Week 19 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

The Global Market

 I am mildly claustrophobic. I am never very happy in an enclosed space and the thought of being buried alive in the ruins of a collapsed building is the stuff of my very worst nightmares!  That’s just one of the reasons why news of the collapse of an eight storey building in Bangladesh in which some two thousand people, mostly women, were employed in the manufacture of cheap clothing for the European and American Markets, filled me with horror.  More than 600 of those employed in the building have died, many after having been trapped for several days.  Over 1,000 have been injured, some seriously.  All are human sacrifices to Mammon – the god of greed and selfishness or, if you prefer, of the entrepreneur and the ‘free market’.

            It seems that the building should have been limited to five storeys and that three were added illegally (no doubt to ‘maximise profits’).   Furthermore when warning cracks appeared in the walls of the building the workers were told to ignore them and carry on with their work, instead of being urged to get out while there was time to do so.

          The manufacture of cheap ready-made garments for export is a principal industry of Bangladesh, employing some 3 million people on an average monthly salary of £40. (Try living on that for a day or two!)  Industrial accidents are a frequent and regular occurrence and not a single manufacturer has been prosecuted in connection with them. Similar incidents would occur in this country had it not been for the activities of the Trade Unions and the Parliamentary Reformers of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries whose Public Health Acts and Factories Acts (fiercely contested by the political friends of the Factory Owners) created the relatively tolerable and safe working environments that most of us enjoy in this country today*. We joke about ‘health and safety’ but the Bangladeshi experience could be repeated here if there were no health and safety regulations and no ‘snooping bureaucrats’ enforcing them.

            But, of course, the safe environment and tolerable working conditions that are enjoyed in the UK and in most of Europe render us ‘uncompetitive in the Global Market’ that politicians of all parties seem to find so attractive. So retailers get the supplies of the cheap clothing that their customers demand from such places as Bangladesh where few safety regulations exist. Those that do are ignored by officials so poorly paid that they are easy targets for those who wish to corrupt them. I suspect that at least some of the powers that our Prime Minister and UKIP are  determined to ‘repatriate’ from ‘Brussels’ are the regulations that protect the health, safety and well-being of workers throughout Europe.

            We can only become truly competitive in a market that includes countries like Bangladesh by replicating their slums, their public services, their working conditions, their health services, their education, their low wages.  Is that really what we want? A much better alternative would be for the people of Bangladesh to raise the level of their environment and public services to that of Europe. While I am sure we should help and support them in such efforts it is something that we can’t do for them.  

*The Song of a Shirt

An example of the way in which workers in clothing manufacture in the UK did suffer working conditions comparable with those in Bangladesh today is found in Thomas Hood’s poem, The Song of the Shirt’ published in 1843. Below is the first verse and one of the subsequent verses:

WITH fingers weary and worn,

With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,

Plying her needle and thread--

Stitch! stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

She sang the "Song of the Shirt”

Work—work—work!

My labour never flags:

And what are its wages? A bed of straw,

A crust of bread--and rags.

That shatter'd roof--and this naked floor--

A table--a broken chair--

And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank

For sometimes falling there

 Its origins, according to Wikipedia, are as below:

'It was written in honour of a Mrs. Biddell, a Lambeth widow and seamstress living in wretched conditions. In what was, at that time, common practice, Mrs. Biddell sewed trousers and shirts in her home using materials given to her by her employer for which she was forced to give a £2 deposit. In a desperate attempt to feed her starving infants, Mrs. Biddell pawned the clothing she had made, thus accruing a debt she could not pay. Mrs. Biddell, whose first name has not been recorded, was sent to a workhouse, and her ultimate fate is unknown; however, her story became a catalyst for those who actively opposed the wretched conditions of England’s working poor, who often spent seven days a week labouring under inhuman conditions, barely managing to survive and with no prospect for relief.

The poem was published anonymously in the Christmas edition of Punch in 1843 and quickly became a phenomenon, centering people’s attention not only on Mrs. Biddell's case, but on the conditions of workers in general. Though Hood was not politically radical, his work, like that of Charles Dickens, contributed to the general awareness of the condition of the working class which fed the popularity of trade unionism and the push for stricter labour laws'.

Universal Benefits

            It seems that the government’s Work and Pensions Secretary Mr Ian Duncan-Smith has noticed that there is something a little incongruous about elderly millionaires being able to take advantage of the concessions intended to make the lives of us less affluent oldies a little more comfortable.  It is surely surprising that a septuagenarian with an ocean-going yacht, a second home in the Caribbean, and a chauffeur-driven Rolls, can claim the winter fuel allowance, free tv licence, free NHS prescriptions and free bus pass, just like you (if you’re a pensioner)  and me.

