Week 19 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line          

‘Call the Midwife!’

          Clacton isn’t a town noted for its political activists and its violent (or even non-violent) marches and demonstrations. It is astonishing therefore that there were two protest marches, for the same cause, one on Saturday 26^th April and one on the following day. The cause was the hospital authority’s decision to close the Maternity Units in the Clacton-on-Sea and in Harwich and to concentrate maternity services in Colchester.   The reason is not because of shortage of midwives or other staff in either Clacton or Harwich – but because of a shortage of midwives in Colchester!   They need Clacton’s and Harwich’s midwives to make up the numbers.

            This is said to be a ‘temporary arrangement’ but we suspicious Clactonians suspect that it’s one of those ‘temporary arrangements’ that go on for longer than expected – until, in fact, everyone comes to accept them and it is then decided to make them permanent. `

            No-one likes to see a local service closed down and local people compelled to go further to a larger more distant centre, but the nature of the maternity service and the geographical situation of both Clacton and Harwich make it doubly undesirable in our Tendring district. A glance at a large-scale map of south-eastern East Anglia will make it clear that the Tendring peninsula is almost-an-island bounded by the estuaries of the rivers Stour and Colne, a relatively narrow isthmus extending from Colchester to Manningtree, and a wide length of coastline with the port of Harwich/Parkeston and the popular holiday seaside resorts of Dovercourt, Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton-on-Sea, Holland-on-Sea, Clacton-on-Sea, Jaywick Sands, St Osyth and Brightingsea.

            The only road access is through that Colchester/Manningtree isthmus from which highways fan out to serve resorts which attract motorists from London, the Midlands and the whole of East Anglia to their safe, sandy beaches, seaside holiday attractions – and the lowest average annual rainfall in the United Kingdom!  It follows that throughout all the summer and at weekends in the spring and autumn (particularly bank holiday weekends) those roads are often clogged up with holiday traffic, sometimes reduced to a snail’s pace by sheer numbers, or by the occasional road accident.

            Tough on the mother in labour, perhaps with her first baby, stuck in a traffic jam somewhere between Clacton – or Harwich – and Colchester!  I don’t suppose that the time-and-motion experts who calculated that under ‘normal circumstances’ neither journey should take much more than half an hour, even thought about that.  Babies in a hurry to be born know nothing about normal circumstances, holiday traffic or traffic jams.

            I’m not surprised that Clactonians have protested, marched and demonstrated against this stupid and thoughtless decision of the hospital authorities.  Why though were there two almost identical marches with two lots of protesters?   The Saturday march was the Conservative march, organised and led by Conervative Tendring District Council.  The Sunday march was the Labour march and was organised by the local Labour Party and led by the prospective Labour candidate Tim Young..  The closure of Clacton and Harwich’s maternity units is not a political issue.  Gilbert and Sullivan wrote in one of their comic operas ‘Every little man-child that is born alive is either a little Liberal or a little Conservative’.  Luckily they don’t know that and, luckily or not, nowadays it isn’t only male babies involved, nor is it limited to just two parties.

            I think it a great pity that the two main parties hadn’t got together for a united protest march, thus demonstrating that compassion and common sense aren’t the sole prerogative of one party, and that they can unite when the occasion demands it.  They might have persuaded some of the others to join in – the Lib-Dems, the Greens and the Ukippers (I’m sure they’re convinced that it’s all the fault of ‘Brussels’) might well have joined them!

Those Market Forces

            I don’t like living in a society with an economy reliant on Market Forces.  I believe   that co-operation is better than competition, that we shouldn’t all be trying to get as much as we can for as little as we can get away with, and that we shouldn’t need to follow the advice to ‘shop around’ and change our power supplier, our banker, our savings account, whenever it may seem that it would pay us to do so. Old people - and there are a lot of us in this area - don't like unnecessary change. The cheapest is rarely the best and the supplier or the banker may change his charges as soon as you put your phone down. In the 17^th and 18^th century Quaker businessmen – grocers, brewers, bankers, manufacturers – made their fortunes by declining to yield to market forces.  They bought in or made the products they sold, added just sufficient to make themselves a reasonable living and stuck to that price and to that quality of goods.  Quaker businesses may not always have sold the cheapest goods but customers could be quite sure that they hadn’t been watered down or adulterated, that the price wouldn’t be put up if there were to be a sudden shortage and  that there would be no hidden ‘extra charges’.   That policy benefited both the buyer and the seller.

            Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  The ethics of the market place have made us a nation of cynics.   We’re interested only in prices.  The only ‘value’ market traders recognise is the highest price that goods or services can command at any given time ‘in the open market’.   A diamond ring commands a higher price than a shovel (though there are situations in which a shovel could save your life and a diamond ring would have no value whatsoever), and a merchant banker (a money lender) can demand a higher price for his services than a brain surgeon!

            Market prices depend upon supply and demand.  Increase the demand for any desirable product without increasing its supply will raise that product’s price as surely as night follows day. 

