POSTSCRIPT (3)

POSTSCRIPT (3)

Global Warming – Global Warning!

          In my last blog I said that I was a member and supporter of the Green Party because I believed that Climate Change (global warming largely due to human activity) was currently the biggest threat facing humankind.  Since then I have had an email from a regular blog reader who points out that global warming is not just a future threat – it is already responsible for most of the political problems that are causing us concern today.  Here is part of that email:

I am beginning to see world events in terms of global warming.  Did you know that the real cause of the “Arab Spring” was the rising price of grain, resulting in people in the Arab countries being unable to afford to eat?  The uprisings coincided with a spike in the price of grain. Then the price subsided a bit, but the trend remained very definitely upwards due to lower crop yields and more of the world’s arable land becoming desert. This was reducing output while the population continued to grow.  The uprisings were a cry for help and a call for an end to dictatorial and corrupt governments.  As things got worse the protestors tried other governing systems.   In that part of the world a liberal parliamentary democracy is not the obvious choice of the reformers - but a more rigorous interpretation of Islam is.  Hence the advent of the Muslim Brotherhood (in Egypt now brutally suppressed) the Taliban, Al Qaida and, most extreme and the most successful of all, the so-called Islamic State.

  The no more than Two Degrees Centigrade rise in world temperature upper limit to which all world leaders have agreed is not an ideal figure. It is the point at which scientists predict the world will no longer be able to feed itself, and there will be widespread famine, riot and war. NASA has said publicly  that today Climate Change represents the greatest threat to world peace

So in the light of that, I think what we are witnessing in the Mediterranean and Calais, is the beginning not the end.   It is fundamentally the impoverished world meeting the rich world, and the rich believing their prosperity would be diminished if they shared it with migrants.  I think the incredible risks which the “economic” migrants are prepared to take is testament to the fact that they are escaping a life of destitution as well as immense danger, and particularly, they can see no future for their children in the country they came from. This is really what has driven all previous mass migrations, like the Irish escaping to the USA from the potato famine.

                In the past Britain has been far more generous. We welcomed Jewish migrants from Nazi Germany, we welcomed the Vietnamese Boat people escaping tyranny there and we welcomed Ugandan Asians escaping Idi Amin. And of course, in each case, the migrant population has not been a burden but has done very well in the UK.  The political tide has really turned since then.

I think that the situation in the Mediterranean, and in Eastern Europe where  almost as many migrants are  coming via land frontiers, is the most significant development.   The total number of migrants has reached 180,000.  By contrast there are “only 4000” in Calais. The rest have gone elsewhere in Europe – mainly Germany and Sweden.   So why the fuss in Calais?  Well this is entirely caused by the UK decision not to be part of Schengen, not to accept any quota of migrants at all, and to relocate the frontier to Calais, instead of it being in Dover. It is NOT the result of the UK Benefits system being too generous (it isn’t actually more generous than France), but it’s a good myth to promote.

If we had no borders – like France / Belgium – there would be none of this.  There are migrants arriving in Italy and wandering all over Europe to other EU  countries all the time, and no  one even knows. If the border was in Dover, as it should be, then people could legally hitch a ride with a lorry driver or car driver, and then apply for asylum as soon as they land. However, by putting the border in Calais, they can never get to English soil in order to apply for asylum, so they have to practically kill themselves in the attempt. Why can we not have an asylum office in Calais as well? Is it because they don’t want them applying and it is likely that too many would be approved? Why does the UK stay in the UN if we aren’t prepared respect international agreements?  

                I agree with my correspondent that those migrants aren’t attracted to the UK by our generous benefits.  Even if it were true that our benefits are more generous than those of other countries, I really don’t think that migrants would risk their lives daily in the hope of acquiring a few extra quid!   Many are attracted to the UK because they have learned a little English at school and think, probably correctly, that they’d speak it fairly fluently after a few months.  English has become a world-wide language – and that has its disadvantages as well as its benefits.

