Week 35.10 31st August 2010

Tendring Topics………on Line

An Expensive Mistake

I always felt that Tendring District Council’s previous Tendring First administration performed pretty well on the whole. I have no doubt that its members had the well-being of the district and its inhabitants as their first concern. They were acknowledged by the Government’s Audit Commission to be ‘the best’ local authority in Essex, far outshining the County Council despite the latter’s constant self-congratulation.

They made one or two silly mistakes though. One of the most disastrous was
INTEND, the private company set up to perform the miracle of ‘regenerating’ the Tendring District. I imagine that its name was considered to be clever play on words. All it did for me was to remind me that ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions’. The sole reason for its existence was the idea that, as a private company, it would have access to funds that were not available to a public authority. Why should it? I can’t think of any grants that a private company could apply for to which a public authority has no access.

Nor, I think, are there any such loans. I would have expected a private company to have more, not less, difficulty in raising loans at a reasonable interest rate. If I were in the money-lending business I’d certainly prefer to lend to a public authority. The directors of limited liability companies can declare themselves bankrupt and walk away from their debts. With a local council there might be bureaucratic delays, but payment will always be made in the end. Since INTEND has been established, it has identified areas of the Tendring District where regeneration is badly needed and suggested how this might be done – and that’s about it. Lots of local residents could have done that for free. It cost the Council £1.26 million!

Now, it seems, even Councillor David Lines, leader of Tendring First and former director and chairman of the company, has conceded that the whole enterprise may have been an expensive mistake. We all make mistakes but it is refreshing to hear someone prominent in public life admit that he may have been wrong! I don’t believe that there is anything that INTEND has done, or indeed could have done, that couldn’t be done at least as efficiently and cost effectively by the Council itself and its own staff.

There is an ingrained popular belief, fostered by the popular press, that ‘the private sector’ is always more go-ahead, more efficient and more cost-effective than the public sector. The public sector is populated by desk-bound bureaucrats, swathed in red tape, who spend their days sending each other memoranda suggesting ways in which enterprise can be frustrated and hopes dashed. The private sector on the other hand comprises groundbreaking scientists, thrusting entrepreneurs and eager hard-working factory workers all intent on making us wealthier, and the world a happier place to live in.

I have worked in both the public and the private sectors and I know that this simply isn’t true. Where public sector work is farmed out to the private sector (marking national school examinations and paying student grants come instantly to my mind) it has, as often as not, failed dismally. The public sector, providing schools, hospitals, emergency services, the highways, street lighting, law and order, parks and gardens, cemeteries and crematoria, public health, housing standards, clean air, safe food and drink, is responsible for all the services that make for civilised life. The private and the public sectors both have an important role in modern society. It is, I believe, a serious mistake to suggest that one is more important than the other or that one should be sacrificed for the sake of the other.

I told you so!

When the terms of the Coalition Government’s Emergency Budget were first announced my immediate reaction was that, as usual, the really poor, dependent on Government services, would be hardest hit. The comfortable off and the wealthy would suffer less and the seriously rich wouldn’t experience the least inconvenience. This, I thought, would become even more obvious in the autumn when the cuts would really begin to bite.

The prestigious Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) is Britain’s leading impartial authority on financial matters. It has no association with any political party or movement. I was glad to discover that its professional assessment of the Budget and its likely effects is much the same as my thoroughly inexpert one. The poor will pay a higher proportion of their income than the wealthy toward reducing the deficit, and the lower the income the higher that proportion will be.

Needless to say the Government doesn’t agree. As David Cameron was on holiday in Cornwall it was left to his deputy, Nick Clegg to refute the IFS assessment. I can’t believe that he enjoyed doing so and his argument certainly failed to impress. He claimed that the IFS gave a one-sided assessment of the situation. They didn’t take into account the effect that the Budget would have on getting people off benefit and into paid work, and therefore improving their situation. I suppose that that argument might have had a little validity if there were work waiting for those who came off benefit. But there isn’t – and the employment situation is destined to worsen as the cuts in public services really come into effect. A news bulletin recently reported that 5,000 small private enterprises were already failing because they relied for their survival on contracts with local authorities.

The hope that the private sector will be able to offer employment to the thousands likely to lose their jobs in the public sector is a vain one. Cut public sector finance to the bone and the first to suffer will be their private sector contractors. Public and private sectors are inextricably linked. They are like conjoined twins? Anything, positive or negative, that you do to one will inevitably affect the other.

What is going on at County Hall?

A few weeks ago I commented in this blog about the County Council’s plan to make £300 million of efficiency savings by 2013. This was to be achieved by ‘buying better’ (£150 million), by ‘working with partners’ (£25 million), ‘sharing and trading services (£10 million), ‘working smarter’ (£85 million) and 'thinking ahead on IT '(£40 million).

Crucial to this ambitious programme (which seemed to me more like a wish list than a plan of action) was a multi-million pound deal with international computer and software giant IBM, with its headquarters in the USA and its tentacles worldwide. Lord Hanningfield who, a few weeks earlier had been demanding that Essex jobs should go to Essex men and women, announced this deal for which he claimed personal credit, not long before his retirement from the Leadership of the County Council.

Effects so far have been the axing of 275 line manager posts at County Hall and a rise in the sum paid out to 'outside consultancies’ from £14.4 million in 2005/6 to £25.3 million in 2008/9. I look forward to learning how much the County Council paid out for these consultancies in 2009/10 – and how much saving has so far been accomplished to justify this outlay.

In charge of the transformation scheme, and on a six figure salary, has been Chief Information Officer Mark Briggs, an IT whiz kid who is claimed to have had experience in updating software at 300 council sites and in the USA, his wife Victoria, also an IT expert, was Project Manager, Solutions Development Executive and Senior Programme Officer. (Isn’t it just a little unusual for a wife to hold a senior position – or is it three senior positions? - in a local government department of which her husband is head?) Another senior member of the team was Gareth Allen, Chief Software Architect.

Now it seems that the whole programme – and the County Council’s hopes of saving £300 million – may be in jeopardy. Mrs Briggs resigned her post (or posts) in July after only two years service, and both Mark Briggs and Gareth Allen are believed to have been relieved of their duties and are on indefinite leave. An anonymous inside source is reported to have told the Coastal Daily Gazette that Mr Briggs ‘was escorted out of County Hall last month’.

A County Council spokesman said, ‘Essex County Council does not comment on individual staffing matters. In line with best practice guidelines, we use a leave of absence as part of our resolution procedures’.

No doubt all will ultimately be revealed. In the meantime I shall be ruefully reflecting on the fact that it is that lot at the County Hall who receive by far the greatest share of the Council Tax we pay each year. What a pity all this didn’t emerge before the County Council elections.

An ‘insider’s’ knowledge

Unlike the Gazette, I don’t have an anonymous source within the County Hall. I do though have a very knowledgeable and experienced inside source of information about local authority ‘outsourcing’ IT services.

He says that typically the Managers and Councillors of an authority are approached by the ‘outsourcers’ salesmen and, ‘are first wound up over the cost of the impending need ‘to refresh’ all their PCs, Servers and Software. Then they are offered a deal that really only spreads the cost of this over the full period of the contract, instead of as a one-off expense. Under the deal offered by the ‘outsourcer’ the Council has to define all its IT needs at the start. The answer to these is priced very competitively, probably at less than the running cost of the existing in-house team.

However the contract, which typically is quite long (seven years for instance) specifies that all additional IT needs must be met by the contractor at an additional price. Because of the speed of progress in IT development, it is a very safe bet that over a seven year period lots of new IT needs will surface, and will be charged at a premium rate in a non-competitive way. This means that the outsourcer makes a huge profit from the additional hardware and systems.

