‘had never had it so good!’ This confirmed my own opinion, that of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of every truly independent observer, that it is the poor and the vulnerable who are suffering the pain imposed by attempts to remedy Britain’s economic problems, while those likely to be in Lord Young’s social circle have not suffered even the mildest inconvenience.

There’s one little matter of fact on which Lord Young – and a great many other people – need to be corrected. Home owners (and I am among them!) do not benefit from low mortgage interest rates. We have paid off our mortgages and have, for the most part, put our subsequent savings into accounts administered by the same banks or building societies that had formerly loaned us the money for our home purchase. We are now seeing our hard-earned savings diminish in value as inflation outpaces the miserable amount of interest paid on these accounts.

Those who do at present benefit from the low interest rates, are the home buyers who are paying off their mortgages. They should make the most of that advantage because, as they will find out soon enough that if circumstances compel them to default on their repayments, the bank or building society is the true owner of their home. What is more, house prices are now falling. If they are now compelled to sell, they risk losing not only their homes but much of the money that they have already paid off their mortgages.

Footnote: I wrote the above before Lord Young resigned his honorary office of adviser to the Government. When I heard that he had done so I was considering erasing it. Then I heard on BBC Radio 4, David Mellor who served with Lord Young in a Thatcher government, strenuously defending his former colleague and castigating David Cameron for having had the impudence to rebuke him. It was obvious to me that although Lord Young had departed, his spirit was still among us. My comments remain unchanged!

Week 33.10 17 August 2010

Tendring Topics……..on line

A ‘Big Society………'

……..or just another Confidence Trick? I am referring to our Prime Minister, David Cameron’s idea of a major redistribution of power from its present base in central and local government, to ‘the community’. When I first heard of it I had an eerie feeling of déja vu. Somewhere, at some time, I had heard it all before.

Then it came to me. During the ‘50s and ‘60s I had encountered some extraordinarily nice people who had assured me that an earthly paradise would only be achieved when the state ‘had withered away’ and society was organised in small self-sufficient communities, each managing its own affairs. These friends of mine tended to be bearded, bespectacled and sandal-wearing. The males usually wore corduroy trousers, jeans not yet having achieved their popularity, and the females, flowing and colourful print dresses. They were strict vegetarians, readers of The Guardian and the New Statesman (both of which they criticised for being too pro-establishment) and they described themselves as Tolstoyan Anarchists.

Charming and friendly as they were, they were surely not the kind of people whose ideas – even half a century later – would be likely to inspire a leader of the Conservative Party.

They hadn’t. His ideas are far less radical. Come to think of it, I can’t recall there being any reduction in the power of central government included in them – rather the reverse in fact. He is quite keen on parents and teachers running their own schools free of local government control. He proposes that if a local authority raises Council Tax above a central government dictated benchmark there could be a local referendum, the result of which would be binding on the council. He would like to see the ‘cabinet style’ administration that has been imposed on local government, replaced by the virtual dictatorship of a directly elected Mayor. Similarly, he would like to see the admittedly shadowy Police Authorities replaced by directly elected Commissioners, also elected dictators, to whom Chief Constables would be subordinate. Is that, power to the people? Hardly.

The public are also invited to let the Government know their ideas on savings and cuts that could be made. However there is no question of us having a referendum on the increase in VAT or on the value of the Trident nuclear deterrent. The idea that the system of income tax should be reviewed, with a penny or two immediately added to the standard rate, is a subject, like sex, religion and politics, that simply ‘isn’t discussed’ in polite society.

More use should be made of free volunteer labour, says Mr Cameron. Everyone has ideas about how such volunteers could best be used, invariably ways which do not affect the person making the suggestion. A number have had the idea that volunteer labour could be used to keep flower beds in parks and public gardens neat and tidy. I’d be surprised if any of those making this suggestion are council gardeners or members of their families. Nor, I think, would nurses and paramedics welcome Red Cross or St. John’s Ambulance volunteers supplementing or supplanting them in hospital wards or on NHS ambulances. What would be the reaction of postal workers to boy scouts voluntarily delivering the mail?

I rather warmed to the idea, suggested by a tv viewer, that David Cameron might like to set an example. He has, so the viewer said, ample private means (I have no idea whether or not that is the case) and could resign from his job as Prime Minister – and then take it up again as a volunteer. He would, of course, retain the perks; two comfortably furnished and staffed homes, free VIP travel and goodness knows how many free official dinners and lunches!

Think of the valuable spin-off. Every time workers – even those on the minimum wage – asked for a pay rise, they could be told, ‘Stop moaning. You’re already getting more than the Prime Minister!’


A correspondent to the East Anglian Daily Times summed up 'The Big Society' very succinctly:

'As I understand it, the aim of the big society is to get the work currently done professionally by workers in the public sector, transferred to the 'voluntary sector'. In other words, Davnick Cleggeron is asking me to volunteer in order to put one of my neighbours out of work'.

No member of the present government, or of any possible future government, can remember the 1930s. I can. Then democratically elected representatives of local communities ran services as diverse as gas, electricity and water supply, hospitals and maternity homes, domiciliary health care, schools and further education institutions, public transport, sewers and sewage treatment, highways, parks and gardens and housing estates; most of the services in fact, that make the difference between civilisation and barbarism. Through their representatives elected to county, borough and district councils, the ‘communities’ provided and controlled all those services. In those days, when local government was truly local and had a considerable measure of independence, there was no apathy at the time of the elections.