            It was this axiom that made me predict confidently in this blog that the government’s help to buy scheme for would-be house buyers would have the effect of raising house prices.  You will recall that a major factor in the creation of the financial crisis from which we hope we are now emerging, was the unwise lending of large sums of money for the purchase of homes.  Because there were not enough homes for hopeful would-be purchasers to buy, the price went up…and up, until it toppled over.

            Many house-buyers had taken on a debt they couldn’t hope to pay off.  Hundreds were rendered homeless and lenders were left with bad debts that could have rendered them bankrupt had the government not bailed them out – with our money!

            Determined not to make the same mistake again, banks and building societies increased the deposit they required from would-be buyers to as much as 25 percent of the price of the property, effectively putting home ownership out of the reach of most first-time buyers.  However David Cameron and George Osborne, determined to pursue the chimera of ‘a nation of home-owners’ introduced their ‘help to buy’ scheme which offered an additional loan to help with that deposit so that the initial sum required by the house-purchaser would be no more than 5 percent of the price of the property.

            This has had two totally predictable effects. Demand for homes once more greatly exceeds supply and – as I had foreseen – house prices are again rising well ahead of general inflation.  The other effect is that the government has, by guaranteeing most of the required deposit, taken on a debt that the professional money lenders had thought was too risky – and, without consulting the electorate – has done so with taxpayers’ money!   This has clearly worried the professionals and they are now asking would-be borrowers a series of very intrusive questions before they will arrange a mortgage. ‘How much do they spend on holidays, on dining out, on alcohol, on entertaining, on children’s education and other financial commitments, and how they would manage their mortgage repayments if – or rather when - interest rates rise?

            The best response?  It’s surely to accept that home ownership is not everybody’s obvious choice.  Repeal the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation and encourage local authorities to build homes for letting as they did for a century before the advent of Margaret Thatcher – and allow those same authorities to allocate those homes as they think best.  In a word; to restore some of the democratic local decision making that is an important aspect of the ‘localism’ to which the government pays lip-service but has been systematically destroying since taking office.

Week 34 2012

Tendring Topics....on Line

Paying for Daytime Television

          For the two years following the accident in 2004 that resulted in my wife becoming increasingly disabled, she and I watched a good deal of both daytime and evening television. After her life came to an end in 2006 I watched ‘the box’ much less. I was desperately seeking busyness to help fill the gaping, and aching, space that her death had left in my life.

Since then the years have taken their toll.  I have moved from my mid-eighties to my early-nineties!  My physical activities have become increasingly limited and I again find myself watching tv both in daytime and in the evening.  The digital revolution, and the freeview box with integral recorder, have widened my choice.  On daytime commercial tv there is very little new to watch.  However, old age has one unexpected, if somewhat mixed, blessing.  Although I may recall a great deal of one of the Midsomer Murders or  Murder She Wrote episodes when I see either of them again for the second, or possibly the third, time – I rarely remember who-dun-it, and how and why!

            I do remember from the past the adverts filling the commercial breaks that irritatingly punctuate commercial tv programmes.  Some are entertaining and are regularly updated by the advertisers (I have in mind some of the Specsavers adverts and the always-entertaining Meercat adverts by Comparethemarket.com).  Others, repeated ad nauseum, are infuriating.  In particular I can’t bear that character who strides across the tv screen shouting maniacally that with his products, if you buy one, you get one free.  BOGOF indeed!

            Over the years these adverts have changed, reflecting the national mood. In the early years of the new millennium they seemed to be dominated by two themes.  One of them was all about ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers eager to inform viewers that if they had an accident that wasn’t their fault, they could be entitled to generous compensation.  These public spirited and altruistic professionals would ensure that those accident victims received every penny of it if only their help were sought.  The ‘other side’ would have to pay the legal expenses.  It was surely unfortunate that the presenter of one of these adverts was an actor best known to most of us as a bent copper in The Bill.

            The other theme, and this was surely the more noxious, was the offer by  money-lenders to give financial ‘help’ to people who, in their own interest, should never be allowed to borrow.  It doesn’t matter, these warm-hearted philanthropists insisted, if you’re old, unemployed, on benefit, and have a disastrous credit record. Get in touch with us.  We may be able to help’ 

            Others aimed at a slightly different class of viewer.  We were shown a lower middle-class householder (unquestionably a Daily Mail reader!) who had everything;  a nice home, a good job, a beautiful wife and marvellous kids, but there was just one tiny little flaw in this earthly paradise.  He and his wife were, well ‘a bit messy with money’.  There were two or three credit card debts to service, one or two HP agreements, the mortgage on their lovely home, and so on.  It could be something of a nightmare – especially to one whose mind was focussed on higher things; like for instance, whether or not the local football team would keep its place in the First Division at the end of this season.

            The tangle of family debts needed no longer  be a problem.  Those warm-hearted money-lenders would gather all of them together and take them over, so the instalments could be paid tidily, month after month.  Who knows, they added, it might even be possible to lend that delightful family more money to provide some of the other essentials of modern suburban life – a second car for the wife?  Perhaps a family holiday in the Bahamas?

