Week 31.08

                           Tendring Topics………on Line

 

Pensioners' Bus Passes

 

            I am glad that Tendring Council has decided to bring forward the period during which pensioners' free bus passes are valid, from 9.30 a.m. to 9.00 a.m.   I don't think that it will make as much difference to the buses as some people seem to imagine.  For those of us who have an early appointment at a doctor's surgery or a hospital outpatients' department, or who need to catch a connection to some destination out of our area, that extra half hour will be all-important.

 

            That certainly won't apply to many pensioners at any one time though.  Most, especially those who are on holiday in our area, will be quite content with a later start except on rare occasions. Will the bus service then be overwhelmed?  The prospect of hordes of elderly strangers from London, Birmingham, Manchester and goodness knows what other part of the UK, cramming our buses and forcing us natives to walk or wait for the next bus, is one that haunts the dreams of some correspondents to the local press.

 

            If it does happen then it is really up to the bus companies to put on more buses.  They are, I am quite sure, adequately compensated by central and local government for dealing with the added use that the free passes bring.  Those free passes make it possible for them to continue to send buses along routes that would otherwise be unprofitable. 

 

            It must be remembered too, that the flow of elderly people using buses in areas other than their own isn't entirely one-way.  I have held a bus pass for two years and had never used it.  My mobility scooter is sufficient for strictly local journeys and if the weather or other circumstances prevents its use I have always been able to depend on a relative or friend with a car, a local taxi service, or, for longer journeys, the railway.

 

            This year, the third year, I had intended to cancel my bus pass until I learned that the new passes could be used on regular bus services anywhere in England.   I decided that I would stick to mine.  It might prove to be useful!

 

            And so it did!  Last weekend  (25^th to 28^th July) I spent with my son and his family.  They now live in a part of London very difficult to reach by 'the underground' (it involves three changes of train and long subterranean walks to find the right platform!) or a very expensive taxi ride.  It is however relatively easy by bus.

 

             It's not a journey that I would have dreamed of attempting on my own.  However my daughter-in-law is a very caring and efficient guide. Under her watchful eye I climbed on board and showed my Tendring bus pass to the driver.  He took just one glance and waved me on.  

 

            Until that moment I hadn't really been quite sure that it would work.  But it did!  I'd urge all people living in our area to apply for a bus pass if they're entitled to one.  Like me, they may never use it on home territory but they may be very glad of it when they take a holiday break elsewhere!

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                        Holidays – and the 'Credit Crunch'

 

            The weather over the Easter and Late Spring Bank Holidays effectively dampened (quite literally!) hopes of a profitable summer season for the resorts on our Essex Holiday Coast.   I could well imagine folk who had snatched a short break at the end of May in Clacton, Frinton, Dovercourt or Brightlingsea and had been welcomed by biting wind and driving rain, thinking again about a longer holiday here later in the year.

 

            Has the credit crunch, the steady rise in air fares and rising prices on the Continent halted, or even reversed, the trend?   It seems that it may have done so.  Just a week or so ago local holiday camps, hotels and boarding houses were reporting an increase in bookings.  Clacton thronged with visitors during the first weekend of the school holidays (which also just happened to be the first weekend of really warm and sunny weather!) and our roads, and the access roads to the town, were certainly jammed with their cars.

 

            We also hear that budget airlines, which depend for their success on a huge holiday exodus to 'somewhere where the sun always shines', are experiencing financial difficulties.  On the other hand BBC tv researchers found a substantial number of couples and families who, so it seemed, would rather starve than forego that sun-baked, alcohol-fuelled fortnight on the Costa del Sol or wherever.

 

            Our political leaders are certainly setting a good example with the Prime Minister holidaying in Southwold and the leader of the opposition in the west-country.  That really is better than taking over the second (or possibly the third) home of a friendly foreign billionaire.   Mind you, they'd both have done better to come to our holiday coast.  We could promise better weather than either Southwold or 'all points west'.  For several years my wife and I holidayed with our motor caravan in Devon.  Yes, it was lovely and we thoroughly enjoyed the change.  However an East Anglian 'expatriate' then running a service station near Newton Abbot assured me, as I filled up in the pouring rain; 'Come to sunny Devon……It rains six days out of seven!'

 

            One thing that has surprised me has been to hear tv commentators speaking of the increase in families taking camping holidays as though this involved real deprivation and was the last resort of the poverty-stricken.  My wife and I, with our two sons while they were children, took touring camping holidays, at first under canvas but latterly with a motor-caravan, from the late 1950s to the 1990s.  We camped from Lands End to John o' Groats in Great Britain.  On the Continent we pitched our tents, or parked our van, in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and the former Yugoslavia.  Camping made it possible to get off the tourist trail and visit areas where foreign visitors were rarities.