                When I hear David Cameron saying that migration from France to the UK is a European problem, not just a problem for France and Britain, I am amazed at his temerity.  It would be a European problem if we had signed up to the Schengen Agreement and had abolished our national frontiers – or if we had been prepared to accept a few of the thousands of migrants who have reached Italy, Spain or Greece either across the Mediterranean  or from Turkey.   As it is I think our fellow Europeans could surely quite reasonably say, ‘If those opt-out Brits want to keep their own frontiers and accept no refugees from Africa of Asia – it’s up to them to guard those frontiers and keep the migrants out.  We’ve got plenty of our own problems to solve before we can give thought to those   that the Brits have brought upon themselves!’

                 On the world stage our top politicians diligently pursue what they think of as our national interests. Meanwhile Climate Change waits in the wings with nasty surprises in store for all of them……….and us!

                 

            

March 2015

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day thou canst not then be false to any man’

            In Shakespeare’s Hamlet that was part of the advice that Polonius, a Danish courtier, gave to his son Laertes before the latter embarked on a trip to England, then a distant perilous country, full of temptations and pitfalls for a visiting young Dane with money in his pocket. 

 If Nick Clegg had heeded that advice five years ago I think it very unlikely that his Party would now be facing the possibility of humiliation in the coming General Election.  The Liberal Democrats didn’t really have to be junior partners in a very unequal coalition.  They could have let David Cameron form a minority government promising to support it for as long as it was possible to do so without breaking pledges that they had made to the electorate.

            But he allowed the promise of the empty title of Deputy Prime Minister and two or three Ministerial jobs for a few of his lieutenants to lure him into a coalition and – very shortly afterwards – to break spectacularly the pledge he had made to the electorate  about University Tuition fees.

            Before the last General Election I don’t recall that anyone expected it to result in a hung Parliament and an unequal Conservative/Lib.Dem. coalition.  This time two other parties, the Ukippers and the Greens are serious contenders nationwide and in Scotland the Scottish National Party will almost certainly overturn Labour’s domination of the electoral scene.  Few expect either of the two main parties to achieve an overall majority in the House of Commons. If we are again to have a coalition government which parties will coalesce to form one?

            Nick Clegg appears to be confident that the Liberal-Democrats will again hold the balance and have the choice between coalition with the Conservatives or Labour.  The opinion polls suggest otherwise and so, for what it’s worth, do I.   Since the Lib-Dems, in government, broke promises that they made to the electorate before the last election why should we imagine they’ll be any different now?  I voted for them then but they certainly won’t get my vote in May.  I’m not alone!

            In Scotland the SNP has come on in leaps and bounds since the referendum.   Nicola Sturgeon, their present Leader, seems to be a worthy successor of Alex Salmond. The Tories are evidently fearful that they will have sufficient successful election candidates to join a coalition with Labour and form a government. Many Labour hopefuls fear the same. Well, they certainly brought that possibility onto themselves.  If at the time of the referendum they had been a bit less enthusiastic about preserving the United Kingdom intact there would now be no Scottish MPs at Westminster.   Both Ed Miliband and Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, have said that there will be no such coalition but, of course, politicians don’t believe other politicians’ promises any more than the rest of us do!     

            If there are a substantial number of Scottish MPs I think it likely that they’ll do what the Lib.Dems. should have done last time; support a minority government for as long as its policies are acceptable to them but try to amend or defeat them when they are not.   They won’t get any seats in the government that way but ‘What profiteth it a man (or a political party) to gain the whole world – and lose his soul?’

            A much more sinister, and I fear more likely, outcome of the General Election could be that UKIP will form a coalition with a minority Conservative government, with Nigel Farage as Deputy PM and several Ukip MPs (almost certainly our own turn-coat MP Douglas Carswell would be among them) in senior government posts. The flamboyant and charismatic Nigel Farage would soon outshine the present PM and the Chancellor in the public eye, and probably in the eyes of a substantial number of hard-line Tory MPs.  Farage’s career has, so far, mirrored that of Adolf Hitler in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.  I fear a future in which he acquired real power.