            The benevolent money lenders are no longer quite so blatant.  A few months ago they were pushing their latest idea. Everyone, they said, at sometime or other faced a domestic crisis that needed a relatively small sum of money (perhaps £200 or £300) to settle.  Unfortunately these crises had a habit of occurring just a week or two before payday.   The answer was a payday loan.  Give them a ring and within minutes the two or three hundred pounds would be in your bank account.  It could be repaid on payday with what seemed a very small amount of interest. Easy – but the snag was that what was left of the borrower’s pay wouldn’t then be enough to last the next month.  The answer to that?  Perhaps another payday loan, and another after that – with the interest beginning to become anything but a ‘small amount’.  Following adverse publicity in the news media payday loan adverts are now becoming rarer

            Ambulance chasing lawyers still make their appearance on commercial tv offering ‘no win ….no fee’ services to accident victims.  They do seem to be a little less brash, a bit more grave and professional, than they once were. 

            The latest trend in daytime tv advertising is possibly a response to a realisation by members of the public that there’s little hope of becoming rich by diligence and hard work these days.  It is publishing opportunities for gambling – ‘Someone has got to win – it could be you!’   There are a surprising number of on-line Bingo games available to hopeful fortune seekers.  There’s Sun Bingo. There’s Foxy Bingo, and there’s Tombola.   There may well be others.   There’s an occasional advert for the National Lottery and for on-line roulette. There are also what I think of as disguised lotteries within the fabric of tv programmes.. ‘Secret Dealers’ and ‘Dickinson’s Real Deal’ for instance, always feature a ‘competition’ with  a single prize of several thousand pounds for phoning in, or texting, the correct answer to an easy (much too easy) question. A typical question might be.  Brussels is the capital city of (A) Bulgaria? (B) Switzerland? or (C) Belgium?   Viewers who think they know the answer are invited to phone or text A, B, or C to a given phone  or text number.  There must be scores, perhaps hundreds, of correct answers submitted.  As there is only one ‘winner’ the ‘competition’ really amounts to yet another lottery.

            It seems sad that so many of us appear to be hoping, by means of one or other forms of gambling, to win a life-changing sum of money to escape from the ordinariness of our every day lives. ‘Someone has got to win – it could be you!’   It’s not very likely though that it will be.  The only certain regular winners are the organisers of the gambling game or the Lottery.  They have to make a profit and pay their very considerable advertising or sponsorship costs.

Colchester Council ‘harnesses the sun!’

          A report in last Friday’s (17^th Aug.) local daily Gazette reinforced my confidence in the value of true localism – the devolution of the powers of central government to elected local authorities and the freedom of those local authorities to use those powers wisely.

Last July Colchester Council hired the Breyer Group to install photo-voltaic panels on the roofs of 563 houses managed by Colchester Borough Homes.  They had intended to provide the same service for 2,000 of those homes but central government (‘Nanny knows best dear) had cut their financial support.

            The fruits of the council’s decision are now being harvested and a very bountiful harvest it is proving to be.  Mrs Iliffe-Weston, one of the tenants involved, told the Gazette that for the six months from February to August 2011 her electricity bill had been £331.96 but that for the equivalent six months this year (most of which were not noted for their periods of warm sunshine!) it was just £96.33! 

            The good lady heeded the sage advice that if something seems too good to be true – it probably is!  She thought that there may have been a mistake and, as she definitely did not want a surprise bill of £1000 later, she phoned the Electricity supplier.  They assured her that the bill was correct and that the reduction was due to the photo-voltaic panels on her roof.

            I am not a bit surprised.  The installation on my roof is much smaller and less ambitious.   I have just two small photo-voltaic (I have always called them photo-electric) cells, servicing my solar water heating system. When the fluid in the solar water-heating panel on my roof is a few degrees warmer than the water in my hot water storage cylinder, those photo-electric cells activate the pump to circulate that fluid through the heat exchanger in the storage cylinder. The system is thus self-contained, needing no electricity from the grid.

            .   In weather such as we are having as I write (18^th Aug.) I don’t need to switch on my gas boiler o at all.  In the winter, and on overcast summer days, the solar panel doesn’t produce all the hot water I need but, in summer and winter alike, it preheats the water in the storage cylinder before it circulates through the boiler, which therefore needs to burn less gas to bring it to the required temperature.

            I pay my combined gas and electricity bill monthly by direct debit. My solar heating system has reduced those payments by £30 a month.  My saving is therefore in the region of £360 a year – not quite in the same league as that of Mrs Iliffe-Weston but then mine doesn’t take up so much of my roof surface and, I imagine, cost less to install.

            Congratulations to Colchester Council. As well as doing their bit for the environment, their initiative means that nearly 600 Colchester householders have a few extra pounds in their pockets to spend, and thus to help the country out of the recession.  Pity the Council didn’t get the central government support for which they had hoped – but there, central government has probably got other urgent concerns like nuclear submarines to service and multi-millionaires to keep on-side!

   

           

Week 33 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Olympics Fever (continued)

            My elder son Pete, a regular blog reader, felt that I wasn’t being quite fair to Great Britain’s Olympic team in my comments last week.  He pointed out that, taking into consideration the size of the populations from which each country has to choose its Olympic teams, Great Britain had already overtaken both the USA and China.