            Mr Duncan-Smith appeared to suggest that it might be a good idea if such people handed benefits that they didn’t need back to the government, but he now stresses that he didn’t mean that at all.   Like all members of this government of the wealthy for the wealthy he seems desperately eager not to cause the very least offence to anyone even richer than himself, and he has made it clear that millionaires are at liberty to keep their benefit, hand it back, or give it to charity, just as they please.   He would express no preference on the matter at all.

            I am a long, long way from being a millionaire but, unlike many pensioners, I am not entirely dependent upon the state pension and any benefits that I can squeeze out of the government.  I have a modest public service pension for which I paid six percent of my salary throughout the many years that I was working.

            I cannot take advantage of a bus pass or concessions on rail travel, because physically I am no longer able to walk to the railway station or even to the nearest bus stop.   The winter fuel allowance though has meant that I had no qualms about keeping my central heating on continuously during the icy weather of February and March this year! I am glad too that my NHS prescriptions are free as it seems to take an increasing amount of medication to keep me going. 

I also very much appreciate my free tv licence, and the lower rate of ‘Attendance Allowance’ that I receive because of my steadily diminishing mobility. This frees me from being housebound and has made it possible for me to buy and maintain the electric mobility scooter that I use to go to Church and the Quaker Meeting, as well as for shopping and visiting friends.  The blue disabled parking badge that I use when, very occasionally, I am driven in a friend or relative’s car has been free too. It is due for renewal in a month or two and I understand that it will now cost me £10.   As far as I am concerned that won’t break the bank.  For some disabled people though it could prove to be the final straw that breaks the camel's back..

            I am certainly not proposing to give any of my benefits back to the government – they’d probably fritter them away on nuclear deterrents that don't deter anybody, expensive funerals for former politicians, or arming ‘freedom fighters opposed to tyranny’ who, before you can say jihad, are liable to become ‘dastardly terrorists trying to murder us!’

           
           Nor would I welcome the idea of any of those benefits being means-tested. It would be expensive and time-wasting to administer.  Many needy but proud pensioners would feel that submitting details of their income and expenditure to a faceless official was intrusive, demeaning, and a form of ‘begging’ in which they were not prepared to engage.  Others would seek means of ‘fiddling the system!'

           

There is just one way, that would I believe be acceptable to most pensioners, in which the government could make the ‘old age benefit system' fairer than it is at present  That is, to make all those currently tax-free benefits subject to income tax. All old people would continue to get their age-related benefits in full as at present.  Pensioners who have no source of income other than the state pension would be completely unaffected by the change. Those, like me, who have another modest source of income and are currently paying income tax would have the appropriate proportion added to their income tax demand, and really wealthy pensioners, with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year, would have an increase in their income tax equivalent to 45 percent of the value of the benefits to which they were entitled.  It would, of course, have been 50 percent had it not been for the Chancellor’s recent generous hand-out to the very wealthy!

            This system would work very well so far as winter fuel allowance, free tv licence and attendance allowance are concerned but would present difficulties with bus passes and prescriptions as the financial benefit from these varies from person to person and from time to time.   It should though be possible to work out an average benefit, a notional sum that could be added to the taxable income of every income-tax paying pensioner.  Thus, I would be helping to pay for bus passes that I can’t use but others can, while those who don’t need as much medication as I do, would be helping to pay for mine.

            Many of us would pay rather more income tax than we do at the moment but we would all receive our full benefits and, unlike any other kind of taxation, it is the nature of income tax that no-one is ever asked for more than they can afford to pay. The system would, of course, be much simpler and fairer if the whole income tax system were to be overhauled and restructured so that all adults paid an equal proportion of their gross income as their annual ‘membership fee’ for British citizenship.  The annual income tax assessment would then be a ‘means test’ to which everyone would have to submit – but it would be the only means test ever needed.

             But there – regular readers of this blog will know that that is a hobby horse of mine.

I told you so……..

          …….but very much wish I had been wrong.   Below is an extract from a blog that I published in March, forecasting UKIP’s likely performance in last week’s county council elections.

 Nigel Farage seems also to have acquired the knack of attracting the serial non-voter, the kind of man or woman who dislikes politics and will never trust politicians.  He gives the impression that he feels just the same as they do; that he is an anti-politics politician. Such people comprise a considerable slice of the electorate.   If he can persuade them to vote, his Party will do very well in the forthcoming County Council elections and, even more importantly, in the European Parliament Elections next year.