Users also discover that while their previous IT department was flexible and tried to be helpful, the new company (which may be operating a help desk from a call centre in Scotland or the like) will do exactly what is in the contract. Anything else is chargeable. The new supplier is likely to be totally rule-bound (often by the ‘good practice’ that the Council thought was a good thing to build into the contract!) and as a result quite unhelpful, whereas the previous in-house team will have been pragmatic, putting the needs of the council and its staff first.

Strategically, Councils who outsource in this way lose completely their own IT expertise and have no choice but to renew the contract when it ends. There may be a rollover clause to re-award it or it may have to go out to tender again. If it does the incumbent will be at a huge advantage and very likely to get it again.

Of course, the County Council's outsourcer may not be like that at all. Let’s hope that its quite different from some of its competitors, because the funds that the County Council is using for this experiment in outsourcing came from our pockets, handbags and bank accounts.

It is beginning to look though Lord Hanningfield’s coup may not have beensuch a triumph after all. The saved £300 million seems to be receding further and further into the distance!

Week 34.10 24th August 2010

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Mammon’s Servants?

A month or two ago I expressed my disquiet at the fact that at Clacton’s new Coastal Academy pupils were being offered material prizes, not for outstanding work or extramural activities, but for simply turning up at school on time most days, attending classes and generally behaving themselves. I contrasted that attitude with the situation in developing countries, where education is so valued that children will walk barefoot for miles to sit on mud floors and attend to every word that their teachers utter.

Today’s adult world offers children a thoroughly bad example. Bankers, for example, who receive what most of us would consider to be an extremely handsome salary, have to be offered even more handsome annual bonuses if they are not to up sticks and exercise their talents elsewhere. The same threat is made if it is suggested that their salaries and bonuses might be subject to special taxation. They are, of course, among the first and loudest of the patriots who accuse public service workers of ‘holding the country to ransom’ when they strike for a pound or two extra pay!

It might have been thought that the public service at least would have been free of this extra-payment-for-doing-the-job-properly culture. Not so – top Civil Servants also get ‘performance bonuses’, and the plague has now spread to local government. A few weeks ago I mentioned that at a time of savage cuts in services and an income freeze on rank and file staff, the members of the Essex County Council had awarded themselves increased ‘allowances’ and had also paid out handsome cash bonuses to a favoured few top officials!

The practice has now spread to Tendring District Council. It appears that in addition to the Chief Executive, his Deputy and his Assistant (the Council’s three highest paid officials) there are four departmental chiefs, on salaries of £65,000 a year, who are designated as ‘Performance Champions’. Nigel Brown, Council Spokesman (once my job but I’m glad I haven’t got it now!) explained to the Gazette that the authority’s constitution authorises the Chief Executive to appoint four designated heads of service as ‘Performance Champions’, with a range of additional responsibilities. They may be granted an ‘enhancement in salary’ (a bonus in plain English) not exceeding twenty percent of their salary and for not more than three years. This year they are each getting £13,000 despite a general Council wage and recruitment freeze. What is it for? Making some of their colleagues redundant perhaps?

If that is the Council’s Constitution it is high time that it was amended. An unnamed ‘Council insider’ is reported as having told the Gazette: ‘It seems wrong. They are already well paid and are getting a payment which seems to be made behind people’s backs, especially when others may lose their jobs. Surely they should already be performance champions if they are heads of their service’.

Do ‘top people’ have to be bribed, as well as paid, to give of their best these days? I would have hoped that the satisfaction that comes with a good job well done would have been a sufficient incentive.

Pakistan’s Floods…..and other Charities

Worldwide, the response to the appeal for aid for the victims of Pakistan’s catastrophic floods has, so we are told, been disappointing. Among the reasons suggested for this are appeal fatigue, Pakistan’s perceived association with Islamic terrorism, and a suspicion that Pakistan is a country in which money donated to help the many would be in danger of being siphoned off to further enrich the few. I think that ‘appeal fatigue’ is probably the nearest to the truth. The fact is that there have simply been too many natural and man-made disasters in the past few years; earthquakes, tsunamis, civil wars, floods, mudslides, avalanches – there has been no end to them. Some of them are on going. Haiti is going to need charitable aid for years to come. There is no sign of an end to the humanitarian crises in the Sudan, in central Africa and in the Gaza strip.

Meanwhile, the appeals for Charities nearer home continue to land on our doormats, getting ever more desperate as the world-wide financial crisis reduces their income, and support once regularly received from central and local government dries up. Christian Aid, Oxfam, Cafod, War on Want, The Red Cross, The Salvation Army, charities supporting the very young, the very old, the chronically ill, the dying, the blind, the deaf, the disabled, the homeless, alcoholics, drug abuse victims, ex-service men and women, the RSPCA, the NSPCC, the PDSA, the Lifeboats, the Air Ambulances, the hospitals, the Hospices and so on, and on, and on.

They’re all thoroughly deserving but none of us can hope to support more than a handful of them. All are no doubt hoping for a multi-millionaire patron (the British Legion must be delighted to have found one in Tony Blair!) but all of them know that it is from the masses of generous ordinary people that their continuing support comes. It really isn’t surprising that some people have found that Pakistan is ‘an appeal too far’. Nevertheless the response from the British Government and the British people has surely been generous. We are said to have funded, either officially or through charities, a quarter of the aid that has so far reached the stricken area.

I have wondered why we haven’t heard of a few millions being donated from Pakistan’s wealthy co-religionists in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States – the purchasers of racehorses, country estates and football teams in this country. And isn’t it surprising that Pakistan’s government should have found the millions required to manufacture, develop and maintain a nuclear arsenal but has apparently been unable to prepare adequately for devastating floods – a much more likely peril than nuclear attack. But, of course, that was not a matter about which the unfortunate flood victims were consulted - and if we ever suffer a natural disaster and need international support, the same will be said about us.

Late News - I am pleased to learn that the Pakistan Flood Disaster Appeal is gathering pace and that useful sums of money are now being received. Like Haiti though, it is going to take years to bring Pakistan back to ‘normal’. While it is very unlikely that Haiti will suffer another equally devastating earthquake in the near future, there is no reason at all why Pakistan should not experience a similar inundation next year – or the year after. We really must do something about world climatic change, even if it does upset our local MP and his supporters!

A letter to the Press

I am, let me confess it, an opinionated old man – and I don’t keep my opinions to myself! As well as writing this blog every week, I sometimes find myself writing letters to the Readers’ Letters Pages of the press. Local blog readers may have noticed my occasional contributions to the Daily Coastal Gazette and the Clacton Gazette.

On Wednesday of last week (18th August) the East Anglian Daily Times published one of my letters. It was in response to a correspondent who, while admitting that he wasn’t around at the time, wrote about the relationship between Britain and the USA in World War II. Well, I had been around at the time. I agreed with much of what he said but felt that he had an exaggerated idea of the number of British girls, and married women, who succumbed to the charms of American Servicemen, forgetting their boyfriends or husbands in the forces overseas.

Some, of course, did. Many more though certainly did not. Among them was my girlfriend Heather Gilbert, whom I had met as a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl on the day Britain declared war on Germany. She loyally waited for me for the four years that I was overseas, including three as a POW in Italy and Germany, despite the fact that we were not engaged and had no more than a verbal ‘understanding’, and that there was no certainty about when, if ever, I would be home again. With my letter I attached a photograph of Heather in 1942, aged nineteen, to make the point that she would have had no problem finding another boyfriend, American or British, had she wished to do so. The photo had been sent to me at my work camp in Germany and I had been particularly pleased to see that in her lapel she was wearing the miniature Royal Artillery cap-badge brooch that I had given her when we had said goodbye.

In my letter I also mentioned that I had been a member of the 67th Medium Regiment RA, an East Suffolk Territorial Regiment that had been successfully in action in the Egypt/Libya frontier area from November 1941 till June 1942 when we had been part of the Tobruk garrison overwhelmed by the tanks of Rommel’s Afrikakorps.