            Here’s what he has to say:

I see from your Blog that you have also been watching the Olympics. I would say that considering  our population, we are doing far better than the USA or China.  To be fair, you should compare Team GB with any collection of 10 American States. Similarly we are doing so much better than the Russians who have twice our population. Did you know that New Zealand is the country doing the best compared to its population, with 3 gold medals and only 4m people – about the same as Scotland?  Also Yorkshire has won 7 of our gold medals, which means they would be 8^th in the Country list.

            In a later email sent on the eve of the Games’ closure, he wrote:

            I think it is  pleasing to see everyone cheering on the son of a Somalian refugee.  In the Games Britain has massively benefited from its immigrant population, and regardless of other allegiances, from what I saw in Greenwich where everyone was watching a giant screen, a very multi-cultural audience was rapturously cheering British athletes of any colour or creed. I think this has been a bit of a victory for “multi-culturalism”

Pete’s figures in that first email are, of course, based on the situation a week ago, but I doubt if the proportion of medals won by each national team changed all that much after that.

            On Thursday (9^th August) afternoon I had the good fortune to switch on to BBC 1 just as the Dutch contestant had begun her individual ‘dressage’ performance at the Greenwich equestrian stadium.  She was followed by British gold-medal-winning Charlotte Dujardin.  I have watched a few medal-winning performances during these games but this was the first time that I could truly say that both performances were not merely committed, flawless and thoroughly professional, but almost breath-takingly beautiful to watch. For her horse’s dance the Dutch contestant had chosen pieces from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, with which I was familiar.  I enjoyed every minute of it.

            Charlotte had chosen a patriotic medley of familiar melodies.  It included ‘I vow to Thee my Country…..’ from Holst’s Planet Suite and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ from Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance. Her performance too held me entranced.  Horse and rider were as one, both responding as a single unit to the mood as well as to the melody of the music.  When she bowed out I felt that though both were excellent, Charlotte Dujardin was the better of the two.

            Thus the announcement of the score, which made it clear that she had in fact earned another gold medal to add to the one already gained in the team ‘dressage’ competition came as no surprise. No-one who had experienced that performance could have doubted that Charlotte had earned her place in Olympic history. Nor, I think, would anyone have doubted that her Netherlands predecessor thoroughly deserved the silver medal. How my father, who had spent all his working life with horses, would have appreciated and enjoyed those performances! 

           

‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder’

            The perception of beauty and ugliness is indeed, a very personal matter.  Many tv viewers may have been quite unmoved by the spectacle of Charlotte Dujardin and her horse earning their Olympic gold medal.  Similarly there are paintings and structures about which others wax lyrical and that seem to my eyes to be just plain ugly.  One such is that extraordinary structure in the Olympic Park which to me suggests a meccano model made by a baby giant and abandoned half-finished.  I feel much the same about ‘the Shard’, that other monstrosity that now dominates the London skyline.   Others though, find them beautiful and inspiring.  Probably my opinion says more about me than it does about the structures concerned.  Yes, I am an old fogy.

            Locally, I realize from comments in the local press, many people have similar feelings about the wind turbines that have become a feature of the local seascape and more recently a conspicuous spectacle inland between Clacton and St Osyth, plainly visible from miles around. ‘Ugly, monstrous, noisy, dangerous, an eyesore, expensive, useless, unnecessary, a danger to birds and wildlife, a threat to house values in the area,’ are just some of the accusations levelled at them.

            It was quite refreshing to get a different view in readers’ letters page of last week’s Clacton Gazette.  Mr C. Griggs of Walton-on-the-Naze, an artist who was formerly an engineer, finds them delightful.  He writes that his artistic nature sees tham, ‘as an awe-inspiring work of art…..huge sculptures that enhance our skyline and otherwise bleak seascape’. He adds that, ‘as an engineering project they are awe-inspiring.  I look at them as my bus passes and wish that it would slow down so that I have them in sight for longer.  One day, I promise myself, I will get off the bus and go to the site, have a good look and maybe do some painting’.

            John Kampf of Meadow Way, Jaywick is a little less poetic but equally forceful: ‘When I was driving in Jaywick Lane the first time, I saw this beautiful invention, an invention that benefits mankind.  I would like one in my back garden. Wind turbines are harmless and cheap to run’.  I don’t like to think of the furious response that those two letters may evoke in next week’s Readers Letters!

             Wind turbines as objects of art, arouse neither my enthusiasm nor my indignation.   They do have a certain stark grandeur and they are certainly not so ugly, nor so potentially dangerous, as the electricity pylons that stride across our countryside and to which we are now thoroughly accustomed.  I have no doubt at all though that – together with the means of harnessing the power of the sun, the waves and the tides – they will provide a badly needed alternative source of the power that is needed to support our civilisation.  They are energy sources that are infinitely renewable, unlike the fossil fuels that will eventually be exhausted and will in the meantime, year by year, become more and more expensive.   Unlike those fossil fuels (coal and oil) they do not produce by-products that poison the environment and hasten climatic change nor, like nuclear energy, do they have a lethal residue that remains dangerous for centuries and for which mankind has not yet discovered a safe means of disposal.