            But it may well be that all these anxieties and hopes are groundless.  Such is our first-past-the-post electoral system that perhaps, to everyone’s surprise, either the Conservative or the Labour Party will secure a commanding majority and rule the country for the next five years.  If that is so then I can confidently predict  the future outcome:  Britain’s future will not be anything like as happy and as prosperous as supporters of the ruling party promise – but neither will it be quite as disastrous as opponents of that ruling party fear.

            In May I fully intend to vote for the Green Party candidate.  The Greens won’t form a government and it’s unlikely that they’ll be asked to take part in any coalition.  In my own Clacton-on-Sea constituency it’s very improbable that, with our present first-past-the-post electoral system, the Green Candidate will be elected.  I may help him save his deposit though (the Greens rely on the support of its thousands of members.  Unlike other parties, they have neither multimillionaires nor trade unions financing them), and nationally I will add to the number of Green voters.  ‘This above all’ I shall be being true to myself and voting for a party whose policies I wholeheartedly endorse; a party that really does want to make Britain and the world a better place for this and future generations.

            My vote will not be wasted!

           

A Spendthrift’s Charter?

            I have sometimes wondered if the present government likes having a large proportion of the UKs population in debt.  Perhaps it makes the failure of their policies to reduce the national debt substantially, seem less important.  There are student loans, for instance;. I understand that increases in tuition fees result in some students leaving their colleges with a debt burden of as much as £40,000!  Then, of course, the Government’s obsession with home ownership has made sure that thousands of home buyers will owe thousands of pounds to banks or building societies for the whole of their working lifetimes..

            The latest encouragement to financial irresponsibility is making it possible for those who put aside a percentage of their income every month to provide themselves with a pension on retirement, can now withdraw the money at any time from their ‘pension pot’ and use it as they think best.  The hope is presumably that they will re-invest the money to enrich themselves and to help keep the wheels of industry turning.

            It will surprise me if at least some of those pension investors, with the opportunity to get a considerable sum of money into their bank accounts will say, ‘Blow provision for retirement.  Let’s go on a cruise to the Bahamas.  We’ll worry about “tomorrow” when it comes1’

            I’m glad that I was never able to withdraw cash from the ‘pension pot’ into which I paid 6 percent of my salary for most of my working life.  I wouldn’t have squandered it on a spending spree but, when my wife was diagnosed with pulmonary and laryngial TB, I’d have been sorely tempted to withdraw any money I had saved in the hope of buying her better, speedier treatment.   Perhaps (or perhaps not!) in that way I might have bought my wife a speedier recovery; might even have spared her the major surgery that saved her life but left her with a permanent disability.

            There’s no ‘perhaps’ though about the fact that, without an adequate pension, our sixties and seventies would have been much less comfortable, less worry-free and much less pleasurable.  And now that I am in my nineties and have been a widower for nearly nine years, I would be a poverty-stricken housebound cripple without the pension that has provided me with a warm and comfortable home and, among many other things, my mobility scooter and the lap-top on which I am writing these words. Thanks to that pension I am able to remember generously the birthdays of my young great-nieces and great nephew (I have yet to acquire any great grand-children), and to offer visiting family and friends hospitality in a local licensed restaurant!  As some-one once remarked, 'money can't buy happiness, but it can help you to be miserable in comfort!'

 I daren’t think how miserable and bad tempered I’d be without all those things!  I’d advise anybody – ‘However much you may be tempted never imperil your retirement pension. You will live to regret having done so.  It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll make your fortune by gambling on the Stock Exchange – and even less likely that you’ll make it on the National Lottery!’

The Budget

Regular blog readers will know that my idea of a good Budget is one that narrows the yawning gap between the incomes of the very richest and the very poorest people in the UK.   A bad Budget is one that widens that gap.  It follows that it is a long, long time since I have experienced a good Budget and that the one revealed by George Osborne on 18^th March was more blatantly robbing the poor and enriching the wealthy than most.