 

            I suppose that at first we did choose camping because it was all that we could afford. It wasn't long though before we knew that we would never want any other kind of holiday.  I can do it no longer but I'm glad that others 'carry on camping!'

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'Everybody out!'

 

            When I retired from Tendring Council's service in 1980, one of the parting gifts that my colleagues gave me was life membership of what was then NALGO (the National and Local Government Officers' Association).  NALGO was subsequently absorbed into UNISON and today I still carry a UNISON membership card in my wallet.

 

            I therefore take a mild fraternal interest in UNISON's activities, especially when they relate to the staff of local authorities.  I couldn't for instance do other than sympathise with the objectives of the recent 48 hour strike of some local government workers.  A pay rise of below the rate of inflation is, in effect, a pay cut.  As we all know, price inflation continues to go up, up and up.

 

            On the other hand I thoroughly dislike the inconvenience and hardship that strikes almost always inflict on innocent members of the public.

 

            I thought that Tendring UNISON members showed a great deal of the true spirit of public service by making their protest in a way that caused minimal, if any, inconvenience to the public.   They displayed their solidarity with UNISON's cause by picketing Council offices – but they did so in the lunch hour when they wouldn't have been on duty anyway.   They also, of course, avoided losing two days pay which, since many of them are on or only just above, the minimum pay rate, they could ill afford.  I wish that I thought that such moderate and considerate protests were as likely to achieve results as full blooded 'Everybody out!' strikes.

 

            Public servants can, as the government points out, only be paid more, by cutting services already cut to the bone, or by increasing taxation.  And the tax-paying public feels that it has paid enough.

 

            I think that members of the public would pay their taxes and public servants would accept below-inflation pay rises more willingly, if they could feel that Britain's financial burden was being borne equally by all Britain's residents.   I have pointed out before in this blog that it is those on the lowest incomes who have to pay the greater proportion of those incomes in taxation and in the purchase of essential commodities like gas, electricity and water.  Our whole economy and taxation system is geared towards making the rich even richer and the poor even poorer.

 

            Low paid public servants endure pay cuts while heads of public corporations walk away from their failures with 'golden handshakes' of hundreds of thousands of pounds.   The really super-rich, be they native born or foreign émigrés, are asked for a much smaller proportion of their incomes in taxation than the rest of us – and they can and do employ the very best lawyers and accountants to make that little even less!

 

            I don't suggest that they should be reduced to penury but there must surely be some way of making them feel just a little, if not of the pain, at least of the discomfort of the rest of us; perhaps to the extent of being compelled to sell just one of their overseas residences, downsize to a slightly smaller yacht, or to be content with he ownership of a First Division, rather than a Premier League Football Team!

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Week 30.08

                          Tendring Topics……..on Line

 

Great Clacton Reacts!

 

            A week or so ago I remarked in this blog that although I had learned that Holland-on-Sea residents were protesting strongly about Realize Health Ltd's plans for future general practitioner health care in Holland-on-Sea and Great Clacton, I hadn't yet heard how people in Great Clacton regarded them.  I suspected that it would be without great enthusiasm!

 

            In Great Clacton the commercial company now responsible for 'delivering health care in the Colchester and Tendring areas' is proposing to close down existing surgeries in North Road and Epping Close and replace them with a single medical centre in Kennedy Road. This was the site that had been proposed for the discredited and now-abandoned idea of a super-clinic serving both Holland-on-Sea and Great Clacton.  On a street map the site is revealed as being in the bottom right hand corner of the very large area served by the present surgeries.  What the street map doesn't, of course, show is that it is also at the top of a hill, that there is no bus service along the nearby main road, and that there isn't a single dwelling within easy walking distance.

 

            The reaction in Great Clacton is, as I had expected, outrage!  The protest is headed by Pete Halliday, who represents St John's ward on the Tendring District Council.  He hopes to collect 1,200 signatures on a petition to keep Epping Close surgery open. This will be presented to the North East Essex Primary Care Trust, who are partners in Realize Health Ltd but whose main function seems to be to act as a 'shock absorber' between their commercial partners (masters?) and the public.

 

            Councillor Halliday says that he has been a patient of the Epping Close surgery since 1983, adding: 'I have always received top-notch care.  The whole staffing team appreciate the importance of seeing the patient in good time, seeing your own doctor and at a time to suit you as well as the doctor'.

