Week 22.10

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Beyond belief! ……..well, almost.

Britain is in the midst of a financial crisis. The one thing that can be predicted with absolute certainty is that there will be savage cuts in the public services. There is to be a total pay freeze in the public sector, and an investigation into the mammoth salaries and bonuses paid to those at the top in both the Civil Service and the Local Government Service. The Government itself has set a good example by cutting (not just freezing) the salaries of its own members and urging them to use public transport instead of official chauffeur-driven cars. Quite right too!

Staff of Essex County Council are bracing themselves for cuts in their numbers and changes in their conditions of service. Their trade union UNISON claims to have seen a document that suggests the axing of 85 jobs, a two year pay freeze, reduction in working hours by one or two hours a week, and stopping sick pay for the first three days of absence from work.

Surely, you will probably have been thinking, County Council members must be planning to introduce a similar regime of austerity for themselves. Their subsidised canteen, for example, has been criticised by at least one of their own members, and they have become well known for sending their members and top officials on expensive jaunts abroad. Their former Leader is alleged to have fiddled his expenses as a member of the House of Lords. He is, of course, presumed innocent until proved guilty. It will be to everyone’s advantage when the matter is settled in court. It might though have been expected that his colleagues would have wished to demonstrate their own integrity and devotion to the public service by reducing their cash allowances.

Essex Councillors Cut Own Pay before Cutting Services! would have made a refreshing and inspiring headline in the local press. In your dreams! What actually appeared (Daily Gazette 21.5.10) was Councillors vote to increase their own allowances.

The allowances of ordinary County Councillors, with no special extra responsibilities, are to rise by 6.1 percent to £11,500 a year. The County Council Leader gets £53,500 and his eight ‘County Cabinet’ members around £27,000 each. County Councillors also get the use of a Blackberry mobile phone and are paid generous allowances for meals and overnight accommodation when travelling on Council business.

There are, I am sure, still a great many public-spirited councillors at every level of local government whose motivation is a genuine desire to serve the communities in which they live.

However, generous ‘allowances’, and rule by a well-paid Leader and his ‘Cabinet’, open the door to a new breed of professional local politician. Soon ‘seeking a career in local government’ won’t necessarily mean getting a humble job at the Town Hall and laboriously working your way up. It could mean being a political activist and getting elected to a (preferably large) local council. That route to the top won’t demand the possession of any particular qualifications, skills or experience. It would help though to have sharp elbows and a thick skin.

It would also mean that you could keep your day job, and you wouldn’t have to get your hands dirty – at least, not in a literal sense.

Who suffers from the cuts?

There is to be a seven percent cut in local government spending. A good job too, you may think, if it’s going to cut some of those top executive salaries and curb the ‘allowances and expenses’ of self-serving councillors.

I’d be wholeheartedly in support if I really though that those would be the main victims of the cuts. I fear that they won’t be. During the Thatcher/Blair years (I now find it difficult to tell them apart!) local authorities were compelled to disband their ‘direct labour teams’ and put most of their front-line public services out to competitive tender. Thus, there’s really no such thing these days as a ‘council dustman’, ‘a council street sweeper’, or a ‘council gardener’. These services, together with office cleaning, catering, building maintenance and, in some areas social care, are contracted out to private firms that naturally enough, expect to make a profit from them.

Also, of course, there are the really big local authority contracts with private firms for – for instance – building or renovating schools, road construction and maintenance, old people’s homes, municipal swimming pools, car parks, adult education facilities, sports and recreation centres, and other public buildings. Essex County Council recently congratulated itself on cutting down its own staff by completing a multi-million pound contract with an international IT firm. Local authorities provide most of the services that make the difference between civilisation and barbarism, and they employ scores of private firms to carry out these responsibilities.

I have recently heard economic ‘experts’ on tv, discussing whether or not the ‘private sector’ would be able to find employment for the many people likely to lose their public sector jobs because of enforced economies. Cuts in local government spending, as well as reducing or eliminating vital services to the general public and, in particular, to the old, the poor and the otherwise disadvantaged, will probably result in many more job losses in ‘the private sector’ than among actual council staff.

Some Depressing Headlines

Quite apart from the political and economic situation (in which I hope I can see a few glimmers of light), two news stories of the past week have made particularly depressing reading. The first was the revelation by the News of the World, that for a substantial fee, the Duchess of York had been prepared to ‘open doors’ to give someone she believed was a businessman, access to her estranged husband the Duke, who holds an influential post in the field of exports. What’s more, she was revealed as a pretty ruthless businesswoman herself, driving a hard bargain and demanding a sum of money that, to most of us, seemed astronomical.

I’m not sure which aspect of this sorry affair is the more distasteful; the behaviour of the Duchess, or the duplicity of the ‘investigative journalist’ who trapped her into revealing this behaviour, and secretly filmed her as she did so. It is surely outrageous that an employee of a newspaper should act as an agent provocateur, encouraging anyone (duchess or dish-washer) into folly and indiscretion, and recording it for all the world to see and hear.

A visitor from another planet, learning about this incident, would draw two conclusions. Firstly that all humans, even those apparently wealthy and with exalted titles, can be bought if they’re offered enough money. Secondly, that no human, however plausible, should ever be trusted.

The other story that I found extremely depressing was that of the two little boys, ten years old at the time of the incident, who were convicted of the attempted rape of an eight-year-old girl. If the three children involved had not already been robbed of their childhood innocence by the pressures of the world around them, the process will certainly have been completed by their verbal examination and cross-examination in the Old Bailey of all places.

Children can be guilty of acts of extreme cruelty and wickedness, but it is absurd to suggest that this case is comparable with the horrific murder of James Bulger or the dreadful torture of two boys near Doncaster in April last year. There has been no report of the victim in this case having suffered severe physical injury or of her running home to her mother in pain and distress. We don’t yet know what punishment will be inflicted on the two boys. Surely though they should not be stigmatised for life as ‘sex offenders’ for what may have been little more than a precocious experiment.

In my childhood and youth in the 1930s, society was much more determined to dampen the sexual precocity of the young than it is today. Most children went to ‘all girls’ or ‘all boys’ schools from the age of seven onwards. The idea of distributing contraceptives to teenagers and advising on their use would have been regarded with horror. I think though that the thought of dragging pre-adolescent children through the adult criminal courts for sexual experimentation would have been regarded with almost equal horror. Had such incidents occurred (and I suppose that they must have), those involved would have been given a good smacking by their parents and a closer eye would have been kept on their future activities. However medieval and inadequate that remedy may sound to third millennial ears I’m sure that it would have done far less long-term damage than our ‘enlightened’ twenty-first century solution.

The Changing Clacton Scene

Clacton had appeared to come fairly lightly out of the economic recession. The empty space created by the closure of Woolworth was filled by the ‘99p Store’. The closed Co-op Departmental Store in Station Road was replaced by Vergo, selling much the same range of clothing and household goods as the Co-op, and taking on the entire Co-op Staff. Our town centre was mercifully free of the gaps and the boarded-up shop premises that we saw on tv news programmes from elsewhere. Clacton had a good 2009 Holiday Season. The weather, while not the barbecue summer promised, was better than that of the previous two summers. The rising Euro and falling Pound encouraged stay-at-home holidays. Holiday camps, hotels and boarding houses were well booked and the tills of town centre retailers rang merrily throughout the summer.