The threshold of income at which tax becomes liable has been raised.  That means that some low-paid workers will no longer have to pay tax and that every single payer of income tax (including the very wealthy) will benefit.  Those who won’t benefit are the really poor, whose incomes are too low to be taxable.  They will, of course, continue to pay indirect taxes such as VAT and excise duties like those on petrol, alcohol and tobacco.   But that’s not all – the level of liability to pay the higher rate of income tax has also been raised, even higher.  Thus those whom most of us would consider to be very wealthy will receive a double hand-out. Meanwhile, there are to be even more cuts in the  funding of benefits and of public services, which will most  affect the very poor.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the news reports was that I didn’t hear a word of protest from Ed Miliband about this particular aspect of the Budget.

Week 23 2014

Tendring Topics……on line

‘The Lights are going out all over Europe………’

          So said Lord Grey, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, as World War I broke out.  I had much the same sinking feeling and presage of doom as the results of the recent European Parliamentary Elections became known.  The voters of practically every one of the EU’s member states had expressed at the polling booths their dissatisfaction at the performance and progress of the institution from which some of us had hoped for so much.

            Extremism triumphed.  Mostly, as in the UK and in France, it was right-wing extremism reminiscent of the nationalism that spawned Fascism and Nazism in Europe in the 1930s.  Nigel Farage took over a small fringe political party and, by finding appropriate scapegoats and urging immediate extreme action to deal with one or two issues that were causing public concern, he transformed it into a political force that seems unstoppable.  It reminded me of Hitler’s takeover of the well-meaning but slightly batty National Socialist German Workers Party and transforming it into the brown shirted,  jack-booted, ruthless and all-conquering Nazis.

            Hitler’s scapegoats for Germany’s defeat in World War I and all the country’s post-war problems were ‘The Jews’ and ‘the Bolsheviks’.  Nigel Farage’s scapegoats for all the UKs 21^st Century problems are ‘the European Union’ and ‘the immigrants’.  Nigel Farage has an advantage over Hitler in that he has an engaging man-of-the-people personality.   He enjoys a pint and a fag and he doesn’t 'talk posh' in meaningless platitudes like most other politicians.  On the surface he‘s ‘one of us’ – an ordinary bloke who believes in straight talking and calling a spade a spade even if it’s sometimes not ‘politically correct’; a politician for those who thought they detested all politicians!

            Well, I have come to distrust all politicians. I am sure that David Cameron and George Osborne do what they believe is best for the country – which means to them best for the seriously wealthy.   ‘If they’re getting richer the whole country’s getting richer.  Prosperity ‘trickles down’ to the lower classes’. I did fall for Nick Clegg’s rhetoric before the last general election; never again!  As for Ed Miliband – surely the Daily Mail’s dubbing him ‘Red Ed’ must be ironic. The 19^th and 20^th century pioneers of the Labour Movement would see him as about as ‘red’ as a pale pink blancmange!

            Perhaps things aren’t quite as hopeless as I fear. UKIP made little progress in the north-east and in Scotland, and actually lost ground in London.  Essex – my county – is where they did best.  The only two policies on which all Ukippers are agreed is getting out of the EU (Why bother with a referendum? – We know what ‘the people’ want!) and drastically cutting immigration.

 Funny thing – Ukippers don’t seem to be bothered by the fact that the progress of privatisation of public services means that more and more of them are coming under the control of foreign shareholders, nor about the fact that popular and influential newspapers and radio and tv services, moulders of public opinion, are owned and controlled by wealthy, often foreign, individuals.  I’d have expected that to be anathema to people who really valued the UKs independence.  What about NATO and the ‘special relationship’? Ukippers worry themselves to death about trivial decisions taken in Brussels.  Decisions costing us billions of pounds and hundreds of British lives are similarly taken in Washington.