 

            Consultation on Realize Health's proposals will continue until the end of August. Mr Halliday urges Great Clactonians to visit the PCT's website www.northeastessexpct.nhs.uk to protest, or to write to Tonia Parsons, North East Essex PCT, Freepost, NAT21857, Clacton, CO15 4BR

 

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Protests from Left, Right (and probably Centre)

 

            The idea of private firms providing (or delivering, as they seem to prefer) public services appears to be losing some of its appeal among members of the public and their elected representatives, if not to the Government.   When I learned that the Council had set up a limited company, Tendring Regeneration Ltd with capital of £1.26 million, to 'regenerate' our district I had serious doubts about the whole idea, and expressed them on this blog.

 

            Why on earth should they establish a private company to undertake a job that they should clearly do themselves? I find the explanation that a private company has access to grants not available to public authorities, unconvincing.   What grants and who provides them?  If it were really a good idea then why not abolish the whole Tendring Council and replace it with Tendring Local Services Ltd. That would have the advantage of not having to allow the press and public access to the meetings at which decisions are made!   What's more, these wonderful grants available only to private firms could help reduce the Council Tax.

 

            My doubts redoubled when I learned that the whole of that £1.26 million was to be spent on salaries of the supermen and superwomen who were to be appointed to access these grants and get on with the task of regeneration.  It wasn't only I who had doubts.  Neil Stock, leader of Tendring Council's opposition Conservative group, and Councillor Steven Henderson have both resigned in protest from Tendring Regeneration Ltd's Board of Directors.  Mr Henderson is Community Representative Party's representative on the Council but I don't think that I am being unfair to either of these gentlemen if I describe them as being from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

 

            Needless to say Tendring Regeneration Ltd. is carrying on regardless.   Their web site www.in-tend.org  suggests that recruitment is well under way for most of the jobs that are going  absorb those £1.26 million pounds.  Just one post currently remains vacant; that of external funding officer on a salary of £33,000 a year.  This is presumably the officer who will have the job of accessing those marvellous grants!   I wish him (or her) luck ……and think that it will be needed!

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'Satan will find Mischief still…..'

 

            I was shocked (and these days it takes quite a lot to shock me) to hear on a tv news bulletin that in this country something like 18 percent (almost one in five) of young people aged sixteen or seventeen are no longer in education but are neither in training nor employment.

 

            Add to them the number of children aged from thirteen to sixteen who are at school, but have given up bothering with homework and have no other positive interests to pursue once they are through the school gate.  Too many of these will also have no welcoming parent awaiting them when they get home.

 

            Is it really surprising that we top the European league in teenage pregnancies, hooliganism, juvenile delinquency and vandalism?

 

            My mother used to say:

                                           Satan will

Find mischief still,

For idle hands to do!

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A Tale of Two Hospitals

 

            We hear lots of reports, some good some bad, about NHS Hospitals.  I was a briefly a patient at two, very different, Essex hospitals last week.  This was my experience.

 

            Broomfield Hospital Chelmsford

           

My experience didn't start very auspiciously.  I had an appointment with the 'plastic surgeon' at Broomfield at 3.50 p.m. on Monday about a small sore on my left ear that obstinately refused to heal.  During the previous week I had spent a frustrating hour or so on the phone arranging my transport to and from the hospital from Clacton.  I won in the end but it left me wondering if some of the moans I had heard about bureaucracy in the NHS might be justified. 

 

On the Sunday afternoon I had a phone call from the volunteer driver.  He was picking me up the next day but he had to pick up another Clacton patient at 11.00 a.m. Would I mind travelling then? He would do his best to bring my appointment forward.  I agreed, but without enthusiasm.  I certainly wasn't looking forward to the possibility of hanging around in a hospital waiting room from about 12.30 till nearly 4 oclock!

 

Broomfield was, I discovered, a modern hospital with 'all mod.cons'.  There was a spacious waiting room with very comfortable chairs and a snack bar.  I 'clocked in', my driver fulfilling his promise to urge that my appointment should be brought forward.  The receptionist was non-committal.

 

It was by then, as I had anticipated, just after 12.30.  I cast my former-public- health-inspector's eye over my surroundings and was pleased to note that the floor of the waiting area and the whole of the snack bar and the toilet were immaculately clean.   A somewhat severe looking member of the nursing staff was conducting an inspection, rubbing her gloved finger over horizontal surfaces and finding them dust-free.  I had a coffee and a cheese sandwich at the snack-bar and settled down with a book to wait for anything up to nearly three hours.

 

To my astonishment barely twenty minutes elapsed before my name was called out and I was summoned to the consulting room of the plastic surgeon.  He proved to be a genial gentleman who took a look at my ear through some kind of a magnifier before telling me that I had a relatively harmless form of skin cancer.  He would cut it out and put in a graft.  It would be a simple operation, performed on me as an out-patient at Colchester General Hospital under a local anaesthetic.  I would be discharged home on the same day.