It came as a blow to many disabled and elderly people when Shopmobility, a local charity that had provided electric mobility scooters to those who needed them for their shopping expeditions, closed down on 31st December. Five months later the premises are still unused. Now Vergo is closing down and the Clacton Branch of Rayner Dispensing Opticians, at the junction of Beach Road and High Street has also closed. Their nearest branch is now in Harwich. This affected me as Rayner had supported my failing eyesight for many years! Rayner and Vergo – two new unsightly gaps in Clacton’s town centre, both adding to the number of local unemployed.

There are a few more cheering signs. The service Shopmobility provided has been replaced to some extent by Marks Mobility of Holland-on-Sea opening a branch in the landward end of Pier Avenue, near to the Wellesley Road junction. Marks Mobility sells and services new and used mobility scooters and stocks a wide range of other equipment (wheelchairs, walking frames, scooter accessories, specialised footwear and so on) for the sickroom and for elderly and disabled people. A mobility scooter user myself, with increasing disability, I have found its services invaluable.

Then again, The Black Bull, a relatively recently built pub in St Osyth Road, which has stood empty and abandoned for many months is being converted into a Tesco Express store. This may not be good news for other convenience stores in the area but I have no doubt that it will sometimes prove useful for nearby residents (like myself!) Yet another new service will be a new coffee-shop, one of a nation-wide chain, that is to open shortly near the new Travelodge Hotel in Jackson Road.

Work in progress on converting the former 'Black Bull' into a Tesco Express Store.

Perhaps the positive signs are beginning to catch up with the negative ones. I certainly hope so.

Week 21.10

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘The year’s at the spring……

……..and the day’s at the morn’, just as Robert Browning declared in Pippa Passes. And, as I write that is exactly as it is. For the past few days we have been free of that arctic north wind. The sun has shone, temperatures have risen and the forecasters suggest that the situation won’t change too much for at least the remainder of the week*.

Spring really is here – and I am particularly full of its joys because I have just celebrated, very happily, my eighty-ninth birthday and I am now in my ninetieth year! This might not seem much of an occasion for celebration. I am very conscious of failing eyesight and hearing, and of short-term memory loss. Walking is difficult, and I have my share of aches and pains.

The rear view of my bungalow in May
with my eating-apple tree in full blossom.

However, my New Year resolution for 2009 was, as the children’s hymn says, ‘to count my blessings, count them one by one’, and – with one or two regrettable lapses – I have tried to do that ever since.

I really do have a great many blessings to count. I live in the comfortable bungalow that has been my home for the past fifty-four years. I have no debts and an adequate income. I have an electric mobility scooter that saves me from being housebound and enables me to get to the church services and Quaker Meeting that have become an increasingly important part of my life. I no longer enjoy reading as I once did, but I can enjoy tv, radio, DVDs and video tapes; and I have stored in my still-functioning long-term memory great tracts of poetry and prose some of it dating back to my infancy.

I am very fortunate in being still able, with the aid of my lap-top, to exercise and enjoy the one real skill that I have ever possessed, that of stringing words together into a readable narrative. I have recently self-published Zittau….and I, an account of my relationship with that small German town where I was once a POW but in which I now have good friends. I have just completed, for the interest of my sons, grandchildren and great-grandchildren (if any!), my autobiography and, of course, I write and publish this blog week after week.

Most important of all, I am upheld by the love of a great many friends and relations who have meant so much to me since the loss, after sixty years of marriage, of my dear wife Heather. For my birthday I received over thirty messages of love and friendship in birthday cards, letters, emails and text messages. During our marriage, possibly because of Heather’s always fragile health, I felt little need for friends, though Heather had a great many, with most of whom she kept in touch by correspondence. It is since her life came to an end that I have known the real value of friendship with the sort of friend who can always be depended upon. Such friendships, together with the love and support of every member of my extended family, have really been my greatest blessing.

Heather and I, aged 65 and 67

St. Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians says that there are three things that endure for all eternity, Faith, Hope and Love. My faith is weak and full of doubt. I have never lacked love though, and I am sustained by the fervent hope that some time, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, Heather and I will be reunited in another better world beyond time and space.

So far thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on.
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent till
The night has gone.
Then with the dawn, that angel face will smile
That I have loved long since, and lost the while.

I am sure that the late Cardinal Newman would forgive me my tiny alteration to the penultimate line of his hymn, ‘Lead Kindly Light’.

* That was last week!

Back to Politics!

Reading about our new Coalition Government’s immediate programme made me think about some of its predecessor’s acts and omissions.

Who would have thought that after 13 years’ rule of a Political Party that was formed for no other purpose than to further the interests of ordinary working people, it would be left to their Conservative-led opponents and successors to call time on the ever-spiralling salaries and bonuses of top civil servants and local government officers, and to realize that there must be a reasonable relationship between the incomes of the highest and the lowest paid of any organisation?

Who too, would have imagined that that same New-Labour Government would in 2008, almost simultaneously abolish the 10p income tax rate which had helped the low paid, and reduce the Capital Gains Tax from 40 percent to 18 percent, putting more cash into the pockets of the already wealthy?

The same government encouraged twenty-four hour drinking, planned further airport expansion, wanted to introduce identity cards and blindly followed the most reactionary American President in recent history into an illegal war in Iraq and an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan.

That government made no attempt to redress two of the most obviously unfair and inept actions of their Conservative predecessors – the severing of the link between average earnings and state pensions, and the ‘right to buy’ legislation that compelled and still compels local authorities to sell at bargain basement prices, homes provided by their predecessors to facilitate slum clearance and prevent overcrowding. It was legislation that destroyed scores of rural communities, increased homelessness and contributed to the soaring house price inflation of the turn of the millennium, thus playing a part in the creation of the current financial crisis.

When, way back in the 16th Century Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote the words of the general confession for use in Anglican Morning and Evening Prayer, he might almost have had that future New-Labour Government in mind:

‘We have done those things that we ought not to have done and have left undone those things that we ought to have done, and there is no health in us

Coming home to roost?

Do you remember the excitement a year or so ago when Essex County Council announced that it was setting up its own bank? It was at the height of the world financial crisis. Struggling Essex businesses were finding it almost impossible to get loans. Some promising firms were facng failure. Mass unemployment threatened.

‘Knight-in-shining-armour’ Lord Hanningfield rode in to the rescue. The County Council, he told us, would under his far-sighted leadership set up its own bank. £50 million (of our money!) would be made available, offering quick loans to up-and-coming but still struggling Essex businesses. It was a new bright idea that earned universal press headlines and almost universal praise.

I was doubtful, and said so in this column. This was not because I knew anything at all about Banking. I didn't and don’t. However I did know that Essex County Council had been taken to task for failings in its child protection service and that its other statutory services had been judged by the Audit Commission to be no more than ‘adequate’. Was it likely, I thought, that an authority that had not made a striking success of duties with which it is charged by law, would succeed in a field in which it had no previous experience whatsoever? I also wondered whether eligibility for a loan might depend upon acquaintance with influential councillors rather than on need and suitability.

Lord Hanningfield gave his interviews and his photo opportunities, and made his statements. The press published their headlines and departed to pastures new. The Bank of Essex was left to its own devices……..and flopped.