            Now we have a new generation of wind turbine – and the prototypes are being installed for testing with the existing forty-eight wind turbines just a few miles off-shore from Clacton-on-Sea.  We may well think that the existing turbines are enormous but compared with these new ones they are pigmies!

            The new giants are said to have have a blade-span equivalent to the length of two and a half football pitches! – and two of them are currently being installed on the Gunfleet Sands.  Work began in May and installation is expected to be complete by November.  The installers are so confident of success that plans are already being made for 300 of these monsters to be installed round the coast of Britain between 2013 and 2017.

            This pioneering development on the Gunfleet Sands presents the Tendring District with great opportunities.  It will strengthen Harwich’s claim to be the centre for the servicing of North Sea wind farms, and will surely attract extra visitors eager to visit the beaches and the pier from which these new giants can be viewed in action.  I wish I felt confident that the current District Council is up to seizing those opportunites and making the most of them.

            The engineering genius at the dawn of history who first had the idea of a windmill, using turning sails to harness the power of the wind and thus to supplement man and ox-power, would surely have been astonished at the development of his invention, centuries later!  Perhaps, somewhere beyond time and space, he does know about it….and is applauding.

The Olympics Legacy

          I don’t think that it is in any way an exaggeration to claim that The London Olympics of 2012 have been a tremendous success,  Britain’s best ever.  The opening and closing ceremonies excelled and were lauded world-wide, though I can’t pretend that most of the music of the closing ceremony was quite my cup of tea. Actually I much preferred that of Songs of Praise on BBC2 a few hours earlier. But there, that’s just the old fogy in me surfacing again!  

British athletes and gymnasts, cyclists, sailors and equestrians have garnered an unrivalled harvest of medals, a gratifying number of golden ones among them.  Taking Britain’s population into account we have done better than any of our major rivals.  The participants have been a credit to themselves, to their trainers and to the cheering crowds who had supported them.

            It might have been thought that the government would have been pretty pleased with the result and feel that they had got something right at last.  Britain had demonstrated its athletic and sporting prowess.  Now, while maintaining the standard in those fields, we needed to concentrate on upgrading our young people’s scholastic, academic and technical standards to rival those of their contemporaries in Europe, Asia and the USA. This too, just like the training for the Olympics, will demand determination, hard work, and sometimes deadly-boring continuous repetition and practice.

            Is that what the government is doing?   Not a bit of it.  Against all the evidence, a government that has cut education grants and is even now encouraging the sale of school playing fields, has  chosen this moment of triumph to decide that there isn’t enough physical education in British schools. What, I wonder, would they have done had we failed to win any medals?  Nor are they going to leave it to Head Teachers, much less Education Authorities, to decide how much PE there must be and what should be its nature.  These devotees of ‘localism’ who had  insisted that all reforms must come from the bottom up, not from the top down, are going to dictate not only how much time must be spent on PE but how it is to be spent.  It must be on proper competitive sport (like 'we' had in Eton and Harrow), none of this mamby-pamby ‘Indian dance’ stuff, insists David Cameron.

            Needless to say local politicians are getting in on the act.  London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, whose current motto appears to be ‘Anything David Cameron can do, I can do better’, has been quoted as urging that every schoolchild should have two hours of PE a day!   That would leave just three hours a day for reading, writing and arithmetic (the foundation of any education), science, history, geography and religious education, not to mention frivolities like art and music.  It would not however need the daft idea of devoting almost half of each school day to PE, to derail an already flawed educational system.   Every extra hour that is devoted to physical education means an hour less for the teaching of academic, scientific and technical subjects.    

Thanks to the government’s policy of combating unemployment by training the young unemployed for non-existent jobs, and extracting the maximum work capacity from the disabled, we are already building up the world’s best-trained army of unemployed.  The government’s post-Olympic educational policy could result in our also having an unrivalled host of athletic and muscular illiterates!

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Week 44 15.11.11

Tendring Topics……..on Line


‘We will remember them!’

Next Friday, 11th November, is what we once called call Armistice Day, the anniversary of the day on which at 11.00 a.m. (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) in 1918, the guns of World War I fell silent and the daily carnage on the Western Front ceased. Next Sunday will be Remembrance Day on which Remembrance Services and Parades will be held throughout the UK. The fallen of two world wars, of the Falklands, of Iraq and Afghanistan will be honoured with a two minutes silence, the sounding of the Last Post and the recitation of a verse from Laurence Binyon’s poem '’To the Fallen’:

                                                             They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old,

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them!............We will remember them!

In Clacton (and I have no doubt in many other towns and villages) the British Legion continues also to commemorate the war dead on that original Armistice anniversary, 11th November at 11.00 a.m. on the Town Square.