Within twenty-four hours the letter produced surprising results. There was a phone call from a relative of a former member of the 67th who was researching the regiment’s history. There was another phone call from a former member of the regiment who, like myself, was nearly ninety! We hadn’t known each other. He had been at regimental HQ and I had been a member of a gun team, but it was good to have a chat about old times. We’ll be in touch again.

There was a totally unexpected letter from another nearly nonagenarian whom I had known well as a boy in Ipswich but hadn’t seen or spoken to for some seventy-five years! He was living within half a mile of his childhood home and was anxious to renew contact.

I was most pleased though – and emotionally overwhelmed – by the postcard below from a Mrs Henderson of Norwich. I only wish that she had let me have either her postal address or phone number, so that I could have thanked her, and told her how much her message had meant to me.

Heather would, of course, have been delighted but also totally astonished. She never spent a great deal of time or money on her appearance. The only ‘make-up’ that she ever used was a little face powder if she thought that she had a shiny nose. She very rarely visited a hairdresser and would certainly never have dreamed of going to a manicurist or a ‘beauty parlour'. She made certain that she was always neatly dressed and prepared for any occasion and any company. While she wasn’t as self-sufficient as the Amish teenage girls recently featured on Channel 4 tv, she was an expert with a sewing machine and with needle and thread. That photo was taken in 1942, in the height of World War II and of the blitz, when she was working in central London and living with her parents in the often-bombed suburbs.

She retained her beauty (and her loyal and loving nature) into old age. I was very proud of her though I fear that, as with so many things in this life, I didn’t fully realize how much she meant to me until I lost her after sixty years of marriage. Thank you, Mrs Henderson, for seeing how beautiful she was – and for telling me so.

Week 33.10 17 August 2010

Tendring Topics……..on line

A ‘Big Society………'

……..or just another Confidence Trick? I am referring to our Prime Minister, David Cameron’s idea of a major redistribution of power from its present base in central and local government, to ‘the community’. When I first heard of it I had an eerie feeling of déja vu. Somewhere, at some time, I had heard it all before.

Then it came to me. During the ‘50s and ‘60s I had encountered some extraordinarily nice people who had assured me that an earthly paradise would only be achieved when the state ‘had withered away’ and society was organised in small self-sufficient communities, each managing its own affairs. These friends of mine tended to be bearded, bespectacled and sandal-wearing. The males usually wore corduroy trousers, jeans not yet having achieved their popularity, and the females, flowing and colourful print dresses. They were strict vegetarians, readers of The Guardian and the New Statesman (both of which they criticised for being too pro-establishment) and they described themselves as Tolstoyan Anarchists.

Charming and friendly as they were, they were surely not the kind of people whose ideas – even half a century later – would be likely to inspire a leader of the Conservative Party.

They hadn’t. His ideas are far less radical. Come to think of it, I can’t recall there being any reduction in the power of central government included in them – rather the reverse in fact. He is quite keen on parents and teachers running their own schools free of local government control. He proposes that if a local authority raises Council Tax above a central government dictated benchmark there could be a local referendum, the result of which would be binding on the council. He would like to see the ‘cabinet style’ administration that has been imposed on local government, replaced by the virtual dictatorship of a directly elected Mayor. Similarly, he would like to see the admittedly shadowy Police Authorities replaced by directly elected Commissioners, also elected dictators, to whom Chief Constables would be subordinate. Is that, power to the people? Hardly.

The public are also invited to let the Government know their ideas on savings and cuts that could be made. However there is no question of us having a referendum on the increase in VAT or on the value of the Trident nuclear deterrent. The idea that the system of income tax should be reviewed, with a penny or two immediately added to the standard rate, is a subject, like sex, religion and politics, that simply ‘isn’t discussed’ in polite society.

More use should be made of free volunteer labour, says Mr Cameron. Everyone has ideas about how such volunteers could best be used, invariably ways which do not affect the person making the suggestion. A number have had the idea that volunteer labour could be used to keep flower beds in parks and public gardens neat and tidy. I’d be surprised if any of those making this suggestion are council gardeners or members of their families. Nor, I think, would nurses and paramedics welcome Red Cross or St. John’s Ambulance volunteers supplementing or supplanting them in hospital wards or on NHS ambulances. What would be the reaction of postal workers to boy scouts voluntarily delivering the mail?

I rather warmed to the idea, suggested by a tv viewer, that David Cameron might like to set an example. He has, so the viewer said, ample private means (I have no idea whether or not that is the case) and could resign from his job as Prime Minister – and then take it up again as a volunteer. He would, of course, retain the perks; two comfortably furnished and staffed homes, free VIP travel and goodness knows how many free official dinners and lunches!

Think of the valuable spin-off. Every time workers – even those on the minimum wage – asked for a pay rise, they could be told, ‘Stop moaning. You’re already getting more than the Prime Minister!’


A correspondent to the East Anglian Daily Times summed up 'The Big Society' very succinctly:

'As I understand it, the aim of the big society is to get the work currently done professionally by workers in the public sector, transferred to the 'voluntary sector'. In other words, Davnick Cleggeron is asking me to volunteer in order to put one of my neighbours out of work'.

No member of the present government, or of any possible future government, can remember the 1930s. I can. Then democratically elected representatives of local communities ran services as diverse as gas, electricity and water supply, hospitals and maternity homes, domiciliary health care, schools and further education institutions, public transport, sewers and sewage treatment, highways, parks and gardens and housing estates; most of the services in fact, that make the difference between civilisation and barbarism. Through their representatives elected to county, borough and district councils, the ‘communities’ provided and controlled all those services. In those days, when local government was truly local and had a considerable measure of independence, there was no apathy at the time of the elections.

The post-war Labour Government, no doubt with the best of intentions, entrusted most of those service to giant nationalised corporations. Their Conservative successors, also well intentioned, privatised them, passing them for the most part to giant, often international, private enterprises similar to the nationalised ones they had replaced. Meanwhile local government was reorganised, drastically cutting down the number of authorities, and eliminating the local from local democracy. Subsequent measures, politicising Councils and investing them with all the worst features of parliamentary government, have all but removed the democracy!

There is, I fear, no turning back. Despite Mr Cameron’s good intentions, I can see no possibility of our recovering the community control of essential local services that once we had.

By the riverside

It must have been in the spring of 1944 that a friendly (yes, it really was friendly) football match was arranged between a team of we British prisoners of war at a working camp in the little German town of Zittau, and one of German soldiers from a nearby Wehrmacht barracks. I have always been totally useless at ball games, so I was one of the spectators, sharing the touchline with some of my fellow prisoners and off-duty German soldiers, both groups good-naturedly cheering our sides on. The match was, of course, arranged strictly unofficially. No doubt our respective governments would have preferred us to be trying to kill each other.

We lost 2 –1, which was hardly surprising as there were only 30 of us (including me!) from which to choose a team, while there were several hundred at the barracks. It was by no means a shameful defeat, as our opponents freely acknowledged.

The match was not played on a proper pitch but in a meadow beside the River Mandau, that flows from the nearby mountains through Zittau to join the rather larger River Neisse and thence to the great river Oder. There were no proper goal posts or line markings. The Mandau in Zittau was quite small but fast flowing. One of our worries during the football match was that the ball might be accidentally kicked into the stream and be carried away before it could be retrieved. During the past four years I have visited Zittau three times and have on a number of occasions crossed the Mandau. The river was unchanged but I was never quite sure where the meadow was on which that match had been played.