During its operation it has made a mere ten loans, totalling £29,000. What’s more, those who have applied for loans have experienced just the same long delays that they did with commercial banks. I suppose that we may console ourselves with the thought that not much of that £50 million has been put at risk.

The ‘Daily Gazette’ comments, ‘The Essex County Council Bank was supposed to be a different animal from other banks. If it cannot fulfil that remit, then it is time to shut up shop, as it looks increasingly like a folly’.

I wonder how the County Council’s other ground-breaking schemes are fairing? There was the County Council branch office, deep within the People’s Republic of China, that was going to find export markets for Essex firms, and there was the idea of putting most of the County Council’s statutory services out to private tender. I hope that Walton’s Naze Protection Society has received and safely banked the money promised by the County Council for their ‘Crag Walk’.

Empire Day!

I shall hope to publish this blog on the web during the evening of Tuesday, 25th May. I wonder how many – if any – of its readers remember that 24th May used to be called Empire Day. It was one of the days, including the Christian Festivals of Easter, Whitsun and Christmas, of national celebration that punctuated each year in the decades prior to World War II.

At my primary school on Empire Day we would march round the playground and salute the flag (yes, we really did!) and the glories of the Empire would be extolled by the Headmaster at morning assembly. At my all-boys secondary school, celebration was a little more subdued. The Union Flag would, of course, be flown. There would be a special prayer for the Empire and its people at assembly and we would sing Kipling’s Recessional – ‘God of our fathers, known of old…..’ We certainly didn’t realize how prophetic the line ‘Our faded pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre’ would prove to be! At some time during the day we would be addressed by a visiting speaker from the Bahamas, Bechuanaland, Bombay or some other far-flung outpost. He or she (it was once a very sun-tanned lady!)who would show us all the red on the map distinguishing the Empire on which ‘the sun never sets’ and tell us about the splendid careers in the Colonies awaiting young fellows seeking adventure!

If anyone had told us that before the end of the century the Empire would have disappeared, and that most people would think that that was a good thing, we would have been sure that they were crazy.

Well, it has disappeared and I don’t suppose that many people are very sorry. On the other hand, I don’t think that we need to be too apologetic. There have been plenty of worse Empires and I reckon that in several former parts of ours many of the inhabitants lived happier, more peaceful lives under British rule than they do today. We relinquished our control without too much acrimony and without too much bloodshed – which is more than can be said for most other Empires.

I doubt if I’m the only octogenarian who feels just a little nostalgia for those self-confident and self-congratulatory Empire Days of the past!

Week 20.10

Tendring Topics……..on Line

We can’t have Democracy ‘on the cheap’

Events since the general election have been so newsworthy and have moved so swiftly that shameful situations that arose during that election appear to have been all-but-forgotten. Have we all, except for those directly involved, forgotten that scores of our fellow citizens were denied their right to vote for no other reason than that the local authorities whose duty it is the organise the poll hadn’t made adequate provision for the numbers who turned up at the polling stations on election day?

For years those concerned with the democratic electoral process have bemoaned the apathy of the public and the low turnout at elections. This time, crowds did turn out to vote and, in at least two large cities, they were turned away!

During some three decades of local government service I have, on occasion, performed every task there is, in both local and national elections. I have helped prepare the electoral register. I have counted the votes and have acted as both a poll clerk and as a presiding officer at a polling station. I have even, on just one occasion, performed as Acting Returning Officer, announcing the result of a parish council election to a ‘cheering crowd’ of perhaps half a dozen passers-by! Never once was any registered elector denied the right to vote. Nor did I ever hear of such a thing happening elsewhere.

What was so different about the election of 2010? Simply, I think, that economy has become local authorities’ top priority; cost effectiveness and productivity their main objectives. During previous elections it had been noted that there had been occasions during the day when presiding officer and poll clerks had been idle, perhaps for as long as an hour at a time! Dozens of ballot papers had been unused; wasted manpower! Wasted paper!

The techniques of direction of human resources (we used to call it ‘personnel management’) will have been brought into operation. Take the average number of voters voting at each polling station. Reduce these figures by the expected number of postal voters. Add say ten percent to allow for emergencies. Calculate how long it takes the average elector to register his or her vote and you can calculate the cost- effective requirement of human resources (presiding officers and poll clerks) at each polling station. A similar calculation will reveal how many voting papers should be needed at each station.

Such calculations are valueless because electors are humans, not machines – nor even sheep. The number of people turning out to vote depends upon the weather, the local and national news headlines on Election Day, and on such local issues as the threatened closure of a school or hospital. Polling is not spread evenly throughout the day. Last minute decisions bring in voters at the last minute. There is usually a surge during the final hours of polling.

We need to decide whether our top priority is a cost-effective election, or one that truly reveals the will of the electorate. It is unlikely that we can have both.

Hung Parliaments, Coalition Governments

Today we have a ‘hung parliament’ and a coalition government. I think that we shall be better governed as a result, just as I thought (and the national Audit Commission agreed with me) that Tendring District Council performed better with the Tendring First coalition administration than under single-party – any single-party – rule. During the general election campaign, most of the national press and a great many of the contending politicians assured us that ‘hung parliaments’ and coalition governments were a recipe for national disaster.

One of the comments on government that I have heard most frequently in recent years from ordinary people (as distinct from political zealots) is, ‘Why on earth can’t those politicians stop slanging each other off, and get together to solve the nation’s problems’. How could that possibly happen except in a coalition government?

It is, in fact, precisely what politicians do when they are convinced that our country is in real and immediate peril. Have we so soon forgotten the coalition government, headed by Conservative Winston Churchill with Labour Clement Attlee as his deputy that we had in World War II; Britain’s ‘finest hour’? There were, of course, strong, decisive one-party governments existing at that time – in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy for instance!

Did you realize that modern Germany, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, probably the most stable and prosperous countries in Europe, customarily have coalition governments? Greece, Portugal and Spain, like us, struggle along with single-party ones – and are in an even worse financial muddle than we are!

Recently I watched a tv programme about New Zealand’s political system. There, it seems, they replaced their archaic and discredited first-past-the-post electoral system with proportional representation in 1996. Since then they have had nothing but coalition governments. Throughout that time they have surely set an example of stability and civilised democracy to the whole of the southern hemisphere.

Proportional representation works! Coalition government works! Don’t let self-interested politicians who would like a free hand to carry out their own hare-brained schemes (like introducing poll tax! like invading Iraq!) persuade you otherwise

How about the current Conservative/Lib.Dem Coalition?

I wish it well – though it is a somewhat unexpected marriage of convenience. In so far as ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ still have any meaning in politics the Liberal Democrats were to the ‘Left’ of the Labour Party, which has moved steadily towards the ‘Right’ since World War II. It is fair to add though that David Cameron’s views seem well to the ‘Left’ of a great many Conservatives – of our own Clacton MP for instance.

David Cameron is said to be a great admirer of Benjamin Disraeli (founder of the modern Conservative Party) who, in his early years at least, had some very radical ideas. His description of the squalor and poverty of the working classes in his political novel ‘Sybil, or the Two Nations’ bears remarkable similarities to that in ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844’ by Frederic Engels, friend and collaborator of Karl Marx. Both books were published in 1845. The secondary title of Disraeli’s novel is the origin of the phrase ‘One Nation Conservatism’ meaning a Conservatism that hopes to appeal to every class in our Society. Some years ago I was amused to hear a very right-wing Tory announce that he was a ‘one nation Conservative’ because he was opposed to Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism!