  My forecast proved all too accurate.  Although UKIP does not have any county councils under its control it has massively increased its representation on these councils throughout the country – mainly at the expense of the Conservatives but both Labour and the Liberals have also suffered.   In my own North Clacton electoral division Conservative Andy Wood was elected with a total vote of 929 thanks to our ‘first past the post’ method of election. He was the choice of less than one third of those who voted.  Second came Samatha Atkinson, the Labour candidate, for whom I voted, with 790 votes, followed by UKIP Anne Poonian with just one vote less. Mark Stephenson of ‘Tendring First’ had 396 votes, Lib Dem. Harry Shearing 191 and James Horsler Green Party 75.  Anne Poonian's relative success is all the more remarkable in that she doesn't live in Clacton and that she was the only candidate from whom I - and presumably others - received no election literature.

            I view the future with foreboding – not least because Nigel Farage’s Party’s success will mean a swerve to the political right in Conservative policies in an attempt, that will probably prove to be fruitless,  to avoid being outflanked  by the UKIP.

Week 45 2012

Tendring Topic.......on Line

Some Real Horror Stories!

Hurricane ‘Sandy’

          When publishing my one successful work of fiction (a ‘horror’ story!) as my blog last week I wrote that there was more than enough real horror in today’s world without my adding to it from my imagination!  Events have certainly proved me right.  In the past, when there have been official warnings of doom and disaster to come, the reality has often turned out to be something of an anticlimax.   The flooding of New Orleans in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was something of an exception.  Its appalling effects were restricted in area though and they were made worse by the lack of effective leadership by US President Bush.

            Hurricane Sandy that struck the USA just a week ago, was most certainly an exception. It was far worse than had been expected by the experts – and their expectations had been pretty dire!   An area of the north-eastern USA larger than the whole of Europe, reaching up to and beyond the Canadian border, was affected.  Millions of homes were damaged and/or had their electricity supply cut off, and hundreds of thousands of people rendered at least temporarily homeless. The centre of New York City and other towns on the Atlantic coast were flooded by a tidal surge made even worse by hurricane strength winds and torrential rain, trees were brought down, public and private buildings alike were wrecked.  Heavy unseasonal snowfall compounded the misery in northern parts of the affected area. It has been estimated the cost of the damage will run to tens of billions of dollars.

            Loss of life was mercifully low, probably less than 100 victims, largely due to the dire warnings, backed by President Obama personally, and sound advice given over and over again on radio and tv.  It will surely be weeks though before life gets back to any semblance of normality for thousands of people.  No electric power means that there are no lifts (I think the Americans call them ‘elevators’). Imagine the plight of someone like myself, with very limited mobility, marooned indefinitely in an apartment on an upper floor of a skyscraper! 

            We have become accustomed to similar disasters (though on a smaller scale) in central America, the Caribbean, the Indian Subcontinent and south-east Asia – but not in an area that many see as representing the very highest standard of living that modern civilisation has to offer!

            Despite the tremendous achievements of mankind in the past two centuries and the phenomenal progress of our scientific knowledge and understanding of the forces of nature, Hurricane Sandy reveals humankind as impotent and powerless when those forces are ranged against us.

            Was Hurricane Sandy, and the other extreme examples of drought, storm and flood that we are now experiencing every year, even in our own country, the result of global climatic change, global warming?  I firmly believe that they were and I believe furthermore that these changes are being brought about, or at least made worse, by human activity. 

            If these increasingly frequent catastrophes can finally persuade the climate-change deniers (including our Clacton-on-Sea M.P.!) of the reality of world climatic change, and the need for urgent action to counter its effects to take priority over all other national and international concerns, then those world-wide who have suffered from them will not have done so in vain.

A Horror closer to Home!

            Much closer to home are the still-developing ramifications of the scandal concerning the late Jimmy Savile. There now seems little doubt that this almost universally popular tv personality, honoured by the Queen and the Pope for his fund-raising and practical service to hospitals and for charitable causes was, in fact, for many years a predatory paedophile, corrupting and contaminating other people as he pursued his pernicious activities.

            Who knew what, and when, and what if anything did they do about it? This is the subject of police investigation, and of internal investigations within the BBC, famous hospitals, and other honoured and respected institutions.  Other celebrities from the ‘pop’ world and the world of politics are being investigated.  As I write two other arrests have been made and more are anticipated.

