Tendring Topics – on line
Into Public Ownership
A cheering piece of news that made the headlines at the end of last week was that Essex County Council is to take over the ownership and management of some of our county's branch post-offices that would otherwise have been doomed to closure.
This is obviously good news for the many people living in their neighbourhood, for whom a threatened vital service will be saved. It is, I believe, also good news for local democracy. As well as providing existing post office services, County Council run offices will provide local bases – easily accessible to the public – where the public will be able to make contact with a County Council that to many of us has seemed distant and impersonal.
Is a local authority capable of running efficiently a business such as a post office?
I began my local government career in Ipswich Corporation's Public Health department in 1937. Ipswich was then what is now called a 'Unitary Authority' – responsible for all local government services within the borough boundary. Then it was called a County Borough Council and, in addition to all the activities now undertaken by both County and District Councils, the Council ran its own gas, electricity, water, sewerage and sewage treatment services and its own municipal transport service. Its Public Health Department, in which I was a tiny and insignificant cog, ran the town's school medical and dental service, maternity and child welfare, midwifery and tuberculosis services.
Within the Public Health Department Building in Ipswich's Elm Street were housed the Sanitary Inspectors, Food Inspectors and Shops Inspector plus a TB Clinic, a Maternity and Child Welfare Clinic, and a School and Dental Clinic. Each of these three clinics had its own Assistant Medical Officer in charge. I remember that I found it amusing that the Maternity and Child Welfare Officer was a Dr Jolly, while the School Medical Officer was a Dr Gaye! In those days, of course, 'gay' and 'jolly' were more or less synonymous. The former word had none of its current meaning.
Presiding over all was the august figure of the Medical Officer of Health who had his own large office and secretary and his own bacteriological laboratory.
The Medical Officer of Health and the Public Health Department were also in charge of the town's Maternity Home, General Hospital and Isolation (infectious diseases) Hospital.
The Council's very considerable workforce was not, in those days, headed by a 'Chief Executive' together with 'Directors' of this, that or the other service. There was just the Town Clerk, the Medical Officer of Health, the Borough Surveyor, the Borough Treasurer, the Housing Manager, the Chief Education Officer and so on; not particularly honorific titles but, my word, they were men before whom lesser beings (and I was one of the least of the lesser!) quailed.
Did the Council run all those services efficiently and economically? Well, I was in my late teens, not the most civically conscious age group – but I certainly don't recall the constant complaints that we hear about public services today, and there was never any suggestion that they would be better run by a national organisation or by commercial firms.
The Council's hospitals didn't have the wonderful electronic equipment, the modern drugs and antibiotics that we have today. Patients with Scarlet fever, Diphtheria, Poliomyelitis and Puerperal Pyrexia (childbed fever) were admitted to our Isolation Hospital and occasionally died of those diseases – I never heard though of anyone contracting another infection while in hospital, and possibly dying of it. If someone had mentioned MRSA, I would have thought that it meant Member of the Royal Society of something or other!
At that time, incidentally, the County Borough of Ipswich had a population in the vicinity of 100,000 – some 50,000 fewer than that of the Tendring District today!
If today's senior local government officers are of the calibre of their predecessors in the 1930s (and with the salaries that some of them are getting they certainly ought to be!) they should manage to run a few post offices without too much trouble.
I'm not a bit surprised to hear on the tv news that many other authorities (including the Welsh Assembly!) are thinking of following Essex County Council's example and taking over their otherwise-doomed sub-post offices.
If local government's takeover of local post offices is a success, as I think and hope it will be, it may well teach political leaders valuable lessons. New-Labour enthusiasts are proud of having eliminated the notion, enshrined in 'Clause 4', that public ownership provides a solution to all human problems. They now need to appreciate that handing over every public service to private enterprise and market forces doesn't offer a universal panacea either
Old-Labour remnants should note that the creation of giant nationalised corporations – as in the late 1940s and early '50s - is neither the only, nor the best, means of taking essential services into public ownership and democratic control.
Could it be that our Conservative controlled County Council has suddenly 'seen the light' and been converted to the idea of public ownership of public services? Hardly, I fear. At the same time as they are planning to take over threatened post offices they are considering selling off to private enterprise their few remaining care homes and day centres for the elderly!