I had hoped to see a rather stronger Lib.Dem Party emerge from the election so that they could have retained more of their policies (their opposition to Trident for example) in any coalition that they entered. I had feared though that the Conservatives would have an overall majority. I think that most ordinary people will welcome the new coalition government, while watching it somewhat warily.

Strongest opposition is likely come from the right. I can’t imagine the ‘Withdraw from the European Union now! Stop all immigration now! Stop all this alternative energy nonsense! Britain for the true Brits! Brigade being satisfied with what they’ll get. I certainly hope that they won’t be.

I don’t imagine that they’re very happy about Ken Clarke, a Tory Europhile, being made Lord Chancellor. Nor will they be happy about the number of Lib.Dems becoming Ministers and Cabinet Members. It must be remembered that for every Lib.Dem who gets such an office, there will be an ambitious Conservative MP who had been considering it to be his (or her) job.

The watchword of Lord Asquith, a Liberal Prime Minister of the past, was ‘Wait and see’. I am content to follow that advice.

A Weekend ‘up North’

On Friday, 7th May, while the results of the previous day’s General Election were still unfolding, Andy and Marilyn, my younger son and daughter-in-law whisked me away to Sheffield to spend a politics-free few days with my grand-daughter Jo and her partner Siobhan. It was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend.

We went to Sheffield’s Lyceum Theatre, a beautifully restored (though I thought the seats needed a little extra padding!) ‘Old-time music hall’ type theatre, to see the musical ‘Oh what a lovely war!’ a sometimes savagely satirical musical on the theme of World War I. I had seen the film version many years earlier, but on the stage the proximity of the action (in the theatre steel helmeted German soldiers walked through the audience to meet the British squaddies in no-mans-land for the unofficial Christmas truce of 1914) gave an added immediacy to the performance.

Andy and Marilyn at a restaurant in Eyam

On Sunday we visited Eyam. The Derbyshire village where, when stricken by plague in the 17th Century, the villagers cut themselves off from the rest of the world. While village folk died all round them they remained in isolation to prevent the plague from spreading further.

We also visited the Parish Church of St John the Baptist in Tideswell, which has been called ‘The Cathedral of the Peak’. It certainly is a remarkable church, dating from the 14th Century, with a magnificent stained-glass windows, choir stalls embellished with figures carved by Suffolk craftsmen in 1800, and some very noteworthy tombs.

One placed squarely in the middle of the chancel was that of a locally very important person indeed. Sir Sampson Meverill, who died in 1462, had been a famous warrior in the Hundred Years War against France. Known to have been in battle against Joan of Arc he was probably one of the ‘ band of brothers’ who fought with King Henry V at Agincourt.

Siobhan (left) and Jo

One of the carvings by Suffolk Craftsmen, on the choir stalls

I found the life of Bishop Robert Pursglove, whose burial Brass is to be found outside the Sanctuary, of particular interest. I'm inclined to think that it is only folk of my generation who are likely to be familiar with the ballad of the Vicar of Bray – to be found in every Community Singing songbook in the ‘20s and ‘30s. He was a 17th Century vicar who had changed his faith a number of times, to match the faith of succeding rulers. The chorus went:

And this is the law that I’ll maintain until my dying day sir
That whatsoever king may reign I’ll be the Vicar of Bray sir!

Bishop Pursglove seems to have been an earlier Episcopal equivalent of that vicar. Originally a priest of the old Undivided and Unreformed Church, in 1538 at the age of 38, as Suffragen Bishop of Hull and Prior of Gisbourne, he embraced the Reformed Faith and assisted Henry VIII in his dissolution of some of the northern monasteries. For this he was awarded a pension. He continued in office from 1548 to 1552 under the strongly reformist King Edward VI. When Henry VIII’s fanatically Roman Catholic daughter Mary came to the throne, he had no intention of following his fellow-bishops Latimer and Ridley, and Archbishop Cranmer to martyrdom (and who can blame him!) He reverted to his former unreformed (Roman Catholic) faith and continued to prosper. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1552 he decided that to revert again to the Reformed Church would be a change too far. He retired, using his considerable wealth to found Grammar Schools in Tideswell and Gisbourne. His brass memorial shows him in all his pre-Reformation Eucharistic Vestments, with his Bishop’s mitre and staff.

week 19.10

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Maja – in May

I mentioned in January that one of my most welcome Christmas presents had been a pictorial calendar from my friends, Andreas and Konnie Kulke of Zittau. They had provided and pasted in the photographs that illustrated it. All were pictures of their then three-year-old daughter Maja and/or her little brother Tom, born last September .

I have a particularly attractive picture to look at this month. It is of little Maja happily getting ready for bed and clutching her well-loved teddy bear. The teddy bear is a friend of mine too. I bought him as a gift for Maja, at the International Rail Terminal at St Pancras last July, while I was waiting to catch my Eurostar train to Brussels the first lap of my journey to Maja’s home in Germany’s most easterly town. It was to be my third and almost certainly last visit to Zittau. since World War II.

The teddy bear is wearing the uniform of a Yeoman of the Guard of the Tower of London (the beefeaters) and Maja decided that his name was Bobby.


What would be your immediate thought if you saw the newspaper headline above? It was in the Daily Gazette on Wednesday 28th April. Perhaps you did see it, so you’ll know the answer to that question.

Could it be that I was the only Gazette reader who didn’t instantly understand what the headline writer was trying to say? Quite possibly; because I have realized for some time that if it is possible to read more than one meaning into any written statement I will unfailingly go for the wrong one. Perhaps that is why I have had a modest success at writing books about domestic hot and cold water supply and waste drainage for ordinary householders. I knew how easily I could misunderstand written instructions or descriptions – so I made certain that my narrative couldn’t possibly be misconstrued.

Be that as it may, I have to confess that when I first read that headline I had an immediate mental image of perhaps two or more intrepid members of the clergy, wearing their customary dark grey suits and clerical collars and armed with furled umbrellas, leading a fearless commando of repentant burglars and pickpockets in a daring raid over the rooftops to ‘take out’ a high rise centre of sin and iniquity.

It was a momentary vision only. Then I realized that ‘lead’ in this context was a noun and not a verb and that it rhymed with ‘fed’ and not ‘feed’. The humdrum and rather depressing true meaning of the headline became obvious. No wonder non-natives complain that English is a difficult language to learn.

7.00 pm 11th May 2010. It’s all over – except that it isn’t, quite!

Of course, by the time you read this blog, it may be. Today the political situation is changing almost minute by minute.

An unusual feature of the general election that we have just endured is that it disappointed almost everybody. The Conservatives surely hoped that Labour support would crumble and that David Cameron would make a swift and easy passage to No. 10 Downing Street. Labour supporters believed that public fear of swingeing Conservative cuts would enable their Party to cling to power, though probably with a reduced majority. Those of us who voted Lib.Dem, buoyed by the opinion polls, thought that our Party would have sufficient seats in Parliament to be able to negotiate with either of the other two Parties from a position of power.