These memories were brought back vividly last week when one of my current friends in Zittau, the scholarly Dr Volker Dudeck, emailed to me these pictures of the raging, flooded Mandau, as it had been a few days earlier. Zittau, and of course the mountains where the Mandau and the Neisse rise, had had several days of heavy and continuous rain on an unprecedented scale. The town is near the confluence of the two rivers, and is also at the point where the frontiers of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic coincide. There has been serious flooding in all three countries. Dr Dudeck, in his latest email, tells me that the floodwaters are now subsiding, no doubt creating havoc further down the river. The local damage is being assessed. In Zittau and the three-countries area, thousands have been made homeless and there have been 10 fatalities. Nothing, of course, compared with the scale of the flood disaster in Pakistan – but to the bereaved it is little consolation to know that you are one of just ten, rather than tens of thousands.

The floods in Europe (including those in Cumbria earlier in the year), in China and on the Indian subcontinent, and the unprecedented drought, heat and bush fires in Russia are, I have little doubt, all the result of the accelerating world-wide climate change that the recent international conference in Copenhagen failed miserably to address. Dr. Dudeck writes to me sadly that,n ‘It is nature taking revenge for the sins of mankind’. Perhaps I should let him know that our recently re-elected MP is convinced that, if climate change is taking place, it is a purely natural phenomenon and not mankind’s fault. Trying to do anything about it is a waste of time and money.

It might cheer him up – but on the other hand I suppose that it might not!

Clacton’s Station Buffet

Since the sad loss of my wife four years ago I have made a number of trips to and from London by rail, making use of the discounted fares available to pensioners. They have been the first and last stages of my visits to Zittau, to Brussels to visit my grandson there, and of visits to my sons and daughters-in-law who live in the London area.

I usually arrived back in Clacton at about noon. Before finding a taxi to take me home I would pop into the Station Buffet that for many years had welcomed and served hungry, thirsty and weary travellers arriving in Clacton, and those waiting at the station for trains to arrive and depart.

It provided me with a welcome break for a drink, and a leisurely sandwich or light meal before returning to face the washing, the emails and the junk mail that I knew would be awaiting me. Refreshed, I would find my taxi, knowing that whatever else greeted me as I opened my front door, at least I wouldn’t need to make myself a mid-day meal.

It is a little doubtful if I shall be making such journeys in the future. I am beginning to find travel by rail (not so much the travel itself as the hassle before and after!) too much for me

Clacton Station Buffet – now closed

Even if I am unlikely to want to use that Station Buffet again, I am sorry to see that it is closed and that there are so far no signs of its re-opening. Vacant, it’s an ugly ‘missing tooth’ on Clacton Station and I am sure that a great many people must miss the service that, for many decades, it has rendered the travelling public.

Tendring Council claim to be eager to help aspiring local entrepreneurs. They are also eager to promote Clacton-on-Sea’s image as a friendly and welcoming holiday, residential or business destination. Somewhere ‘out there’, there must be a young and ambitious would-be restaurateur, lacking only the funds – or perhaps the self-confidence – to bring new ideas and energy to bear on again making Clacton’s Station Buffet the welcoming venue that once it was.

The Council should co-operate with Network Rail, the station’s owners, to find that young entrepreneur, and offer encouragement and practical help to harness that energy and bring those ideas into fruition..

Week 32.10 10th August 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

Britain’s Housing Situation

The Problem:

I have just been listening to a tv interview in which the Housing Minister expounded the thoughts of the Coalition Government on the country’s housing problems, and told us about the ground-breaking new solutions that they have in mind to solve them.

It appears that they have discovered that local authorities have long ‘waiting lists’ of applicants for housing accommodation from homeless, overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactorily or inadequately housed residents in their areas – and that not enough is being done to shorten them.

Regular readers of this blog could have told him that the main reason for this is the Right to Buy legislation introduced by the Thatcher government in 1980. This compelled local authorities, but not private landlords (the then-government needed their votes!), to sell off the houses, bungalows and flats that they owned, at bargain prices, to sitting tenants. Local authorities were no longer to be providers of new homes but facilitators, permitted to encourage Housing Associations and private developers to build ‘affordable homes’. To add insult to injury, local authorities still had a duty to provide shelter for the homeless, particularly families with children.

Possible Solutions:

The above is, needless to say, not the Coalition Government’s preferred explanation, nor is their preferred solution the obvious one; the repeal of ‘right to buy’ and encouragement of local authorities to build houses for letting as they had done successfully for the previous hundred years. They do have two ‘brilliant’ ideas though which, I have little doubt, they fondly imagine had never before occurred to anyone.

It must, I think, have been reflecting on the success of a mantra of the Thatcher/Blair years ‘No-one can expect to have a job for life’ that produced the idea that ‘No-one can expect to have a Council house tenancy for life’. Instead of being offered, as at present, a secure tenancy for as long as the rent was paid and the conditions of the tenancy observed, tenants could be offered a five or perhaps a ten-year lease, the situation to be reviewed at the end of that period.

If the family income had risen substantially when the lease expired, the tenant would be informed that he was now in a position to buy a home and was no longer eligible for Council accommodation. If the financial situation was unchanged but members of the family had left home, the tenant might be told that he was no longer eligible for a three bed-roomed house but might be offered a five or ten year lease on a one or two bed-roomed one.

There are two obvious disadvantages to this idea. However soon it were to be introduced it couldn’t possibly have any effect on the Housing Waiting Lists for many years to come. The other snag is that a householder who knows that his occupancy is strictly limited isn’t going to spend either money or energy on internal decoration and improvement or on maintaining and improving the garden. Most tenants by now will have been persuaded of the merits of the Blair/Thatcher philosophy of the Market Economy – Take as much as you can get, for as little as you can get away with!

The other brilliant idea of the Government is that there should be a central tenancy exchange agency. A council tenant in, say Liverpool, who would like to exchange with one in Clacton would get in touch with the agency. Perhaps there would be someone here who wanted to go to Liverpool for a job or to be nearer mum and the family. The two local authorities would be required by law to permit the exchange.

‘There is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

The Housing Minister may be astonished to learn that in the early 1970s, both these ideas (but without either the element of compulsion, or the extra layer of bureaucracy that would be involved with a central exchange agency) were being practised in Clacton-on-Sea without any fuss, any protests, or any news headlines and, as far as I can recall, without any central Government encouragement.

Clacton Urban District Council was predominately Conservative but believed very strongly that they should not sell their Council Houses. They regarded them as a trust bequeathed to them by their far-sighted predecessors to solve the town’s contemporary and future housing problems.

Existing tenants who could afford to do so were encouraged, but not compelled, to relinquish their tenancies and buy their own homes. In the days before run-away house price inflation, home ownership was a desirable and not unachievable goal. Many did buy their homes, leaving their council houses available for letting. My wife Heather and I were among them.

The Council house in Thorpe-le-Soken where Heather and I lived for a year and where our younger son was born. We subsequently lived for six months in a Council house in Holland-on-Sea, before buying the bungalow in which I am still living today.

Council accommodation was not just for the helpless and hopeless. It was also for the ambitious and aspiring. As a result there was an economic and social mix of residents on Council housing estates. They were not being allowed to develop into ‘benefit ghettoes’. This was surely desirable.

During the time that I was Clacton’s Housing Manager, the Council encouraged tenants whose families had grown up and left home, to move into smaller, perhaps ground-floor, flats or bungalows, usually at a lower rent. Many gladly did so. Bungalows were particularly popular with the elderly. Being old myself, and living in a bungalow, I know why!

Exchanges of tenancy were also arranged without the need for any outside agency. A Clacton tenant wishing to move to Liverpool, or Leeds or London, perhaps for employment or any other reason, would insert an advert offering an exchange in a local paper at his preferred destination. He or she could usually find someone there who would like to move ‘to the seaside’. By agreement with the other authority concerned and provided the incoming tenant had a good rent payment record, the exchange would take place.