The post-war Labour Government, no doubt with the best of intentions, entrusted most of those service to giant nationalised corporations. Their Conservative successors, also well intentioned, privatised them, passing them for the most part to giant, often international, private enterprises similar to the nationalised ones they had replaced. Meanwhile local government was reorganised, drastically cutting down the number of authorities, and eliminating the local from local democracy. Subsequent measures, politicising Councils and investing them with all the worst features of parliamentary government, have all but removed the democracy!

There is, I fear, no turning back. Despite Mr Cameron’s good intentions, I can see no possibility of our recovering the community control of essential local services that once we had.

By the riverside

It must have been in the spring of 1944 that a friendly (yes, it really was friendly) football match was arranged between a team of we British prisoners of war at a working camp in the little German town of Zittau, and one of German soldiers from a nearby Wehrmacht barracks. I have always been totally useless at ball games, so I was one of the spectators, sharing the touchline with some of my fellow prisoners and off-duty German soldiers, both groups good-naturedly cheering our sides on. The match was, of course, arranged strictly unofficially. No doubt our respective governments would have preferred us to be trying to kill each other.

We lost 2 –1, which was hardly surprising as there were only 30 of us (including me!) from which to choose a team, while there were several hundred at the barracks. It was by no means a shameful defeat, as our opponents freely acknowledged.

The match was not played on a proper pitch but in a meadow beside the River Mandau, that flows from the nearby mountains through Zittau to join the rather larger River Neisse and thence to the great river Oder. There were no proper goal posts or line markings. The Mandau in Zittau was quite small but fast flowing. One of our worries during the football match was that the ball might be accidentally kicked into the stream and be carried away before it could be retrieved. During the past four years I have visited Zittau three times and have on a number of occasions crossed the Mandau. The river was unchanged but I was never quite sure where the meadow was on which that match had been played.

These memories were brought back vividly last week when one of my current friends in Zittau, the scholarly Dr Volker Dudeck, emailed to me these pictures of the raging, flooded Mandau, as it had been a few days earlier. Zittau, and of course the mountains where the Mandau and the Neisse rise, had had several days of heavy and continuous rain on an unprecedented scale. The town is near the confluence of the two rivers, and is also at the point where the frontiers of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic coincide. There has been serious flooding in all three countries. Dr Dudeck, in his latest email, tells me that the floodwaters are now subsiding, no doubt creating havoc further down the river. The local damage is being assessed. In Zittau and the three-countries area, thousands have been made homeless and there have been 10 fatalities. Nothing, of course, compared with the scale of the flood disaster in Pakistan – but to the bereaved it is little consolation to know that you are one of just ten, rather than tens of thousands.

The floods in Europe (including those in Cumbria earlier in the year), in China and on the Indian subcontinent, and the unprecedented drought, heat and bush fires in Russia are, I have little doubt, all the result of the accelerating world-wide climate change that the recent international conference in Copenhagen failed miserably to address. Dr. Dudeck writes to me sadly that,n ‘It is nature taking revenge for the sins of mankind’. Perhaps I should let him know that our recently re-elected MP is convinced that, if climate change is taking place, it is a purely natural phenomenon and not mankind’s fault. Trying to do anything about it is a waste of time and money.

It might cheer him up – but on the other hand I suppose that it might not!

Clacton’s Station Buffet

Since the sad loss of my wife four years ago I have made a number of trips to and from London by rail, making use of the discounted fares available to pensioners. They have been the first and last stages of my visits to Zittau, to Brussels to visit my grandson there, and of visits to my sons and daughters-in-law who live in the London area.

I usually arrived back in Clacton at about noon. Before finding a taxi to take me home I would pop into the Station Buffet that for many years had welcomed and served hungry, thirsty and weary travellers arriving in Clacton, and those waiting at the station for trains to arrive and depart.

It provided me with a welcome break for a drink, and a leisurely sandwich or light meal before returning to face the washing, the emails and the junk mail that I knew would be awaiting me. Refreshed, I would find my taxi, knowing that whatever else greeted me as I opened my front door, at least I wouldn’t need to make myself a mid-day meal.

It is a little doubtful if I shall be making such journeys in the future. I am beginning to find travel by rail (not so much the travel itself as the hassle before and after!) too much for me

Clacton Station Buffet – now closed

Even if I am unlikely to want to use that Station Buffet again, I am sorry to see that it is closed and that there are so far no signs of its re-opening. Vacant, it’s an ugly ‘missing tooth’ on Clacton Station and I am sure that a great many people must miss the service that, for many decades, it has rendered the travelling public.

Tendring Council claim to be eager to help aspiring local entrepreneurs. They are also eager to promote Clacton-on-Sea’s image as a friendly and welcoming holiday, residential or business destination. Somewhere ‘out there’, there must be a young and ambitious would-be restaurateur, lacking only the funds – or perhaps the self-confidence – to bring new ideas and energy to bear on again making Clacton’s Station Buffet the welcoming venue that once it was.

The Council should co-operate with Network Rail, the station’s owners, to find that young entrepreneur, and offer encouragement and practical help to harness that energy and bring those ideas into fruition..