         

          I hope that Jimmy Savile’s victims, especially those who summoned up the courage to complain but had their complaints ignored or discounted, will find satisfaction in the final outcome of all the current probing.  One regrettable result of the scandal has been to make it possible for rubbishy publications like the Sun, the flagship of the remaining Murdoch Media Empire, to pour scorn on the BBC, an all-British institution of which most of us want to be proud. However the BBC has weathered storms before and I have no doubt that it will, in the end, weather this one.

            Another sad effect is the way in which it will deepen the atmosphere of suspicion with which adult males are regarded when in the company of the young.  Like many old people I find myself attracted to young children.  I like to hear their happy and spontaneous laughter.   It is a joy to see them happily at play.  Yet nowadays I would hesitate to watch children at play on the beach or at a public playground for more than two or three minutes.  I would be afraid of a plain clothes police officer arriving and inviting me to step down to the nearest Police Station and answer a few questions!  

            The Jimmy Savile affair also illustrates how very difficult it can be to pursue resolutely and disinterestedly, an allegation of criminality made against a well-loved celebrity.  In the USA many people believe that such a celebrity may have literally ‘got away with murder’ when, despite overwhelming evidence, a jury acquitted him.

            We hope that couldn’t possibly happen in the UK, but we have seen celebrities acquitted of fraudulent tax evasion by persuading a judge and jury either that they were too other-worldly to have thought about sordid financial matters, or that in all matters other than the narrow one that made their fortunes, they have ‘severe learning difficulties’    Funny thing – one never hears of celebrities being so other-worldly or so dim-witted as to unintentionally pay the Inland Revenue a million or so more than they owe!

Government policies promise horrors yet to come.

-  In the field of ‘Defence’

I don’t think that one needs to be a member of CND or a supporter of the Peace Movement, to believe that devoting another few million pounds to the continued use of those totally useless Trident submarines – while leaving the UK without an aircraft carrier and cutting down the conventional forces that still have unfinished (and never to be finished) business in Afghanistan, is an act of utmost folly.

             Foreign Secretary Hague keeps making bellicose noises against the government of Syria and the Prime Minister is sending war planes to the Middle East to threaten Iran!  Yet Cameron & Co have systematically run down the conventional armed forces that could have backed their bluster while finding millions to support a ‘deterrent’ that we have had for years, that has not as yet deterred anyone and that, if it were ever to be used, would inevitably result in an incalculable number of deaths and the end of civilisation on this planet; Mutually Assured Destruction or M.A.D. (mad indeed!)

- In the field of Planning and Building

The government has decreed that, in order to give a boost to the building industry, create more jobs and provide much-needed homes, the planning laws are to be relaxed.  There is to be a presumption of acceptance of developers’ plans and planning permission will no longer be required for building extensions to homes or structures in back gardens.          

 Building Regulations are also to be relaxed, including those relating to fire precautions and to disabled access.  This is described as cutting through pettifogging red tape and allowing the wealth-creating entrepreneurs to get on with their task of creating wealth for themselves and, purely incidentally and if circumstances permit, serving the needs of the public.

What it will do is create ready-made slums of jerry-built badly insulated buildings, subject to fire risk and threat of flooding, and inaccessible to wheelchair users (so much for the new deal for the disabled that was supposed to be a legacy of the Paralympics!)  It is a step towards making Britain a land of slums comparable with those of the Britain of Victorian times, and of many Asian and South American cities today, and with run-down trailer parks for drifters and missfits on their outskirts, like many cities of the USA.

Add to this either departure from the European Union or ‘repatriation’ of health, safety and labour protection laws ‘imposed by Brussels’, and we’ll have a developers’ paradise and a  positive move towards making the UK ‘competitive in the Global Market’.   Shame about the poor – but David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ will surely see to it that there are sufficient soup runs, food banks and charity handouts, to make sure that very few of them will actually starve or freeze to death.

The American Presidential Election

I am very pleased that Barak Obama won the American Presidential Election.  I am sure that that is good news for both the USA and the rest of the world.

However I have had first the radio and then tv switched on to BBC programmes from 5.00 am till 7.30 am (with a half-hour break for wash, shave and shower) and have heard nothing else.  Surely that can't be all that happened in the world and, in particular, on this side of the Atlantic, in the past twenty-four hours!