We did, of course, have a ‘waiting list’ of applicants for Council accommodation, but during my period of office no family was ever left, even for one night, ‘without a roof over their heads’. Nor did we ever have to resort to using bed-and-breakfast accommodation to solve a problem of temporary homelessness.

Afghanistan

Few places can be more remote from our Essex Coast, both geographically and in history and culture, than Afghanistan. Yet it is constantly being forced on our attention by the almost daily death toll of young soldiers, killed in gunfights, by snipers or – most frequently – by improvised land mines laid by Taliban insurgents.

After years of conflict we seem no nearer to achieving the original objectives of the war which were to stamp out the El Quaida terrorists responsible for ‘9/11’ and other acts of terror world-wide, and to kill or capture their leader Osama Bin Laden. Nor have we defeated El Quaida’s allies, the Taliban. Occupying Kabul and ousting the Taliban government was the easy bit. Fighting a guerrilla army, whose members know every inch of its territory, wear no uniform and are either supported or feared by much of the local population, is another matter. Those who are convinced that to fall in battle against the infidel is an instant passport to Paradise are unlikely to fear death. How are we to know when, or whether, they have been defeated? Widely scattered armed bands can bury their weapons and their members can become innocent townsmen and villagers overnight. Who would wish (or dare) to betray them?

The war is increasingly politically unpopular in the west. Will the Afghan national army be ready and willing to take on the Taliban within the next few years, thus allowing us to make a dignified withdrawal? Perhaps, but if I were an Afghan who had been converted by the allies to the benefits of parliamentary democracy, universal education and women’s rights, I would by now be seeking ways of escape. Within days of the Soviet Army’s withdrawal there was a little publicised bloodbath as those deemed to have been collaborators were hunted down and slaughtered. Why should those who collaborated with NATO expect different treatment?

A week or so ago, we heard the news that two American servicemen had been captured by the Taliban. Since then there has been silence. Are urgent negotiations currently going on ‘behind the scenes’ about the payment of a ransom for their release? A few months ago on Channel 4tv there was a programme about the final months of the Soviet occupation that included surprisingly frank interviews with Russian soldiers at a remote mountain outpost. They spoke chillingly about the fate of any of their number captured the insurgents. ‘We always keep one round of ammunition for ourselves if there’s a risk of capture’, one said. He echoed the words of Rudyard Kipling who, one hundred and fifty years earlier, had ended his poem of advice for The Young British Soldier with this verse:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains –
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Soldier of the Queen!

I doubt if the Afghan insurgents have become more humane than they were 150 - or 20 - years ago. They may have become more susceptible to bribery though, and their current opponents more ready to offer them bribes

I certainly hope so.

The Value of Friendship

A fortnight ago I mentioned in this column that I was shortly to have day-surgery on a cancerous condition affecting my right ear. My left ear had received similar surgical treatment two years earlier. As, this time, the treatment was considered to be urgent, I was to have the operation at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford rather than, as previously, at the day-surgery unit of Colchester General.

I wasn’t particularly anxious about it. I had, as they say ‘already been there; read the book; got the tee-shirt!’ However, I was now two years older (and there’s quite a difference between 87 and 89!) and it was much further to go for the operation in an unfamiliar hospital.

I travelled to Chelmsford and had the operation on Tuesday of last week (3rd August). Now, as the Consultant had promised, I have two ‘matching ears’, both a little smaller, both scarred and both slightly misshapen! The ordeal was immeasurably lightened by the kindness of a friend who drove me from Clacton to Chelmsford, escorted me through the maze of corridors in Broomfield Hospital, waited with me until I was summoned for my operation, continued to wait for the hour that I was in the operating theatre, and then drove me home again.

It was not the first time that that friend had supported me in this way – but never before had I been quite so pleased to see a friendly, welcoming and reassuring smile as I returned to the waiting room, and never before been so grateful for congenial companionship both on the journey to Chelmsford and on the drive home.

I have learned several lessons during the four years that have elapsed since my wife’s life came to an end after sixty years of marriage; an ever-present loss that still overwhelms me from time to time. I think that the most important of those lessons has been that of the value and importance of friendship. He, or she, who has no friends is bereft indeed.

Week 31.10 3rd August

Tendring Topics………on Line

The Queen…….and I

The Queen and I haven’t a great deal in common. We’re both members of the human race, we’re both well past the first flush of youth and we both wore uniform during World War II, though hers was a good deal more elegant, and more comfortable, than mine was. When, in a mood of patriotic fervour, I volunteered for the Territorial Army early in 1939, she was included when I took my enlistment oath to protect her father King George VI and all his lawful heirs and successors. Oh yes, and my wife and I were very pleased when the Queen sent us a card and message of congratulation on our sixtieth wedding anniversary.

That was about it until very recently, when I learned that, like me, she had a collection of photographs displayed on the Flickr Web Site. This site displays many thousands of photographs submitted by people all over the world and is recommended to art teachers and students seeking inspiration and example.

Trooper Hall, F.C. 17th Lancers 1901

I have over 400 pictures on display – a great many family ones of course, with some of me as a tiny baby with my proud parents, culminating with some of me as I am now. There is a picture of my father in 1901 (one of Queen Victoria’s Redcoats) newly enlisted as a trooper in the very dashing 17th Lancers which, just fifty years earlier, had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in the Crimean War.

Right: Younger Son Andy with granddaughter Jo

There are pictures of my now-middle aged sons, and of my grandchildren as babies and, as they are now, in their late twenties.

Above - Myself, Chris girlfriend Ariel,Chris, Pete

Right - Arlene, Pete, Nick, Nick's girlfriend Romy

There are pictures of record too, some unrepeatable; a glance into a girls and a boys primary school class in the 1930s, pictures of a frozen sea off Clacton during a now-long-ago winter, and pictures of the famous Turkish packhorse bridge at Mostar in Bosnia, taken in 1980 before it was destroyed in the Jugoslav civil war.

The old Turkish pack-horse bridge at Mostar in Bosnia taken on a never-to-be-forgotten holiday in 1980. Through the archway a mosque can be seen in the distance. The bridge was destroyed in the subsequent bloody civil war. It has since been rebuilt at the expense of the Turkish government. It isn’t really the same though!

You can see my flickr pages by accessing www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea (my somewhat romantic code name was a product of the fertile imagination of my elder grandson Chris, who set the site up for me). The website has brought me into contact with a Canadian distant cousin whom I hadn’t known existed; a Baptist truck driver from the USA’s ‘deep south’ with whom I had a brief but interesting correspondence, in which we disagreed with each other on practically every issue raised; and with a number of interesting people with requests, always granted, for permission to use one or other of the pictures displayed.

I hope that the Queen gets as much pleasure and interest from her flickr site as I have from mine.

Clacton's Bashful Fountains!

Clacton’s water feature, on what was once called ‘Christmas Island’ but is now ‘The Town Square’ has had a short history but a distinctly chequered one. When first installed in 2008 (amid inevitable accusations of its being ‘a waste of taxpayers’ money) it resembled similar water features in many other English towns. Fountains of water shot up into the air from hidden nozzles at pavement level.

It was attractive to look at. In what passed for a summer that year, it attracted small boys who enjoyed running through it and getting soaked. A great many adults enjoyed watching them do so!

Outside Sheffield’s Town Hall. This is how Clacton’s water feature is supposed to look

It was too good to last. First of all some joker introduced washing powder to it and the jets squirted bubbly suds! (Clacton, I’m sorry to say, has more than its fair share of such humorists.) The water feature was switched off, emptied and cleaned. It was at about that time that the Council realized that their fountain hadn’t been provided with an adequate water purification plant. It had been an economy measure, a typical case of spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar, though in this case it would have been a pretty big ha’porth.

