18th April, 2015

Tendring Topics……on line

Buying Votes…….with other people’s money!

          That’s how I described the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation introduced by then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the ‘avaricious 1980s’.  ‘Compel to sell’ legislation might have been a more appropriate name for it.

            For almost a century prior to the advent of Thatcherism, local authorities throughout the UK had built council houses to let, in order to combat homelessness and overcrowding in their areas and to rehouse families from individual unfit houses and properties in ‘clearance areas’ that were to be demolished.  They allocated tenancies according to housing need, without paying particular attention to whether housing applicants were poor or comfortably off.  I think that, on the whole, they were successful.  Slowly but surely, slums were demolished, overcrowding eradicated and substandard houses improved or demolished and replaced. I know that in the years before local government reorganisation in 1974, while I was Clacton-on-Sea’s Housing Manager, no-one was forced to ‘sleep rough’, under the Pier of instance, for want of a roof over their head; nor did we have to resort to providing bed-and-breakfast accommodation for homeless families.   The Council had a modest annual house building programme and this, together with casual vacancies resulting from a death or a tenant moving away, prevented even temporary homelessness.   

            All that was changed by ‘right to buy’.  Local authorities were compelled to sell homes to sitting tenants at bargain basement prices.   Many of the better off (and least troublesome) tenants took advantage of the legislation and bought their council provided homes.   Some of them took advantage and sold them on directly they were able to do so.  Some of those houses were bought by speculators and again let – but this time at a much higher ‘market dictated’ rent.  Councils were told not to let homes to people who could afford to buy or rent privately.  Tenants could not expect a home for life – tenancies were for a short fixed period, and were not renewed if the circumstances of the tenant had changed.  The government made clear that ‘social housing’ should be a temporary provision for the poor or, as Mrs Thatcher preferred to put it breathily, ‘for the genuinely needy’

Inevitably Council Estates deteriorated. Tenants had no incentive to tend their gardens, redecorate their rooms or take any pride in their homes.   Former tenants who had bought their homes sold them directly they were able to do so, taking advantage of accelerating house price inflation, and moved on to a better area.   Councils no longer had any incentive to build homes that they knew would have to be sold on ‘on the cheap’ after a few years.  Nationwide demand for homes vastly outstripped supply. Inevitably both rents and house prices rocketed and the housing situation that we have today developed.

            Those extra votes that ‘right to buy’ undoubtedly won were very dearly bought indeed.   But extra votes, from former tenants who had bought their homes ‘on the cheap’ at their Council’s expense, they certainly did buy.

            Now, with the general election only weeks away, the opinion polls indicating that the Conservatives and Labour are neck-to-neck, the Lib.Dems. nowhere in the polls, and Ukip and the Greens threatening both the main parties, the Conservatives are hoping that they can pull off the same trick a second time.

            Local authorities were not the only providers of ‘social housing’.  Housing Associations also housed thousands of folk who couldn’t aspire to home purchase (I say ‘home purchase’ rather than ‘home ownership’ because, as many home purchasers have discovered, no-one becomes a home owner until he or she has paid off the final instalment of the mortgage loan)   Prior to ‘right to buy’, Housing Associations provided a much smaller proportion of social housing than local authorities.  However during its decade of power New Labour did nothing to repeal the pernicious ‘right to buy’ legislation and Ed Miliband actually apologised for the fact that his party had opposed it!  Consequently Housing Associations have provided a steadily increasing proportion of the UKs social housing.

            Evidently hoping that his proposal will buy as many votes as Margaret Thatcher’s did back in the ‘80s David Cameron has  promised that, if the Conservatives form the next government, tenants of Housing Associations will enjoy the same ‘right to buy’ as council tenants.  The government’s costs will be recovered by compelling local authorities to sell off their most expensive housing when it becomes vacant and thereby, so they believe,  raising £4.5 billion a year.  (This is, of course, the same government that claims to believe in loosening the power of the state and putting local matters in the hands of local people!)

            Will it work for a second time?  Will this ploy be as successful in buying votes as Margaret Thatcher’s was in the 1980s?   Possibly not; prior to the 1980s central government did not dictate housing allocation policy to local authorities.  Many –perhaps most – authorities allocated tenancies on the basis of need for accommodation.  The applicants’ financial circumstances were a minor consideration. Certainly neither of the authorities for which I worked as Housing Manager in the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s barred any applicant on the grounds that they could have found private rented accommodation or could have bought their own house.

            Consequently when Margaret Thatcher offered all council house tenants the ‘right to buy’ their home with a substantial discount on the actual value, there were hundreds of council tenants eager and able to become home buyers and take on the responsibilities, as well as  the privileges of ownership.   That was a long time ago.  Since then social housing has been allocated only to unemployed or low waged people with few resources and often large families.  A great many of them wouldn’t be able, or wouldn’t wish, to take on the responsibilities of home ownership no matter how large a discount they were offered.    I doubt if many will respond positively.

            Anyway if they’re wise they’ll remember that it will only happen if the Conservatives win an overall majority in the general election.  If I were a Housing Association tenant I wouldn’t be getting too excited about the prospect of home ownership just yet.  I wonder if David Cameron has ever thought of extending the ‘right to buy’ to tenants of privately owned properties?  Probably not; private landlords are almost certainly Conservative Party supporters.

Is ‘Ironic Fate’ waiting in the wings?

          I once had a colleague with a firm faith in what he called ‘Ironic Fate’ (or I.F. for short)     I.F. was continually on the look-out for humans who took the future for granted, and handed out an appropriate punishment.  He believed that the fate of the Titanic was sealed when the Captain declared that ‘God himself couldn’t sink this ship’.   Hitler did the same thing by promising Germans ‘a thousand year Reich’. My colleague took this conviction to extremes.  He would never, for instance, put up the new office calendar on 31^st December, because that would have been taking for granted that we’d survive into the New Year.

I don’t personally believe in an ironic fate waiting to catch us out but I have thought a lot about I.F. or Nemesis as the election campaign gathers pace.   There are all these politicians making firm commitments for the future.  One promises umpteen  million pounds for the NHS, or for Education, or for affordable homes.  Another says that there’s no way, except by taxation, borrowing or even more savage cuts than we have already experienced, that  that promise can be realized.  One politician is going to give us four brand-new state-of-the-art nuclear submarines (just what you've always wanted?), another a new airport for London, yet another a north/south rail link.

Is it just possible that, perhaps while the election results are still being evaluated, nature will demonstrate its supremacy over all things human and mortal with another tsunami, this one closer to home, a burning all-consuming drought like those recently experienced in Australia, a gale of the strength of the typhoon that recently devastated an island nation in the Pacific, or extreme weather such as they have experienced recently in the USA and elsewhere.

All the party leaders (except perhaps Nigel Farage) accept that climatic change is taking place and that human activity is its principal cause.   They all, again with the exception of Nigel Farage, accept that urgent action is needed – but, as far as they are concerned, not just yet.  They’ll oversee the extraction of the last barrel of oil from bowels of the earth and ruin the countryside by ‘Fracking’ for shale gas, before they take serious steps to find and develop renewable and clean sources of energy, and put combating climate change as the very first item on their manifestos.

I wonder if, when climatic catastrophe strikes, anyone of them will think. ‘That’s exactly what that Green woman, the one with an Aussie accent, what was her name, warned us about during the  election campaign – but at that time we all had much more important things on our minds.

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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.