Week 47 2011 29.11.2011

Tendring Topics……on line

'What goes around, comes around'

            There was a time – I remember it well – when the maximum loan for house purchase that Building Society and Bank Managers would approve for house purchase depended upon the income of the main wage earner in the applicant’s family.  That was in the days before it was assumed that both members of the marriage or other partnership would continue in full-time work even after a baby or babies arrived.   Then, provided one of the couple, usually the male, had a steady job they could buy their new home with a twenty or twenty-five years mortgage and a deposit of ten percent of the total cost.  If the local authority were prepared to act as guarantor and the applicant’s job seemed very secure, then a five percent deposit might be acceptable.

            When, way back it 1956, my wife Heather and I bought our bungalow in Clacton (the one in which I am writing these words) we had thought we could manage the monthly mortgage payments on the kind of home that we needed (I had just been appointed Additional Public Health Inspector by Clacton Urban District Council).  Raising the deposit though was a major obstacle.  We had been married for ten years but during that time Heather had suffered a life-threatening illness and had had a crippling operation.  We had two young children, and a loan to repay on the car I needed for my work.  My pay had been adequate but we had virtually no savings.   The Council was prepared to act as guarantor and we had only to raise five percent of the value of the bungalow.  It seems a totally piffling sum now but we were able to raise it only by selling Heather’s solitaire diamond engagement ring that I had bought eleven years earlier with a considerable proportion of the army back pay I had accumulated as a prisoner of war.

            There came a housing shortage.  It was destined to be made much worse by Mrs Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ legislation that, within a short space of time, markedly reduced the amount of social housing available for letting.  With rents prohibitively high in the private sector, young couples yearned to get their feet on the first rung of the home ownership ladder.

            It was a time of low unemployment and relative prosperity.  Married women, including young mothers, carried on working, leaving their children in day care.    Banks relaxed their rules and made loans based on the total income of the applicants – not just that of the highest earner.  Many more became eligible for mortgages.  But, of course, there was no commensurate increase in the number of homes available for purchase.  The price of houses began to rise, and rise – and rocket!   The housing boom had begun.  Soon house price inflation soared well above general rise in prices.

             Banks competed with each-other in making tempting offers to would-be buyers.  Ninety-five percent mortgages became commonplace.  Soon there were one hundred percent, and eventually one hundred and ten percent loans to help prospective house buyers with their legal costs and their removal and furnishing expenses!

            It couldn’t, and didn’t last.  The bubble burst.  Home buyers (they had imagined they were ‘home owners’ but they weren’t!) or their partners lost their jobs and half their incomes.  They couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments and either sold their homes at a loss, or were dispossessed by the Bank. House prices plummeted. The homes thus recovered by the Banks were often worth only a fraction of the sums originally loaned on them.  Some Banks would have been declared bankrupt had they not been bailed out by us taxpayers.     

            Right now we have stagnation.  Few new houses are being built.  Skilled and experienced building workers – bricklayers, plumbers, electricians – are unemployed.  Many people are homeless or inadequately housed. There is an acute housing shortage and there is nothing like sufficient social housing available for rent.

            There is, of course, an obvious solution – repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation and encourage local authorities and Housing Associations to build housing for letting, fund them adequately and leave them to solve the housing problem in their own areas – as they did successfully for a century before the advent of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatism and its pale-pink New Labour shadow.  That would have been true ‘localism’.

            Is that what the Coalition Government is going to do?   Not likely; they are going to encourage remaining council tenants to buy their own homes with discounts as high as 50 percent (well, it isn’t their money they’re giving away!) and guarantee,  with taxpayers’ money, part of the mortgage on  homes newly built for sale at affordable prices.    This, it is hoped, will encourage Banks to reduce the level of that difficult deposit and bring home-purchase within the scope of ordinary people again. This, so they declare, will stimulate the building trade and thus get the general economy moving.  I hope that it will!  It seems to me though to be offering to bail out the banks before they are even in trouble, and bringing us back to a situation similar to that at the beginning of the house price boom.

‘Ere the winter storms begin’

          The harvest hymn tells us that, ‘All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin’.   And so it should be – but those of us who live in towns know that bringing in the harvest is not the only task that needs to be performed before the winter storms, the ice and perhaps the snow are with us again. Among them are repair of the damage done to our roads and footpaths by the last two hard winters.

Well, here are a couple of local examples of road and footpath disrepair that need urgent attention.  They are by no means the only examples of highway neglect in Clacton and they are almost certainly not the worst, but they are examples that I see regularly.  The footpath is beside Old Road and is regularly used by pedestrians (and mobility scooterists) on their way to Morrison’ supermarket.  It is a positive danger to those unsteady on their feet or with impaired sight, and a source of bone-shaking discomfort to scooterists.  I speak from personal experience!