Sometime between now and the next General Election UKIP will have to make up its mind about its policy on a great many issues other than ‘Europe’ and ‘immigration’ – education, the health service, social services, tax policy and so on.  As they reveal their position on these issue some, perhaps a great deal, of their support is likely to fade away.  Their deputy leader, for instance, would like to see more of the NHS privatised.   There’s talk of a flat-rate tax; another 'poll tax'?  Such hard-right measures such as these will surely alienate Labour, Lib. Dem and at least some of the Conservative voters who have defected to UKIP. 

It wasn’t only UKIP that came well out of the European Parliamentary Election.  I supported – and urged others to support – the Green Party as an alternative to the traditional parties. The Greens offered the promise of a better country, and a better Europe for all, not just for a wealthy minority.  They are a small party without the funds of UKIP who, in this area, managed to leaflet the electorate both at the beginning of the election campaign to catch the postal voters and, at the last minute, to catch the undecided.  UKIP was the only party to do that.

The Greens are still a small Party but they have one MP at Westminster (which is one more than UKIP has!) and, while they previously had only one member from the UK in the European Parliament they now have three!  There, they will join Green EMPs from other EU countries to make sure that the Green Voice is heard, and join in alliance with other parties over matters of mutual concern.   The Greens were, for example, active in the campaign to limit the bonuses paid to bankers within the EU.  Considering the general outrage within the UK about these bonuses, it seems almost incredible that our government opposed that measure. But they did!

Say not ‘the struggle naught availeth

The labour and the wounds are vain;

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been, they remain’

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars,

Perhaps by yonder smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,

And but for you, possess the field!

For though the tired waves, vainly breaking,

Seem here no painful inch to gain;

Far back, through creek and inlet making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main

                                                                            Arthur Clough (mid-Victorian poet)

 An Insane Law?

‘INSANE LAW’  To boot mum from the UK says headline in the ‘Clacton Gazette’  ‘Please don’t take me away from my family’, pleads Clacton housewife fearing deportation.

          Thirty-two year old Mrs Christine North was born in Germany of a German mother and an English service-man father.  She moved with her mum into a British Army base when she was just six months old, attended an English School on the base and moved to England with her mum and step-dad, another British soldier, when she was seven years old.

She grew up, married an English husband, has two children and has lived in Clacton-on-Sea for a quarter of a century!  She has a National Insurance number, has twice served on a jury (that’s something I have never done!) and claims to have voted in every election since she was eighteen.  Her ‘Britishness’ has never been questioned and probably never would have been had she and her family not decided last year to take a holiday in France.  When she applied for a passport it was discovered that her German mother’s name was on her birth certificate but not that of her British father.

Technically, so it seemed, she was not British but German.  Could she be deported and separated from her family?   Was it possible that she could be prosecuted for claiming this, that or the other benefit to which only British citizens are entitled. Somebody has clearly warned her that this could happen  MP Douglas Carswell has taken up her case and says that he has written to Home Secretary Teresa May ‘in the strongest terms possible’  but received, only ‘flat bureaucratic replies saying rules are rules’.

I don’t believe that there is the least danger of her being deported and separated from her family.  Even convicted terrorists are able to avoid deportation by claiming their ‘human right’ to a normal family life.  What’s more, EU rules (that Mr Carswell would like to abolish!) give Germans, as citizens of the European Union, every right to live in Britain if they wish to do so.  As for prosecution; clearly Mrs North had no fraudulent intention and I don’t believe for one moment that she would be prosecuted.

As Teresa May is alleged to have said rules are rules. The obvious solution is for Mrs North now to apply for British Citizenship for which she certainly has an overwhelming case, for our MP to use every ounce of whatever influence he may possess to expedite the process, and for those who wish Mrs North well to assist with whatever cost this may involve.

          This is surely a saga that can- and will – have a happy ending.

Week 16 2012 19.4.2012

Tendring Topics......on Line 

Recycling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 "Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens."

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

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

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

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

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

         

Health and Safety

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Local Elections

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

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

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

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

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