I too have war dead to remember – 100 out of an artillery regiment of about 700. Some were killed in battle, others died in PoW camps in Italy or Germany. Fifty young men of about my age were killed by ‘friendly fire’. They were drowned in November 1942 when the Italian steamer that was transporting them to a PoW Camp in Italy, was torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine. One other, whose death I personally remember, was a young man accidentally killed while working as a PoW on the railway sidings of Zittau. I was less than three feet away from him at the time. It could have been me. The fifty have no grave save the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The one who died on the railway sidings was given a German military funeral. We, his fellow PoWs, slow-marched to the cemetery, We threw sprigs of yew onto his coffin in the open grave. A firing squad from the local Wehrmacht barracks then smartly ‘presented arms’ and fired a volley over the grave. It was a salute from those who were no longer his enemies. I think that we all found it a very moving occasion.

I am not a member of the British Legion but next Friday I intend to climb onto my mobility scooter (my iron horse) and make my way down to the Town Square where I shall stand in silence, observe the two minutes silence and listen, probably on the brink of tears, to the sounding of ‘The last Post’.

‘Wear your poppy with pride!’ says the British Legion. I shall wear mine with sorrow – and perhaps just a little bitterness – at the loss of young lives and good friends,

Is the Pope, ‘Some kind of a Commie’?

Surely not – but recent pronouncements from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and statements from the Pope himself have made right-wing American Republicans (supporters of Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Movement and the like) think that he, and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, may be heading in that direction.

Writing in the Church Times, Paul Vallely, associate editor of The Independent, says that the Pope’s opposition to abortion and gay marriage had made right wing Republicans imagine that the Pope, ‘was one of us’. To discover that he took a radical stance on economics came as an unpleasant shock.

The Pontifical Council, supporting the aims of the hundreds of thousands of people world-wide (not just the handful camped outside St Pauls Cathedral) protesting against the inequalities and injustices arising from unfettered Capitalism, called for a more ethical approach to finance, the redistribution of wealth, an end to rampant speculation, the establishment of a global central bank to which national banks would have to cede power. This statement, says, Paul Vallely has been branded quasi-Marxist on Wall Street! The Pope himself calls ‘for everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural moral values at the basis of social coexistence’.

Paul Vallely says that this call is valid and timely. He adds that those who say it is impossible to constrain a free market are as wrong as those who say that if we don’t sell our arms to oppressive regimes, someone else will. ‘The continued ruthless arrogance of the bankers, who with their effective state guarantee against failure, are still paying themselves obscene bonuses, shows that the system has learned nothing’.

I am reminded of a time (I can’t be sure whether it was in the 1930s before World War II or in the early 1950s after it) a number of prominent Anglican clergy were both very High Church and very left-wing. It was said of them as a jibe that the Church of England was The Conservative Party at Prayer – except, of course, for the Anglo-Catholics, who were the Communist Party at Mass!’

Nowadays, I think that throughout the Christian Church – Roman Catholic, Anglican, Non-conformist and Quaker, there is a growing realization of the evils of our current economic system (the Rule of Mammon) together with a firm rejection of Marxism as a possible remedy for them. A poster displayed by the St. Paul’s protesters reads WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY? I think it possible that he would say, as he said 2,000 years ago: 'Treat other people exactly as you would like them to treat you. This sums up the whole of the moral teaching of the Scriptures.

If we all, as individuals, as communities and as nations, really strove to obey that commandment, there would be no wars, no arms trade, no inequalities and injustices – and no budget deficit!


They’re at it again!


The more the Government insists that its aim is to divest central government of power and responsibility and to pass these over to ‘local communities’, the more its actions have the precise opposite effect. I wouldn’t suggest that this is necessarily always a bad thing. We are all keen on local people deciding local issues - until it affects us personally! However, when one street has a fortnightly refuse collection and the adjoining one, that happens to be within the area of a different local authority, has a weekly one, it is hardly surprising that the residents in the former street begin to complain about a ‘post-code lottery’!


The extent to which adults receiving social care are expected to contribute to its cost, is currently decided by the local welfare authority, usually the County Council or Unitary Authority where there is one. The Government is said to be considering making these charges uniform throughout the country and imposing a cap, possibly at about £30,000, on the total sum that recipients can be required to pay. Thus, folk needing expensive care who have to sell a home that they have bought with a lifetime of hard work and saving, would be able to retain at least a proportion of the fruit of their labours. It seems eminently sensible and humane that this should apply nationwide.


Very different, I think, is the government’s determination to dictate the conditions of the tenancy of Social Housing, the erosion of Local Authority control over primary and secondary education (nominally to give them more independence but actually they’ll be controlled by Whitehall, who will hold the purse-strings), and the weakening of local planning control leaving, as a correspondent to the Clacton Gazette put it, local communities with the power to say YES but not to say NO!


The latest field into which the Central Government’s ‘Nanny knows best dear’ policy has strayed, is that of Child Adoption. This, like adult social care, is currently the responsibility of the County Council or, where there is one, of the Unitary Authority. The Government believes that adopting a child should take no more than 12 months and has decided to name and shame authorities who consistently take a good deal longer than that to arrange this.

Two authorities that have earned the government’s disapproval are the London Boroughs of Hackney and Brent. I know nothing about Brent but both my sons worked at one time in Hackney’s Housing Department and one of them lived in the Borough. I do know therefore, if only at second-hand, a little about that corner of London’s East End.