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Quakers – and Iraq
Thursday of next week, Thursday 20th March – appropriately, the eve of Good Friday, when Christians remember the cruel death of Jesus Christ upon the cross – is the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
British Quakers, in the light of their three hundred year old testimony against all war and violence, had been among the million plus people who had demonstrated in London during the previous month against a war that many of us believed would be illegal, immoral and unjustified. Heather and I were immensely proud of the fact that that our two sons, and their families, were there.
Five years have passed. Over a million people are dead and some four million have been rendered homeless. The war continues and violence has failed to bring peace.
Quakers will mark the anniversary with renewed determination to seek a peaceful end to the conflict. On 19th March, the day before the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Quakers will join the 'Christian Peace Witness for Iraq' in remembering the suffering of the Iraqi people, in praying for forgiveness and healing, and in committing themselves to action for peace and justice for the people of Iraq and their neighbours.
Kat Barton of Quaker Peace and Social Witness says, 'Our Peace Testimony underpins all our work. It leads Quakers to work together at local, national and international level to transform the structures and cultures that lead to violence. In regions of conflict such as, for instance, Northern Uganda, we work to reintegrate child soldiers back into their communities. In this country we campaign nationally for disarmament and we work locally to stop violence in our schools'.
I have no doubt at all that Clacton Quakers and indeed, Quakers in local Meetings throughout the United Kingdom, will endorse the words and actions of their National Peace and Social Witness Committee.
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The Budget
The Budget? Well, there isn't really much to be said, is there?
I'm not so churlish as not to be grateful for an extra £100 heating allowance next winter – if I live that long! I'm glad too, to see that fuel-guzzling cars are to be penalised. I doubt very much if the increased taxes on alcohol will do a great deal to curb binge drinking.
I would like to see a budget that reduces the ever-widening gap between the incomes of the very rich and the poor. I shall be surprised if fiddling with family tax credits and child allowances does the trick. What is needed is for New-Labour to rescind, or forget, that promise never to restructure the income tax system.
We need a properly graduated income tax system; one that ensures that the wealthy pay a proportion of their income in direct taxation that brings them into something approaching parity with the proportion of theirs that lower income earners find themselves paying in indirect taxes. Taxes such as VAT and petrol, alcohol and tobacco duties are paid equally by rich and poor alike – but they take a far larger bite out of small incomes.
Yes, I do pay income tax – and I don't enjoy paying it. I do realize though that it is the only form of taxation that takes into account ability to pay – and that I'm very fortunate to have an income high enough to be liable for tax. Thousands haven't!
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Dream Scheme for Clacton – or Nightmare?
I can't pretend that I'm deeply impressed with the scheme for the regeneration of Clacton envisaged by BDP Architects for the Interaction Partnership, and described in a Clacton Gazette headline as 'Dream scheme for town'.
The proposals for the pier particularly interest me. The artist's impression shows a museum, a restaurant/café, an 'ecological ride' and an aquarium, at the landward end. A covered walkway leads to the pier head where there will be cafes and a viewing platform (with 'a small display wind turbine') from which it will be possible to view 'the London array (341 turbines 12 miles off the Clacton coast)'.
Well, I can imagine that a sedate old gentleman (like me perhaps?) might enjoy a peaceful and instructive afternoon on the pier as envisaged by the scheme.
Somehow though I can't quite see it attracting the festive holiday-making crowds who visit the present facilities. These are described – a little disparagingly I thought – as 'a pub, amusement arcades and a small fun fair'.
The viewing platform? I, like most people, know perfectly well what a wind turbine looks like so I wouldn't really need that 'small display wind turbine'. Readers of this blog will know that I am already a wind turbine enthusiast. I don't see them as eyesores and I am quite pleased to think that we are destined to have many more of them, both onshore and offshore. However, I can't imagine that the prospect of viewing them en masse is ever likely to become a great tourist attraction.
Possibly the other ideas, for the railway station, the town centre and the sea front deserve closer scrutiny. One thing though that I am quite sure Clacton doesn't need is 'an American-style seafront shopping mall' along the promenade!
Bognor, so we are told, had the benefit of a similar regeneration scheme eight years ago. I have been tempted – but, with great strength of mind, have resisted the temptation – to quote what are said to have been the late King George V's alliterative last words!
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