None of that happened. No Party secured an overall majority. To some extent the Liberal Democrats are in a strong negotiating position. This is weakened though by the fact that they actually have fewer seats than before, and that the total number of Labour and Lib.Dem. MPs, although greater than the number of Conservatives, doesn’t add up to that elusive overall majority.

The Lib.Dems. and Conservatives are discussing possible co-operation, it seems with success. I didn’t see how they could realistically form a coalition government unless the Lib.Dems were prepared to discard some of their cherished policies; in particular, their attitude to the European Union, their insistence upon electoral reform, including some form of proportional representation, and their intention to use the taxation system to create a fairer society. Retaining them would make coalition with the Conservatives impossible. Dropping them would surely enrage many loyal supporters. It now (6.30 pm on 11.5.10!) appears that they have squared that particular circle!

They might have agreed to co-operation short of a coalition, in return for some compromises on the part of the Lib.Dems. This solution at one time seemed to me the most likely outcome.

While negotiations between the Conservatives and Lib.Dems were still ongoing we learned that serious talks are also taking place between the Lib.Dems. and Labour. Presumably to facilitate these talks, Gordon Brown was stepping down as Labour Party Leader. Were these talks serious I wonder, or could Nick Clegg be playing ‘hard to get’ and encouraging the Conservatives to think again about some of his demands that they are finding difficult to accept?

The one permutation that has not, as far as I know, been considered is that of co-operation, perhaps a coalition, between New Labour and the Conservatives. Why not? There is less difference between New Labour and Conservative policies than there is between both of those policies and those of the Lib.Dems. Both Parties offer much the same solutions to the nation’s ills, differences being in emphasis and timing rather than substance. David Cameron wants ‘change’ but only a change of government – not a change in the voting system, the economic system, foreign and defence policies, and policy towards the rest of Europe. I reckon that if the Conservatives and New Labourites could forget some of the nasty things they have said about each other in recent weeks, they’d get along famously.

The Daily Gazette reports that our re-elected MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, doesn’t think that the Conservatives should seek Lib.Dem co-operation but should go it alone, forming a minority government. Well, that is at least an honest and straightforward solution. Since no one can possibly be eager to experience another election in the near future, such an administration might last longer than appears likely at first glance. Before forcing a vote of ‘no confidence’ the opposition would probably wait until the government had pushed through enough unpopular (though quite likely essential) measures to ensure that it didn’t get re-elected! That’s politics for you!

It now seems likely though that some time later this evening, we shall be told that agreement has been reached between the Conservatives and the Lib.Dems and that a formal coalition government will be formed. If this is true (there could be yet another surprise awaiting us!) I look forward to learning the details and will no doubt comment on them next week.


Look on the Bright Side!

Do you remember Pollyanna, that fictional little American girl who, even in the direst situations, was always able to find ‘something about which to be glad?’ Earlier I said that almost everybody had been disappointed by the outcome of the recent General Election. I certainly was. What, I wondered, would Pollyanna have discovered that should have gladdened my heart?

There were one or two things. I was very glad that Bob Russell, Colchester’s Lib.Dem. MP, had not only held his parliamentary seat but had increased his majority. I was glad too that the very first Green Party MP had been elected to the House of Commons to represent the Pavilion Ward of Brighton. Conversely, I was delighted that not a single UKIP or BNP candidate had been elected though, of course, a number of MPs (including our own in Clacton) were not opposed by UKIP as it was considered that they shared UKIP’s Europhobia.

No, the General Election was generally very disappointing – but it wasn’t all loss! I am sure that Pollyanna would have been very glad about that!

Week18.10

Tendring Topics…..on Line

My Chinese Readers!

A week or so ago I was very pleased to realize that a number of comments had been made by readers of recent Tendring Topics…..on Line blogs, and had been published on the blogspot. It was nice to know that I had at least one reader sufficiently interested to comment on what I had written. I was still pleased, though totally bewildered, to discover that these comments were written in Chinese!

Most messages written in any European language will contain at least one or two words with a meaning that can be guessed. It is thus often possible to discover at least the subject of the message. Chinese though! I hadn’t a clue, but I sent an urgent SOS to grandson Chris, living and working in Taiwan, for his help.

Chris speaks Mandarin and understands the spoken language fluently, but has only a limited knowledge of written Chinese. Fortunately his girlfriend Ariel can read it – but she is a lot less than fluent in English! Together, they believe they have solved the mystery of my Chinese correspondence, and have translated four of the messages into English.

Chris and Ariel in Taipei, capital of Taiwan

They first of all discovered that the messages had come from a number of Chinese, not just one, as I had imagined. They think that the reason that I have received them is that hundreds of thousands of Chinese have recently acquired computers and have access to the internet for the first time. A great many of them are eager to learn English, and are searching the world-wide-web for sites that will enable them to practise reading grammatical every-day English, and perhaps to imitate a good English writing style. Having found such a site they mark it with the comment, in Chinese for the benefit of their compatriots, that that particular site is interesting and the material worth reading.

This theory is reinforced by the fact that two of the messages are to the effect that this site ( www.ernesthall.net or www.ernesthall.blogspot.com ) is interesting and worthwhile. Well, who am I to say that my blog doesn’t provide a good source of well-written and (usually) grammatically correct English, and an insight into the interests of people in this corner of the UK?

A third message comes from someone who had clearly read my comments on secondary education in Clacton-on-Sea. He, or of course she, says The purpose of education is to create a well-rounded, freethinking adult and not a mere store of information. I wonder if that came from a Chinese schoolteacher? I agree, but I would add, or a mere unit of human resources prepared for the labour market. I do however also believe that a foundation of accurate information is needed on which to build that well-rounded freethinking adult.

The fourth message? Oh, that was an example of Chinese ‘spam’. Readers were directed to a website where they would be able chat to young ladies of dubious virtue!

I look forward to hearing again from the first three of my Chinese correspondents. If they are learning English perhaps they’ll try to send a message in that language. I would like to be able to read it too!

Forty years on!

Below is a copy of the cover of the recently published illustrated history of ‘The Harwich Society’, written by Elizabeth A. Kemp-Luck M.A. With 94 x A4 sized pages, lavishly illustrated with fifty photographs it covers every aspect and every decade of the first forty years of what must surely be among the most successful of East Anglia’s Amenity Societies.

Created by sixty local enthusiasts at a public meeting in February 1969, it now has over 1,000 members, a number of them scattered ‘afar and asunder,’ just as the Harrow School Song, ‘Forty Years On’ predicts.

The forty years of the Society’s existence have been years of success, which have changed the face of Harwich, preserving much of the town’s past that would otherwise have been lost forever in the name of progress.

I remember (it must have been in the mid-seventies) an occasion when one of Harwich’s representatives on Tendring Council, who was less than enthusiastic about the Society’s conservationist activities, remarked that if you dared to stand still for more that five minutes in Harwich, you’d be liable to have a conservation notice pinned onto you!

Among the Society’s notable successes have been the restoration and re-opening of the Electric Cinema, one of Britain’s oldest purpose-built cinemas, the establishment of the Ha’penny Pier Visitors Centre, the Lifeboat Museum and Maritime Museum, and the restoration of the Beacon Hill Fort and the Napoleonic era Redoubt.