I know for instance that it probably has as thorough a racial, cultural and religious mix as any in England. The political correctness of social workers who block the adoption of a black or mixed race children by a loving all-white families has been much derided. It is, of course, absurd to refuse adoption simply on the grounds of skin colour. I could well understand though, objection to the adoption into a practising Christian family of a child of Muslim or Jewish parents. I would be sorry to see the adoption of a child from a Christian background (whatever might be the colour of the child’s skin) into a devout Muslim family or, for that matter, into a family of proselytising atheists – disciples of Professor Dawkins.

Ultimately, of course, adoption – or refusal – should be made in the interests of the child, not of the prospective parents, or of the local authority - or even of a government at Westminster eager to be able to claim credit for speeding things up. A wise decision cannot and should not be hurried.

‘A child is for Life – not just for Christmas!’ Rather than naming and shaming local authorities who take their time about making adoption decisions, they should name and shame those where, due to hasty action, there has been the greatest number of failed adoptions within five years of them taking place.

Week 35 2010 6.9.2011

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘In the bleak midwinter…….’ Do we Heat or Eat?

I had thought that I might have been exaggerating just a little when I suggested a few weeks ago that during the coming winter many poorer families could well be facing a stark choice of ‘heat or eat’. I now believe that this gloomy prediction may prove to have been all too accurate. Since I wrote those words there has been an enormous surge in the price of gas and electricity and the cost of food has continued to increase. Inflation, particularly of the items that all of us need to purchase regularly, is now at more than double the government’s declared target, and increases in pensions and benefits are calculated by a method that no longer reflects accurately the increase in human need.

Our weather is notoriously fickle. During the past two weeks there have been days of wall-to-wall sunshine and others on which I have seriously thought of switching on my central heating! One thing is certain. Winter is coming. Like the last two winters, it could well be a long and hard one.


Dudley Road, Clacton, January 2011. It could have been much worse!

  There is not a great deal that we can do about government policy and even less that can be done about the weather! Most of us though can do something to counter the worst effects of both. When my family and I first moved into our bungalow in Clacton’s Dudley Road in 1956, space heating was by open fires in the kitchen and sitting room. Water was heated from a back boiler to the kitchen fire with flow and return pipes directly connected to an unlagged hot water storage cylinder in the airing cupboard. The bungalow was cold and draughty. During cold weather in the winter it had definite ‘no go’ areas.

Over the years (we had a car-loan from the council and a mortgage to repay, and two small sons to bring up!) my wife and I made improvements, all without any grants or subsidies whatsoever. A porch for the front door and, years later, an extension at the rear of the bungalow, helped with the draughts. After the back boiler, and, a few years later its successor, corroded and leaked, I had the ‘direct’ hot water system replaced by an ‘indirect’ one, but it was not until after my retirement from the Council in 1980 that we had a thermostatically-controlled gas-fired central heating system installed, with a gas fire and back boiler replacing the open fire.

We were early converts to the idea of cavity wall infilling and had ours infilled by Rentokil with their Rockwool system in the early 1970s. We had double-glazing provided throughout, and I clambered up into the roof space (I certainly couldn’t do that nowadays!) and laid a fibreglass mat between the rafters to reduce loss of heat through the ceilings. It had taken us a long time, but by the early1980s - and for the last twenty-five years of my wife’s life – there were no ‘no go’ areas in the winter and our bungalow was pretty comfortable all the year round!

Heather and I with our two sons outside our bungalow in 1947. The windows are not double-glazed and the porch not filled in


Sadly, my wife (and everything that had seemed to give my life a purpose) died in July 2006. With steadily diminishing strength and energy, but with the never-failing support of family, friends and neighbours, I have since kept myself fully occupied.





Nearly three years ago I decided to have a solar panel installed in my south-facing roof, harnessing solar power to augment my gas-fired boiler for water heating. It worked well, markedly reducing my fuel bills.

My solar panel.  My mobility scooter (iron horse) is in the driveway.

Just a month or so ago (in July 2011) my hot water storage cylinder (which had scaled up in over thirty years of continuous use) failed. I seized the opportunity to update my solar water heating system. It is now simpler and, I think, even more effective. I look forward to lower fuel bills despite the price increases. I would probably have to live to well over a hundred to recover, in money saved, the capital cost of the solar installation. However I have no doubt whatsoever that what I am saving is much more than the meagre interest I would have received on that sum had it remained in a Halifax Saving Account. I have added to the value of my home, made a minute contribution towards ‘saving the planet’ and, what’s more, I don’t have to pay income tax on the money I have saved , as I certainly would have had to on the bank interest!

All of the above – the porch and the rear extension, the cavity wall infilling, the double glazing, the roof space insulation, the solar water heating system – were done without any support from the government or the council.

The Government is currently paying the full cost of home insulation for the over-seventies including, for instance, increasing the thickness of loft insulation to a level considerably greater than I had installed. I decided to take advantage of this free service. The roof space was surveyed, the installers came by appointment a few weeks later. They did the job in about three hours without causing me any inconvenience, and departed without leaving any mess whatsoever behind them. If you think you may be entitled to free, or reduced price insulation, do enquire about it (the Council, or Age Concern should be able to suggest an approved firm). It really is worthwhile.