Stray cats and dogs, and even seagulls, could be fouling the water through which little children were innocently disporting themselves! The possible threat of expensive lawsuits initiated by the kind of ambulance-chasing lawyers whose ‘no win: no fee’ adverts keep daytime commercial tv on its feet, began to haunt the dreams of Councillors and senior Council Officials. What if some child developed an unpleasant disease, blamed it on the fountain, and the parents sued? Playing safe, they switched off the fountain and off it remained for several months.

Last summer, again not much of a summer, the fountain started up again – but with an instantly derided (and expensive) fence all round it. The only justification for the fountain’s existence was the contribution its attractive appearance made to the town centre. The fence effectively destroyed that!

This year they are having another try. The ugly fence has come down and the fountain again enhances the attractions of the town centre.

Now though, thanks to electronic wizardry, it resembles the bashful heroine of a mid-Victorian romantic novel. The general public is invited to enjoy its beauty but strictly on a ‘keep your distance and touch me not’ basis. Get too close and electronic sensors send it into the equivalent of a Dickensian swoon – the fountains of water start to fail and eventually shut down altogether.

Nineteenth Century novels usually include ‘some blackguard’ managing to break down the young heroine’s reserve and threaten her virtue. So it is with our water feature. Already, so I understand, small boys have discovered a blind spot in the electronic barrier and have managed to get past it to frolic in the fountains without activating the protective screen!

A few days ago (28th July) I drove my mobility scooter to the town centre to get a photo of that accident-prone fountain. The jets weren’t working; presumably closed down again while someone sought an answer to the latest problem. I wonder what the one after that will be?

‘Essex Works’

‘Essex Works’, proclaims the headline on the latest edition of the County Council’s self-congratulatory newsletter. No one would doubt it, though I am by no means so confident that the same can be said about its County Council.

In the newsletter are set out five ways in which that Council proposes to save £300 million pounds – Buying better, Working smarter, Working together, Thinking ahead, and by means of Sharing and Trading Services. It reads to me more like a wish list than a programme for action but it ends with the bold claim that, by means unspecified, they have already saved £60 million!

I hope that they are successful. They have certainly been very good at spending our money. It seems likely that they’ll have to spend a good deal more of it if they are going to bring all their services up to an acceptable standard. Their child-care services, in particular, have long been below standard. I remember a year ago it being promised that they would take immediate effective steps to improve them. They don’t seem to have been very successful. During 2009/2010, 148 enquiries and complaints about the ECC were received by the Local Government Ombudsman, compared with 139 the previous year. Complaints relating to children and family services rose from 4 to 14 and those relating to adult care doubled from 9 to 18. There were also 36 complaints about education. As a result of these complaints the County Council had to make eleven local settlements in compensation, costing the taxpayers £16,456. This is trivial compared with the £300 million they are hoping to save but, as they say when commenting on these, ‘Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’. The converse is also true, ‘Squander the pennies and you soon won’t have any pounds to save’.

In an attempt to improve their failing Children’s Services they have appointed a new Director of Schools, Children and Families. Dave Hill, the new Director, will be moving from a similar job in Croydon. His salary is not reported but it certainly won’t be peanuts! They are also offering a two-year contract of up to £150,000, not for new staff, but to a company able to bring in non-EU social workers to reduce reliance on agency staff. I’d have thought that non-EU workers from cultures and traditions very different from our own would be particularly unsuitable for social work.

I mentioned a few weeks ago in this blog that, despite their enthusiasm for saving, Essex Councillors had just voted themselves increased allowances. I now learn that during the last financial year they paid out £90,000 in staff bonuses, not to hard-pressed social workers and the like, but to top officials already on six-figure salaries. I have also discovered that they have spent no less than £800,000 (now that isn’t a trivial sum by anyone’s standards!) redesigning the Council’s website. Of this extravagance Emma Boon, campaign manager of the Taxpayers’ Alliance says, ‘The Council already has a site designed and built at the public’s expense. They shouldn’t spend more of our money doing it all over again’.

And so say all of us!

Above left: myself, Ariel Chris' girlfriend, Chris.

Right: Arlene, Pete, Nick, Romy Nick's girlfriend

The Turkish packhorse bridge at Mostar, taken while we were on holiday in 1980. The bridge was to be destroyed in the subsequent bloody civil war. It has since been rebuilt at the expense of the Turkish government. It isn’t really the same though!

There are some pictures of record too, some of them irreplaceable: a glimpse into boys and girls classrooms in primary schools in the '30s; the sea frozen over off Clacton Beach in a cold winter many years ago; the Turkish packhorse bridge in Mostar, Bosnia, destroyed in the civil war.

You can see my flickr pages by clicking on www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea (my somewhat romantic code name was a product of the fertile imagination of my elder grandson, who set the site up for me). The website site has brought me into contact with a Canadian distant cousin whom I hadn’t known existed; a Baptist truck driver from the USA's ‘deep south’ with whom I had a brief but interesting correspondence in which we disagreed with each other on practically every issue raised; and with a number of interesting people with their requests, always granted, for permission to use one or other of the pictures displayed.

I hope that the Queen gets as much pleasure and interest from her flickr site as I have from HM from mine.

Week 30. 10

Tendring Topics……on Line

‘£1.2 million to Save the Naze for 50 years’

In the interests of accuracy, the above headline from the Coastal Daily Gazette
ought really to be ‘£l.2 million to postpone the loss of part of the Naze for 50 years’. A fortnight ago, commenting on the fact that, despite savage cuts elsewhere, the funding for both the Crag Walk at Walton’s Naze and the redevelopment of Clacton’s Pier Avenue was said to be safe, I pointed out that desirable as the construction of the Crag Walk might be, it certainly wouldn’t Save the Naze.

In earlier blogs I have explained that the erosion of the cliffs of the Naze arises primarily from surface water penetrating the subsoil and the stratum of permeable red crag beneath it. Then as it drains away over the impermeable layer of clay beneath them, it destabilises these upper strata, causing the cliff edge to break away and fall onto the beach below. The sea washes away the fallen material, and the process continues. It will continue to do this until the subsoil and the red crag stratum are properly drained and a revetment is provided at the foot of the Naze cliffs for the whole of their length.

A scheme to do this was prepared by the Tendring District Council soon after it took over the whole of the Tendring District in 1974. After a Public Enquiry it was approved by the Government’s inspector but was then vetoed by the government on economic grounds. ‘The time wasn’t right’. I don’t think it ever will be!

The Crag Walk Scheme may prevent (postpone would be a better word) the erosion of 110 metres of the cliff immediately in front of the Naze Tower. 1,200 tons of bedding rock and 13,305 tons of armour stone are to be used to protect that length of cliff. They will also provide the foundation of the Crag Walk, which will form a viewing platform in front of the fossil-rich red crag cliffs.

I wouldn’t care to predict whether this work will endure for 50 years or for a longer or shorter time. It is obvious to me though that the sea will continue to nibble away at the cliff on each side of the protected area. This will, after a few years become a roughly 150 yards wide projecting peninsula or salient. A feature of a salient, as old soldiers will confirm, is that the enemy can attack it from both sides as well as from the front – and there is no enemy more implacable than the sea!

In any case, will the proposed crag walk really attract the anticipated ‘wave of tourists’? I‘m a bit doubtful. The cliffs are indeed ‘fossil rich’. I remember many years ago, my two then pre-teenage sons arriving home from cycle excursions to Walton with fossil shells in their pockets and red sandstone dust inextricably permeating their clothes and their hair. I think it unlikely though that those fossils will be visible from the Crag Walk viewing platform and I hardly imagine that visitors will be encouraged to attack the cliff face with clasp knives or similar implements to find them.

Lies, dam’ lies……and Prime Ministerial Pronouncements!

For several weeks we hadn’t heard very much from the Chilcot Enquiry into the Iraq war. There simply hadn’t been any revelations of the kind that make front-page news.

Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller, a grande dame if there ever was one, and Head of MI5 before and during the Iraq War, certainly put that right. Her evidence to the Enquiry was in complete contradiction of statements made by Prime Minister Tony Blair and, of course, his American puppet-master George W. Bush junior.

They, for instance, claimed that Iraq was involved with al-Qaida and thus, indirectly, with the ‘nine-eleven’ outrage. Lady Manningham-Buller said in evidence, ‘There was no credible evidence to support that connection and that was the judgement, I may say, of the CIA’

On weapons of mass destruction, Mr Blair assured the House of Commons that our Intelligence Service had concluded that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, that he had military plans for the use of these weapons which could be activated within 45 minutes, and that he was actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability. Lady Manningham-Buller said ‘We regarded the direct threat from Iraq as low….we didn’t believe Saddam Hussein had the capability to do anything in the UK. And ‘We were asked to put low-grade, small intelligence into it (the report later known as ‘the dodgy dossier’) and we refused because we didn’t think it was reliable (So had MI5 not refused to publish questionable material, the dodgy dossier would have been even dodgier!)

Mr Blair claimed that as a result of the war ‘I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, that our security is better, I believe we are. The world is safer as a result'. He denied repeatedly that the war had acted as a stimulus to the recruitment of terrorists.

Lady Manningham-Butler told the Enquiry, ‘our involvement in Iraq radicalised a generation of young people, who saw it and our involvement in Afghanistan, as an attack on Islam. We in MI5 were swamped with intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with in terms of plots, leads to plots and things we needed to pursue. We gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad, so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not able to before’. Perhaps the most telling evidence that the danger of terrorism in the UK had increased with the onset of the Iraq war (and that Tony Blair was well aware of this) is that in 2003 Lady Manningham-Butler found it necessary to ask the Prime Minister for a doubling of MI5’s Budget, and the Prime Minister agreed!

I am more than ever proud that my two sons and my grandchildren, with their wives and girlfriends, were among the nearly a million protesters who marched - in vain - through London on the eve of the war, while New Labour MPs trooped like sheep into the ‘Aye Lobby’ to endorse it. Nor can today’s Conservatives congratulate themselves. With one or two honourable exceptions they too supported a course of action that was justified only by deceit, deception and downright lies, that cost, and is still costing, tens of thousands of lives. ‘A plague o’ both your houses!’


Repealing ‘The right to buy’

There was what I believe to have been a highly significant news item on BBC tv’s Breakfast programme this (21st July) morning that the BBC clearly didn’t consider sufficiently important to be repeated on the 6.00 pm national news bulletin. I am sure though that it must have been on the Welsh Regional News.

This was that the Welsh Assembly had passed a law, that was to be given the Queen’s assent at once, permitting Welsh local authorities to rescind the requirements of the ‘Right to Buy’ Act passed by the Thatcher Government in 1980. This Act might more accurately have been described as the ‘Compel to Sell Act’. It compelled local authorities to sell to sitting tenants, at a fraction of their market price, houses that had been built by their far-sighted predecessors to facilitate slum clearance, alleviate overcrowding and generally improve the housing of the working classes.

A great many tenants, naturally enough, took advantage of this generous offer made at other people’s expense. Many elderly folk were helped to ‘own their own homes’ by sons or daughters hoping to benefit under their wills and thus find their own way to home ownership. After ten years (when you’re my age you realize what a short period that is!) the home, bought on the cheap, could be sold at the market price. With, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, constantly rising house prices, this offered a quick way to a fortune.

The best homes were quickly sold off, many in attractive locations, as second homes or as rural bases from which comfortably-off commuters could get to their city offices each day. House prices rose. Banks were happy to finance the purchase of Council Houses, often to those who could ill-afford the repayments. Unsold Council properties degenerated into slums. Homes in rural villages were unaffordable to working people. Since there were now no Council houses to let, many young families whose ancestors had been villagers for generations were compelled to emigrate from the country to the city.

Repealing right to buy is an obviously needed reform that no government has had the courage to make. Thank goodness the Welsh Assembly has taken the first step in the right direction. I hope that others will follow.

A Matter of History

Can David Cameron, our Prime Minister, really have said publicly that in 1940, we British were the junior partners of the USA in the war against Hitler?

What do they teach the kids at Eton these days? Throughout 1940, and for almost the whole of 1941, the USA was neutral, and there were powerful voices in the States urging that it should remain so. It was a country with large ethnic Irish and German populations. While I am quite sure that the overwhelming majority of them had no time at all for Hitler and the Nazis, neither did they feel any great urge to support Britain. As Winston Churchill said, from the time of the fall of France in the spring of 1940, until June 1941, ‘We stood alone’ against the Nazis.

Called up with the Territorial Army at the beginning of September 1939, the Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a member was dug in, heavily camouflaged, near the village of Elmdon in north-west Essex throughout the anxious Battle of Britain summer of 1940. Our 6in howitzers were kept in constant readiness to shell Duxford Aerodrome and blow it to smithereens immediately German airborne troops swarmed in - an event that was expected hourly.

Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone until 21st June 1941 when Hitler’s forces invaded the Soviet Union and we acquired our first powerful ally. On 7th December of the same year the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and the USA declared war on Japan. Hitler then declared war on the USA in support of his Japanese ally. Would the USA have declared war on Germany at that time had Hitler not moved first? Probably not; there was no treaty obligation to do so. Powerful, and not unreasonable, voices within the USA would undoubtedly have claimed that the American first priority was to defeat the Japanese. They would not have wished to enter an alliance that included the USSR and they would have pointed out to Anglophiles that, in concentrating on Japan, they were supporting the British by easing the Japanese pressure on our forces in India and the Indo-Chinese peninsula. Once they had defeated the Japanese, there would be plenty of time to consider whether or not to confront Hitler.

Hitler made up their minds for them!

In 1941, Hitler’s failure to learn the lessons of history led him to two decisions that made Germany's defeat a certainty. He invaded Russia, ignoring the lessons of Napoleon’s catastrophic experience when he had attempted the same thing in 1812. Then he declared war on the USA, ignoring the much more recent lesson of the effect of the late entry of the USA into World War I, which tipped the balance on the western front decisively in favour of the French and British allies.

Has our Prime Minister forgotten (or perhaps has never learned) the lessons of the fairly recent history of Afghanistan and the Indian sub-Continent? In the 19th Century there was an ignominious defeat of our first attempt (1839 – ’42) to occupy Afghanistan and add it to our Empire, and a not very glorious withdrawal after the second (1878 – 1880). A much more recent attempt on the same lines by the Soviet Union was similarly defeated. On that occasion, today’s Taliban insurgents (then hailed by us as gallant freedom-loving Mojihadin) had enjoyed the covert help of the British and American governments.

There have been four occasions (one very recent) during the present campaign on which members of the Afghan armed forces being trained by British or American troops, have murdered their trainers and fled to join the Taliban. These incidents should surely make us ask whether there may be lessons to be learnt from the Indian Mutiny of 1857/58? Then, native troops whose discipline and loyalty had seemed beyond question, had turned on their British officers, slaughtering them and their families before going on to incite other garrisons to mutiny. Thanks to their British army training, they enjoyed considerable success before the Mutiny was, very bloodily, put down.

There really are lessons to be learned from history, for those who don't imagine that they already 'know it all'!

Week 29.10

Tendring Topics………on line

Dispensing with the Bureaucrats?

Under the new coalition government the NHS, so they say, is to experience the biggest shake-up of its history. Power, and the cash that goes with it, is to be taken from the Primary Care Trusts and handed over to the Medical Practices in their areas. They will decide which consultants we may need to see, and when. They will organise minor operations and through them, patients will be able to say which hospitals they wish to go to and who will operate upon them. Thousands of NHS managers will be sacked. It is envisaged that two or more practices may get together in some cases, to ensure that they give the most efficient and comprehensive service possible.