It was the last of these that particularly interested me and led to my becoming a (very inactive) member of the Society. Charlie Gilbert, the father of my sadly missed late wife Heather, had been a Harwich boy. His father John Gilbert, Heather’s paternal grandfather, had been a fireman on the ill-fated SS Berlin that went down off the Hook of Holland in 1907. As a child Heather spent many happy holidays in Dovercourt with her cousins Roger and Joan.

Nine-year-old (or thereabouts) Heather Gilbert on Dovercourt Beach in the early 1930s.

Roger, grown up of course by 1968, was an early member of the Harwich Society. He was deeply involved in the recovery and restoration of a 9in, 12ton cannon found buried in the Redoubt’s dry moat. A striking photograph in ‘The Harwich Society’ shows it being winched from its resting place.

It was then, as the text goes on to say, ‘mounted on a purpose built carriage in Cook Street and is now known as the Gilbert Gun, named in memory of Roger Gilbert, the deputy group leader, who was much involved in the recovery of the gun'.
How proud Roger’s dad, Bill Gilbert, and his uncle (my father-in-law) would have been to know that their family name had been perpetuated in this way in their hometown.

I was a gunner in a 6in howitzer battery, in World War II and have looked over the Gilbert Gun with a certain professional interest. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted the job of feeding that huge 9in diameter iron monster its diet of cannon balls!

'The Harwich Society' history is a thoroughly good read for anyone with an interest in Harwich or who is thinking of launching an amenity society in his or her own area. It is, quite obviously, an ideal gift for Harwich exiles living elsewhere in the UK or further afield.

Copies can be obtained from Andy Rutter at 5 Church Street. Harwich, CO12 3DR at £9.50 or £11.00 by post. If you would like to find out more about the Harwich Society, access:

http://www.harwich-society.co.uk/

Indecision!

I once saw Shakespeare’s greatest play, Hamlet, described as the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind. In that respect, though probably no other, I find myself closely resembling the eponymous hero of that Shakespearean masterpiece.

I am writing these words on Tuesday 27th April. The General Election is only nine days away. I am a postal voter and received my ballot paper and instructions on filling it in, yesterday. I can vote right away. I shall certainly do so and post off the envelope containing my vote, within the next day or two but I still haven’t quite made up my mind about the name against which I shall mark my cross.

My strong inclination is to vote for the Liberal-Democrat candidate. This is not because I have been bewitched by Nick Clegg’s honeyed tongue during the tv election debates. It is simply because Lib.Dem. policies nationwide support political ideas that I have held for many years. I believe that Britain could and should become a fairer society, both economically and politically. The gulf between the very rich and the very poor should be narrowed. Nobody should need to be hungry, homeless or deprived of health care. Everybody’s vote should count – even in ‘safe’ Labour, Conservative or Lib.Dem. held constituencies.

I believe that we should strengthen our ties with Europe, even if that means weakening those with the USA. I believe that climate change is a very real danger world-wide, created or at the very least exacerbated by humankind’s activities, and that we should take urgent action to counter this change.

I believe that the Trident submarine fleet is an almost unbelievable waste of money and resources.

These are all Lib.Dem. policies. Why then am I hesitant to vote for them?

Simply because under our absurd first-pass-the-post voting system, voting for the candidate whose policies I really favour would possibly have the effect of making the re-election of a right-wing, climate-change-denying Europhobe more certain. Perhaps I should vote tactically for the Labour Candidate as being the lesser evil. This really could affect the outcome of the election?

Another quote from Hamlet (who says that Shakespeare isn’t relevant today!) comes to my mind. ‘This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou can’st not then be false to any man’.

I shall certainly have filled in and sent off that ballot paper by the time you read these words. I think though that I may keep to myself the name against which I will have marked my cross. I have an uncomfortable feeling that I shall later regret my decision, no matter what it may be!

PS (on Tuesday 4th May) I have completed my ballot paper and posted it off. In the end I followed the Shakespearean advice above!

Week 17.10

Tendring Topics……….on Line

A Once-sleeping Volcano

That Icelandic volcano with an unpronounceable name, situated hundreds of miles north-west of the British Isles and mainland Europe, achieved something that had proved well beyond the power of either Hitler’s Luftwaffe or the murderous fanatics of Al Quaida. It grounded the whole of Britain’s Royal Air Force and civil aircraft fleet and the equivalent air fleets of the greater part of the rest of Europe. It demonstrated conclusively how puny is all the might and all the technology of humankind in the face of forces that nature is capable of unleashing.

As recently as a century ago, that volcanic eruption would have caused no concern to anyone in the British Isles or on mainland Europe. It would have attracted little, if any, attention beyond its immediate vicinity in Iceland. Its devastating effects in 2010 result entirely from mankind’s reliance upon the technological advances made in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first.

It has been the plight of the thousands of holidaymakers and would-be holidaymakers unable to get to their destinations that has caught the public’s attention. The effect on trade and commerce worldwide has been at least as important though. Rapid airborne travel and transport were among the greatest achievements of the late twentieth century. Now, we find that we simply can’t manage without them.

The crisis might perhaps have been expected to have instilled into us humans a certain degree of humility, possibly even a renewed realization that, ‘The fear (or awe) of the Lord, is the beginning of wisdom’.

But it hasn’t, has it? In our litigious society the first reaction is to look round for someone to blame, someone from whom we can claim compensation. General Election campaigns are in full swing. Party organisers immediately seek ways in which electoral advantage – a few thousand extra votes – can be squeezed from the situation.

Why isn’t the government taking immediate steps to help those stranded Brits to get home? asked the tabloids. When a warship was deployed to help, an armada of rescue boats was urged by the press. We were given visions of a new Dunkirk with stranded Britons being snatched from European beaches. Meanwhile a retired Colonel Blimp wrote to one of the papers to thunder that this wasn’t a proper use of the Royal Navy. I could imagine him pontificating in his club, ‘Dammit man, this could be just the time that the Ruskies decide to attack!’

Perhaps the scientific advisers were over-cautious. As an occasional air traveller (though I think that my flying days are now over) I am glad that they were. It is much better that they should be over-cautious than that they should not be cautious enough. The unnecessary grounding of aircraft is regrettable; but not half as regrettable as allowing them to fly prematurely……and having them crash! Imagine what the headlines would have been like then!

Let us be thankful that Europe has survived a major crisis without, as far as I know, the loss of a single life. That surely is a matter for congratulation and celebration. Compensation for the airlines for the millions of pounds they claim to have lost? Much more deserving are the stranded passengers who have had to spend the last few hundred pounds in their bank accounts trying to get home, and who in some cases were denied the support from their airline to which they were legally entitled.

Clacton’s Parliamentary Hopefuls

The final day for the receipt of candidatures for the Clacton-on-Sea Constituency revealed that there are two new contestants in the field, both standing as ‘Independent’. They’re not actually all that ‘new’. There’s Terry Allen of Frinton-on-Sea, a former leader of Tendring Council and founder-member of ‘Tendring First’, who lost his Council seat in the 2007 local elections. His policies, I quote the Clacton Gazette are ‘to bring health, fire and police services under more local control, boost vocational education, give better equipment to frontline troops, hold a referendum on Europe and introduce a quota system for immigration’.