No-one can see what the future holds, but I now have up-to-date space and water heating systems, infilled cavity walls, double glazing and a heavily insulated roof space. My mobility scooter (my iron horse) has an all-weather canopy. It is therefore confined to ‘its stable’ (leaving me housebound) only by falling and laying snow.

I am able to face the winter of my ninety-first year with quiet confidence.

 Is your County Council really necessary?

 I was directly involved in the local government service for something like forty years. It was only fairly recently though that I fully appreciated that three quarters of my council tax payments were going straight to an authority based in Chelmsford in which I had no confidence whatsoever. I came to the conclusion that county councils were a layer of local government that we could well do without, and that among the first to disappear should be our own Essex County Council. While loudly blowing its own trumpet (‘Essex works!’) and embarking on such extramural activities as funding influential councillors’ world-wide jet travel ‘on‘County Council business’, taking over failing post offices, launching its own bank, and establishing a branch office in mainland China (some corner of a foreign field that is for ever Essex?) it was selling off its old people’s homes and failing in its statutory duty of child care.

 I didn’t, and don’t, believe that there is a single function of the Essex County Council that couldn’t be better performed by the county’s borough and district councils.

 I was heartened to see that a former Lib.Dem. Tendring Councillor Mrs Sue Shearing, has come to the same conclusion. She believes that Tendring Council should become a unitary authority, responsible for all local government services in our area. She is reported as saying that this would be, ‘a fantastic idea. It would benefit the whole district. Wouldn’t that truly be localism, as the government is pushing nationally ……….. local councillors know their areas and are passionate about them’.

 Mrs Shearing’s damascene moment came when she realized that the County Council had paid its Chief Executive Ms. Joanna Killian more than £5,500 per week last year, despite her generous acceptance of a ‘pay cut’ that had miraculously left her better off! Those who like to have a yardstick to compare incomes may care to know that that it would be possible to hire two Prime Ministers for that amount! She also realized that the County Council receives 74 percent of the money that she pays to Tendring District Council in Council Tax. Tendring retains 10 percent of it and the remaining 16 percent goes to the fire and police services.

 ‘Surely’, she says, ‘The time has come to rid ourselves of this burden and allow councils, like Tendring, to keep the money they collect and run the district in a much less grandiose way.

 Mr Neil Stock, Tendring Council leader, is dismissive of the suggestion. Mrs Shearing, he said, was five years too late with the idea. He is reported as saying, ‘It was tried with others and one or two unitary authorities were created, but it was not very popular’.

 Well, it certainly wasn’t very popular with the County Council, or with Whitehall bureaucrats, who much prefer having to deal with one large authority rather than half a dozen smaller ones. I don’t think though, that Southend-on-Sea and Thurrock would describe their unitary status, and consequent independence of County Council control, as ‘not very popular’!

 I wish Mrs Shearing every success with her campaign but fear that it is doomed to failure. She should not, I think, pin too much hope on the government’s support of ‘localism’. Despite their verbal enthusiasm for giving power to local people I can’t think of a single example of a government or a county council service being handed down to a truly local authority. I can think of a number of instances of elected local authorities being divested of powers and responsibilities that they once had. These were either retained by central government or handed over to unelected groups or individuals directly funded by government.

 The recipients of this largesse would be wise to remember that, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune!’

 The Voice of the Voter

 Whenever I pick up a local paper, be it the Clacton Gazette, the Daily Gazette or the East Anglian Daily Times, after a quick glance at the front page headlines, I go straight to Readers’ Letters. These, whether they are simply restating the obvious, are controversial, or are just plain stupid, express the strongly-felt opinions of real people, not those who – as I did in the past – write for a living. What is more, it is usually the case that for every reader who feels strongly enough to write to the newspaper, and who write sufficiently coherently for the editor to publish the letter, there are likely to be dozens, perhaps scores, of others who feel just as strongly but who would describe themselves as ‘not much of a letter writer’, or feel that they have better things to do with their time.

 For that reason I was delighted to find that in the latest Clacton Gazette (1st Sept. 2011) there were no less than three readers’ letters echoing my comments in last week’s blog about Tendring Council’s Tourism boss Stephen Mayzes’ extraordinary outburst against the Coastal Academy for letting the school’s playing field for a fortnight during the school holidays to the highly respectable Camping and Caravanning Club of Great Britain for a rally of the club’s members.

 One of the letters is from Michael Weighell, a Governor of the Academy, one from Ms. Janet Hayes of the Grove, Clacton and the other from B. Nicholson of Douglas Road, Clacton who remarks that ‘Also, the site was left clean and tidy and not in need of cleaning up at the rate-payers’ expense’ thus confirming the accuracy of the prediction I had made in my blog the previous week.

 I think that Mr Mayzes owes an abject apology to the Coastal Academy, The half-million members of the Camping and Caravanning Club, and to the officials of the Council’s Planning Department, whose time he has wasted!