            The pothole is in Beaconsfield Road, near its junction with Skelmersdale Road.  If it doesn’t receive attention it will get much worse, and more dangerous, in the coming winter.  Unspectacular work like this is far more worth-while than, for instance, the wholesale reconstruction of the seaward end of Pier Avenue last winter – when the dust had scarcely settled on the precious reconstruction!

The ever widening incomes gap!

          At last – the gaping chasm between the incomes of the poorest and the wealthiest of us has received the attention of an official investigation and is being brought to the attention of the government.  It seems that the average income of the staff of a top FTSE100 company is £20,000 a year (for many people even that is wealth beyond the dreams of avarice!) while the incomes of Directors and Chief Executives of these companies is – wait for it! – more than three and a half million pounds a year.

            A CBI spokesman explained to us on TV this morning why nothing could – or should – be done about this.  It’s all because of that wonderful Global Market. Profit-making enterprises throughout the world need the very best brains to make them even more profitable.  They are prepared to pay the best salaries, bonuses and other perks, to get them.   If we lesser mortals were to attempt to limit the number of millions our top people receive (I can’t bring myself to write ‘earn’) they would simply up sticks and move elsewhere.  How very convenient, for some, it is to have an economic system that demands that the pay of workers gets ever lower so that we can be competitive in the global market, while that of their bosses has to get ever higher, for exactly the same reason!

Despite the obvious absurdity of this situation and world wide protests about its manifest unfairness and injustice, the Global Market is welcomed by all three of our main political parties!

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

            The government’s policy of cuts in public services and benefits, and of tax increases (in VAT and similar indirect or ‘stealth’ taxes) that particularly affect the less-well-off are really beginning to bite.  The provident, who have ‘nest eggs’ in savings accounts with banks and building societies are worse hit than the extravagant.  Their savings decrease in value as inflation outstrips the meagre interest that they earn.  Some  have lost their homes, many more have lost their jobs and practically all of us are beginning to lose hope.

            There would be one very simple and straightforward way of restoring our faith in the Coalition Government’s handling of the economic crisis and persuading us that the sacrifices we all (except the seriously wealthy) are having to make, have been worthwhile. Why not – perhaps quarterly or half-yearly – reveal by how many (surely millions) of pounds the deficit has been reduced during that period?  Then we would know whether or not the gain had been worth the pain.  As a former public relations officer I am astonished that this isn’t already happening.  Could it be that there has been no decrease?  Perhaps there has even been  an increase in that worrying deficit; one that even the most accomplished spin doctor would have difficulty in attributing to the previous Labour Government, or to ‘Brussels’, or to whom or whatever is the latest popular scapegoat.   

            That is very possible.  The cynical may see it as a reason why no such disclosure has been made.  A blog reader points out that the government, in formulating its financial strategy must have been expecting the national economy to show modest (perhaps 2 percent) growth.   This would have been expected to bring a reduction in the number of benefit claimants, together with increased revenue from corporation tax, income tax and VAT.  In fact the government’s austerity policy has killed economic growth, increased unemployment and suppressed demand.

            It is an unfortunate fact that we have to rely on their political opponent’s estimates of the effects that their policies, and those of their rivals, would have on the deficit.

            The Conservatives claim that Labour’s policy of reversing ‘the cuts’ to stimulate the economy, would increase the deficit by £85 billion a year by the end of the present Parliament.  They may well be quite right.

            Labour has considered Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts from November 2010 together with the latest estimates from independent forecasters, They predict that the coalition government’s borrowing could rise by £11 billion more than planned this year, £22 billion next year, £34 billion in 2013 – ’14, and £42 billion in 2014-’15.

            Voters at the next election will, it seems, have a clear choice.  Vote Conservative, cut even deeper, and increase the deficit, or Vote Labour, reverse the cuts and – though in a slightly different way – do the same thing!

            Well, it isn’t all that likely that I shall still be around for the next General Election to have to make a decision! 

An Affront – or a Lucky Escape?

          A couple of weeks ago members of Tendring Council, together with the local press, were full of indignation at the fact that Tendring was the one district in Essex through which the Olympic Torch  would not be carried next year as it makes its tortuous journey to the Olympic Stadium at Stratford.

            Now I learn that the passage of the torch through Colchester on July 6^th   is expected to cost the district council £30,000 in road closures, crowd control and street cleaning.  Our omission from the route may have been a blow to our local pride but I reckon that in every other respect it was a lucky escape!