Hardly, I would have thought, sufficiently different from the policies of our sitting Conservative MP (or even of the BNP candidate) to make it worth hazarding the £500 deposit. Still, it was his £500, not mine.

Then there’s Clactonian Chris Humphrey, whom I have known from a long time ago but who seems to have dropped out of my orbit (or perhaps it’s just that I’ve dropped out of his) in recent years. I knew him as a very earnest and well-meaning young man – well he was young when I first knew him – with very strong views on a number of subjects. I hope he’ll reveal his current election manifesto soon. There’s one thing of which I’m pretty certain. It won’t be a carbon copy of that of any other candidate!

I have little doubt that both these Independent candidates will lose their deposits. I wish them all success though – any votes that they may attract are likely to be at the expense of candidates whom I would not wish to see elected.

‘Get Nick Clegg!’

This was clearly the message that went out to the editors of most of the popular press when, last week, a surge of support for the Lib.Dems. became apparent from opinion poll after opinion poll. Needless to say, the party’s opponents didn’t imagine for one moment that this could be because an increasing number of people had become aware of the Liberal Democrat Party’s policies and decided that they much preferred them to those of New Labour and of the Tories.

Of course not! Political leaders and national newspaper proprietors don’t really believe that we electors are capable of that much rational thought. It must surely have been because we had all been bewitched by Nick Clegg’s performance in that first televised debate between the party leaders. He had skilfully learned all the ‘tricks of the trade’, the right body language, the most effective facial expressions, the telling phrase – and, of course he was young, handsome and clever. Goodness, was it imagined that David Cameron and Gordon Brown had not also had the very best and most experienced tutors to coach them in the best way to present themselves on tv? Wasn’t David Cameron at least equally young, handsome and clever? I don’t think that Gordon Brown would claim the first two of those attributes but he could surely claim to look more mature and experienced than his rivals.

So – Nick Clegg had to be smeared. The fruit of the muck-raking that ensued appeared on the front pages of most of the dailies last Thursday, 22nd April. ‘Four years ago Nick Clegg said this, or that ……and eight years ago wrote this, that and the other’. Then, of course, there had been money paid into his account. No need to mention that it had promptly been paid out again! I was reminded of a rather cruel little rhyme about my own former profession:

It’s true, you cannot bribe or twist,
Thank Heaven, the British journalist.
Considering what the chap will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

They were at it again after the second debate. I felt that there was little to choose between the performances of the three candidates on this occasion. At one stage I was quite impressed by Gordon Brown. Certainly Nick Clegg didn’t suffer the humiliation joyfully predicted by some of his opponents. I think that Sun’s headline celebrating David Cameron’s ‘triumph’ must have been written before the debate.

And why not? Few Sun readers will have watched the debate and few will read much more than the headlines before hastening on to the sports news, the celebrity gossip and the glamour photo-shots.

Once again – Andy changes the subject!

Many years ago, it must have been in the early 1980s, I drove to Chelmsford to gather material for an advertising feature on Ridley’s, the brewers, for one of the Essex County Newspaper’s publications.

I was welcomed by the Managing Director, a Mr Ridley (I don’t remember his first name) with whom I had made an appointment. I was shown over the brewery and given a brief account of the brewing processes. We then repaired to his office for a cup of tea and a chat. I soon had sufficient material from which to produce what I hoped would be an interesting, informative and readable 1,000 words about our county’s own brewery and own beer.

During our chat I commented that I had noticed that the label on all bottles of Ridley’s ale have a head-and-shoulders picture of a man wearing the ‘Tudor style’ cap that I had seen on many a tv documentary and costume drama. Could it possibly be a picture of Nicholas Ridley, the Bishop of London who, together with his fellow Bishop, Hugh Latimer, had been burnt at the stake during the reign of Queen Mary I, elder daughter of Henry VIII? It was indeed, said my host, adding that his family were the direct descendants of the martyred Bishop.

This distinguished historical connection certainly added a little colour and interest to my article. I have no idea whether or not it had any effect on the sales of Ridley’s ale.
My memories of this little incident in my writing career came flooding back when I received another emailed photograph from my younger son and daughter-in-law Andy and Marilyn. They had been visiting Oxford and sent me a picture of the Martyrs Memorial erected on the spot where, on 16th October 1555, Bishops Latimer and Ridley had been cruelly burnt to death. It was on the same spot that, five months later, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, and author of the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, suffered the same horrendous fate.

The Tudors – Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I were the best educated and most cultured rulers that England had ever seen. I am not sure that they don’t remain to this day our best-educated and most cultured monarchs. It was a religious age in which the Bible was translated into half a dozen European languages and was studied meticulously by both the royal rulers and their advisers. A biblical justification for Henry VIII’s annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon had been found in an obscure passage in the Old Testament Book of Leviticus!

Yet, despite the learning, despite the religious belief, acts of the most appalling cruelty took place – often in the name of religion - in their reigns.

What a pity those royal studies hadn’t concentrated on the New Testament, in particular on the Sermon on the Mount. In it, the founder of the faith in defence of which they claimed they were consigning their fellow men and women to the flames, had said: Treat other people exactly as you would like to be treated yourself. This summarises the whole of the Law of God. I don’t think that there is any possible interpretation of those words that would justify making a bonfire of a fellow human, whatever his or her offence.

How different the Tudor period could have been, and how different our own could be too, if only more people heeded that commandment!

Thanks very much Andy and Marilyn for a timely reminder that, great as our problems may be today, many of our forebears faced even bigger ones in the past.

Week 16.10

Tendring Topics……on line

‘Lies, dam’ Lies……and Percentages!’

William Connor, who, under the pseudonym Cassandra, wrote a perceptive and hard-hitting column in the Daily Mirror in the years before, and immediately after World War II, once illustrated the deceptiveness of percentages with the story of an elderly hen, which in the course of one year produced just one egg. The following year she excelled herself, producing two eggs. In a time of food shortages her owner was therefore able to boast that by careful husbandry and efficient fowl management, he had been able to increase egg production by no less than one hundred percent over a period of twelve months.

Cassandra was making the point that even a large percentage of what is very small isn’t very much, while quite a small percentage of a large amount is likely to be rather a lot.

I thought of that highly productive hen when I read the headline about Chief Executives of Hospital Trusts getting a pay increase twice as great as those of hospital nurses. Most of us probably have only the vaguest idea of what either chief executives or nurses earn except that we know instinctively that the former are, by ordinary people’s standards, very well off and that the latter are not. We may have imagined that the Chief Executives were getting an extra £1,000 a year and the nurses only £500, and that would have seemed clearly unfair.

Perhaps it would have been – but it would have been a model of justice and equity compared with what had actually happened. The pay increases both these groups received were, in fact, percentage increases. The Chief Executives had received an increase of over 6 percent of their very large salaries and the nurses only about 3 percent of their much smaller ones. The actual salaries of both these groups vary widely but a Chief Executive of a Hospital Trust would be unlikely to be in receipt of a salary of less than £150,000 a year. Six percent of this sum is about £9,500, a pretty hefty pay rise for anyone in a time of financial stringency. A fully qualified nurse with several years experience and a measure of seniority might expect to earn about £20,000 a year. Three percent of this amounts to £600 – a great deal less than half the rise of the Chief Executives.