Wonderful! But who, in each medical practice will make the thousands of decisions that have to be made, and who will make sure that the actions that result from those decisions actually take place.

The doctors? Well, there are of course lots of decisions that individual doctors have to make and some that will probably have to be made by general agreement among the doctors of the practice. They can’t spend too much time in discussion and debate though – at least I hope they can’t. We need them in their consulting rooms and by our bedsides, diagnosing our ailments and trying to cure or alleviate them!

Most up-to-date practices, employing several medical practitioners and nurses, will already have a practice manager. There will also be a number of clerical and administrative staff to make appointments, man the telephones and the reception desk, type letters, keep accounts and undertake the multifarious tasks that exist in any busy enterprise. With more responsibilities, more of these will be needed. There will need to be a deputy and perhaps one or more assistant managers. They’ll require professional accountants to supervise the practice’s finances. More clerical and junior administrative staff will be required to service the professionals.

There is, I fear, a real danger that we shall be sacking dozens of managers and chief executives of Primary Care Trusts and getting rid of their bureaucratic retinues only to replace them with hundreds of rather-less-well-paid managers and chief executives of independent medical practices and combined practices. They’ll need their own, admittedly smaller, retinues. In the twenty-first century not even the smallest organisation can hope to survive without the skills of at least some of those often denigrated bureaucrats!

I wonder if the new streamlined Health Service will really prove to be more efficient, more cost effective and more customer-friendly than its predecessor?

‘More than the Prime Minister!’

It is strange how the Prime Minister is used as a sort of benchmark of annual income. Any public servant with an income in excess of £200,000 is described in terms of shock and horror, to be, ‘earning more than the Prime Minister!’

I may have done it myself. If so I apologise, because it isn’t really a fair comparison. The Prime Minister’s salary, although enormous by the standards of most of us, is quite modest compared with those of quite a few of our fellow countrymen and women. The Prime Minister’s job does carry a few pretty valuable perks though. There are, for instance, two fully staffed palatial homes, one in central London and the other in its own grounds in the lovely English countryside. On retirement, or on being evicted by the electorate, he or she, as well as enjoying a comfortable pension, can reckon on earning many thousands of pounds from writing memoirs and from lecturing and after-dinner speaking. Company directorates and consultancies are theirs for the asking and they might even get a part-time job as a special envoy for NATO or the UN!

The latest subject of press ‘more than the Prime Minister’ outrage, is the head of an inner city (London) school, whose total income last year was described in some newspapers as over £200,000 and in at least one other as £270,000.
A class of eight year olds at an Ipswich primary school in 1930. I am the
anxious little boy with glasses by the headmaster’s right knee! What an easy
and rewarding job teaching must have been when kids were obedient and
attentive, parents were respectful and co-operative – and there was always
the cane to reinforce the headmaster’s authority!

It appears that the Head Teacher’s actual salary from his Education Authority was £80,000 a year; a lot of money by my standards but, I understand, not at all unreasonable for a hard-working educationalist who has successfully ‘turned round’ an inner city school full of tough inner-city pupils! Most of the rest of his income was derived as awards for that or similar achievements from educational trusts. That said, it does seem that he was rewarded from at least two separate sources for the same, admittedly valuable, work and £200,000 is surely an absurdly high sum.

Nevertheless I felt some sympathy with an email correspondent to BBC tv’s ‘Breakfast’ programme who said, ‘Why pick on the salary of a hard-working and successful head teacher to compare with that of the Prime Minister. What about the incomes of top footballers?’

What indeed? And what about the salaries and continuing bonuses of the bankers whose irresponsibility and incompetence triggered the current financial crisis? What about the wealthy stock holders who use their resources to buy football teams and players, and own luxury yachts in which to entertain compliant members of the Government and the Opposition. It is they who should be targeted by the national dailies; but then, of course, they probably own most of them!

A properly graded income tax, clawing back more than fifty percent of income in excess of, say, £200,000; coupled with measures to curb income tax avoidance, would surely relieve all these people, including the affluent head teacher, of some of their superfluous wealth. It would also do just a little to ease the burden of debt repayment, and help to persuade us that the government is determined that the weight of that burden is shared fairly among us all.

Poverty Kills

I don’t think that anyone in this country, probably not anyone in Europe, need these days die of malnutrition. There’s little doubt though that poverty can undermine our health and impoverish and shorten our lives. Affluence on the other hand, can enrich and lengthen them.

This has been demonstrated by a government study called Health Profiles that provided a study of the quality of life of residents in Colchester and in the Tendring District. Colchester’s St. Andrew’s, St.Anne’s and New Town wards include some of the poorest people in the UK. As a result life expectancy in Colchester generally is 73 years for men and 81 for women. Move a few miles out though to rather-more-affluent Lexden, Wivenhoe, Dedham and Langham and men can expect to live to 80 and women to 84.

Similar results were shown in the Tendring District. In Jaywick and in Clacton’s Pier Ward male life expectancy is below 74 years compared with 81 years in posh Frinton-on-Sea.

Other visible results of the effects of deprivation on our lives are the fact that in both Tendring and Colchester there are more-than-average numbers of pregnant smokers, the number of cases of diabetes diagnosed is among the highest in England, ever more children are found to be obese when starting school, and educational achievement of Tendring pupils is among the lowest in the country.

I don’t live in one of Clacton’s more favoured areas. I once heard Dudley Road referred to by a Planning Official as ‘working class residential’, which I am happy enough to accept. Goodness knows my wife and I did have a struggle when, with two young children and a mortgage, we moved here fifty-four years ago! I don’t think that we ever considered ourselves to be ‘deprived’ though.

Our two sons both did very well at both primary and secondary school and our elder son progressed to Cambridge where he obtained a good degree. Both have professional qualifications and have held responsible and satisfying jobs throughout their working lives; hardly low achievers!

My wife had more than her share of ill-health, partly, I think, as a result of deprivation during World War II when she lived and worked in London through the Blitz. Nevertheless she lived till the age of 82 and, as regular blog readers will know, I am 89. I could perhaps hardly be described as ‘still going strong’ but I am quite definitely ‘still going’ and hope to keep going for a little while yet.

I am not the most observant of persons but my neighbours all appear to be pretty healthy and showing little sign of deprivation. It appears that our ‘working class residential’ road may offer as beneficial an environment as Colchester’s posh suburbs and Frinton’s tree-lined and leafy avenues.

Minimum Wage-Earners?

A couple of weeks ago I referred in this blog to the £91,000 a year that husband and wife team Neil Stock and his wife Sarah Candy were managing to earn from their spare-time voluntary work in Local Government and with the NHS. Ms Candy is a cabinet member of both the Essex County Council and the Tendring District Council, and Mr Stock is leader of Tendring District Council. Ms Candy is also a non-executive member of the Northe East Essex Primary Care Trust.

From their Great Bromley home, the husband and wife team also run a very successful mail order fashion and haberdashery enterprise.

Mr Stock, in explanation, told a Gazette reporter that he and his wife worked incredibly hard for long hours. The £91,000, he said, ‘might not equate to the minimum wage, the number of hours we put in’.

A blog reader, who is better at sums than I am, tells me that worrying about that possibility should not keep them awake at night. She has calculated that if both of them were on the minimum wage and worked a 20 hour day each, they would between them earn rather less than half that £91,000 in a year. They wouldn’t, of course have much time for socialising, running the business that is their ‘day job,’ or indeed for eating and sleeping, but they would make something in the region of £40,000.

The fact that Mr Stock could have imagined, even for a moment, that £91,000 might not equate to the minimum wage, demonstrates how very little well-heeled members of the District and County Councils understand about the problems of the low-paid electors whom they claim to represent.