Compared with many of our fellow countrymen and women, nurses are by no means ‘poor’. Nor, by the standards of the super-rich, are Hospital Chief Executives particularly wealthy. However the ever-widening gap between the pay of the two groups, both working within the same public service, typifies the yawning gap between the rich and the poor in Britain today.

It is a gap that must be closed if we are to mend the ‘broken society’ of which David Cameron, possibly our future Prime Minister, warns us.

Those Manifestos

The three major political parties have published, and publicised, their manifestos – what they would hope to do if they should win the election.



The New Labour manifesto was as one might expect from a party that has been in power for over a decade; solemn, dependable – just a little boring. Its message seemed to be; ‘These are difficult times. A steady hand is needed at the wheel. We haven’t done too badly so far. You’d be wise to give us another term in office. Yes – we know you are disillusioned with politicians – but better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Let ‘middle England’ note that we’re leaving income tax alone. There’s nothing remotely revolutionary about us’.

It could have been a Conservative manifesto in the pre-Thatcher years. I think that if the electorate wants conservative policies, as may well be the case, they’ll most likely vote Conservative. Nothing that New Labour can do or say will ever win the hearts and minds of the leader writers of The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and The Daily Telegraph. Why bother to try?

I was pleased to hear Gordon Brown’s admission that as the financial crisis was developing he should have been less kind to the banks. Regular readers (I feel sure that there are a few!) of this blog may recall that I remarked a few weeks ago that just as Ramsey Macdonald had been ‘dazzled by duchesses’, so the leaders of New Labour had been ‘blinded by billionaires’. It was nice to receive confirmation of this.

The Conservative manifesto was quite different, anything but ‘conservative’ in fact. I wonder if the two main parties have ever considered exchanging their names? ‘Power to the people!’ really is a strong message. It reminded me eerily of Lenin’s clarion call when in 1917 he arrived in St. Petersburg, home from exile; ‘All power to the workers and soldiers councils – the dictatorship of the working people!’ We all know where that led.

Communities, David Cameron said, should be allowed to run their own schools and their own local services. There should be local referendums on controversial issues. They should be able to veto Council Tax rises and sack their local MP if he wasn’t performing to their satisfaction. How, I wonder, would communities do any of these things? We don’t live in the small Greek city-states of classical times where everybody (who wasn’t a slave) could have his say and be listened to. Our communities consist of thousands, often tens of thousands, of people. At least a thousand parents have a direct personal interest in the average comprehensive secondary school.

Such ‘communities’ are rarely, if ever, unanimous in either their likes or dislikes. They would surely have to select representatives to organise and carry out their wishes. It can hardly have escaped the notice of the leaders of the Conservative Party that there is already machinery in place to do just that. It is called local government – a local government that, since World War II has been systematically robbed of its powers of independent action by successive Labour and Conservative Governments. Nowadays, local authorities have become little more than local agents for carrying out central government’s policies.

Restore to local authorities just some of the powers that they had between the wars and, knowing that their votes could actually make a difference, many more people would bother to vote in local elections. Local Councils would become truly representative of the local communities that they serve, and David Cameron’s call for ‘power to the people’ could be realized.

Just as a footnote it must be added that the power that the Conservatives propose to give to ‘the people’ does have its limits. They’d be able to veto Council Tax rises and hold referendums on local issues – but there’s no word of their having power to veto VAT rises, or rises in alcohol, tobacco or petrol duties, or to hold a referendum on whether or not we need Trident submarines.

The Liberal Democrat Manifesto is, as I had expected, the one that I find most attractive. It promises reform of the tax system to narrow the yawning gap between rich and poor (something that this blog has urged since its advent), an improved education system (The other two parties haven’t been very successful. Perhaps the Lib’Dems. could do better) and generally ‘clean up’ politics (that certainly needs doing). The Lib.Dems. claim to have costed their proposals most meticulously. I would certainly pay less income tax if their proposal to make the first £10,000 of income free of tax were to be put into effect, but I am not totally convinced that it would be a good idea.

The Famous Debate

Did you ‘help to make history’ by watching on tv the first-ever pre-election debate by the leaders of the three main parties, one of whom is, of course, still the Prime Minister?

It wasn’t as formal and boring as I had feared it might be. Nor did any of the participants give an embarrassingly poor performance. David Cameron and Gordon Brown interrupted each other once or twice. The former was a little flushed at one stage and the latter once looked distinctly cross. Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat, stayed aloof from the squabbling and I thought that he came out the best, an opinion that seems to be shared by most relatively neutral observers.

He, of course, had an advantage in that his Party, not having been in Government, couldn’t be blamed for any of the catastrophic blunders made by the other parties in the past few decades. Had they held office they might well have made their own mistakes (I never was a fan of Paddy Ashdown!) but, since they didn’t, they enjoy the benefit of the doubt.

I can’t forget that the Conservatives, when in power, severed the link between pensions and the average wage, and gave council tenants the right to buy their homes at a fraction of their true value. ‘Buying votes with other people’s money’, as a cynical colleague of mine described it. They didn’t, of course, even consider giving a similar right to private tenants. They wouldn’t have wished to offend private landlords, many of who were their generous supporters.

New Labour, in power for 13 years, had redressed neither of those wrongs – and had deceived Parliament into voting for the illegal invasion of Iraq!

I am increasingly sorry that Tendring’s Liberal Democrats were apparently unable to find a well-known local candidate to contest the Clacton seat. This time, he or she really would surely have been ‘in with a chance’!

Fed up with politics? Here’s something quite different.

Where do you suppose this photograph was taken? Somewhere in the Middle East? Or possibly in a mosque in one of the more multicultural parts of a big British city – London or Birmingham perhaps?

It is certainly in London, but it dates from the height of Victorian imperial power (long before the capital became multicultural) and is to be found in a palatial upper middle class home in Kensington.

It is, in fact, in Leighton House, the former home of the late Lord Frederic Leighton, whose life, from 1830 to 1896, spanned the greater part of Queen Victoria’s reign. The photograph was sent to me by Andy and Marilyn, my art-loving younger son and daughter-in-law, who visited Leighton House (now a museum) in connection with this interest.

Lord Frederic was himself a celebrated painter. He was once President of the Royal Academy, and was made first a knight, then a baronet and finally a baron by Queen Victoria. There could hardly have been a greater contrast between the decoration in the picture above and his own work. He was in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition and specialised in biblical and classical scenes, exhibiting special skill in his depiction of the human form. Two pictures of his that I have just seen thanks to Google, were familiar to me. They were Moses surveying the Promised Land and The Artist’s Honeymoon. I think that I may have seen reproductions of both as book illustrations but I had had no idea who had painted them.

I reckon that the Middle Eastern style of the decoration of part of his Lordship’s palatial home may have been intended to remind him of a happy holiday spent in Cairo or Damascus – the wealthy Victorian art connoisseur’s equivalent of the ‘holiday snaps’ of my generation, the ‘holiday video’ I suppose, of today.

Oh, one other piece of trivia about Lord Leighton, that might prove useful in a rather intellectual pub quiz, was that he occupied the most short-lived barony in British history. The day after Queen Victoria had made him Baron Leighton he died of a heart attack. He had no male heirs so the Barony died with him, having been in existence just twenty-four hours!

Thanks Andy and Marilyn, for giving us something else to think about!