 

Back in the waiting room it was less than half an hour before my driver came looking for me.  I was back home in Clacton before 3.50, the time of my original appointment!  As far as I was concerned it was 'full marks for Broomfield'!

 

 

Essex County Hospital, Colchester

 

I didn't rely on hospital transport to get me to Essex County Hospital at 9.00 a.m. on Friday morning for the removal of my cataract on my right eye. This time I hired a taxi to take me there and back, thus saving my time and saving the NHS a pound or two. The fare of £20 each way was within my means.

 

Externally the Essex County Hospital could hardly be more different from the Broomfield.   It is an old, somewhat forbidding Victorian building; the kind that 'modernisers' delight in tearing down and replacing with shining modern structures – that probably won't last half as long!

 

Inside, I suppose that the ophthalmic surgery waiting room wasn't quite so roomy, light and airy as the waiting room at Broomfield.  Nor were the chairs quite so comfortable.  The nursing staff were every bit as friendly, attentive and professional though and the attention to hygiene even more apparent.  We all had to give our hands an alcohol rub before we were allowed into the waiting room.   In preparation for a cataract operation each patient had to have three separate lots of eye drops at intervals of, I think, something like half an hour.  I noticed that after administering drops to each patient the nurse would go across to the hand wash basin and wash her hands thoroughly before coming to give drops to the next one.

 

Eventually, I suppose it could have been after nearly two hours, the anaesthetist sat me in a special chair that could be converted into an operating table and wheeled me into the anteroom of the operating theatre.  Here he completed the sterilising and anaesthetising process, rubbing a sterilising spirit into the whole of the right side of my face, warning me on no account to touch my face with my hands once that was done, giving me yet more eye drops and finally an injection near to my eye.

 

If any reader of this blog is awaiting a cataract operation they may be assured that when they are being wheeled into the actual operating theatre, the worst is almost certainly already over.  A nurse held my hand throughout the operation.  If I had needed to cough or to ease a cramped limb I had to give her hand a squeeze.  The operation would then stop till the cough or limb movement was over. I was aware that someone was working on my face but I felt neither pain nor discomfort.  How long does it take?  I imagine that it varies but I glanced at my watch as I was wheeled into the operating theatre and again as I was wheeled out.  Exactly twenty minutes had elapsed.

 

That was it.  My eye had a pad that I was glad to be able to remove the next morning.  I was given instructions about inserting eye drops myself, seeing my optician about new glasses, and seeing the surgeon again in about six weeks time.

 

I think that Essex County Hospital deserve full marks too. As a private patient in 2006 I hadn't had to wait quite so long for surgery on my other eye and the waiting room had been a bit more comfortable.  But those were the only differences. 

 

Oh yes – and I now have a date and place for the surgery on my ear; Colchester General Hospital on 7^th August.  Full marks for the NHS as well!

 

Week 29.08

                        Tendring Topics………….on line

 

Feeding the Hungry – with words!

 

            The top politicians of the world's wealthiest countries recently met in a blaze of publicity, to discuss the most serious threats facing mankind today.  There was the growing problem of world hunger, the ever-accelerating pace of climate change, the threat of world economic recession, Iran's nuclear ambitions (which may or may not include the development of nuclear weapons) and the situation in Zimbabwe.

 

            Iran's intentions and the state of Zimbabwe are undoubtedly important issues on which the future peace of the world may depend.  I reckon though that they are the ones that cause least concern to the hungry, the poverty stricken and the HIV positive of the world, or to those increasingly threatened by drought, forest fires, hurricanes, typhoons and floods resulting from climate change.

 

            It was however, perhaps as one might have expected, on the issues of sanctions against Iran and Zimbabwe issues that the greatest measure of agreement was reached.  How much of that agreement will be honoured by each individual country and how much, if at all, the sanctions will change the policies of those two 'rogue states', remains to be seen.

 

            As far as world hunger is concerned our own Prime Minister urged us all to waste less food; a timely injunction but with its impact just a little dented by the lavish banquet that the world's leaders enjoyed together when they had finished their sermonising.  Oh yes – and they all renewed the promises of financial aid to the poorest nations that they had made a few years ago.  Some of them didn't honour their promises then, so why should anyone imagine that they will do so now?

 

            It was on their unanimity on tackling climate change that the top politicians seem to imagine they most deserved congratulation.  They promised unanimously to reduce greenhouse gas emission by 50 percent in the next twenty years. On the insistence of the USA no attempt whatsoever was made to declare interim targets. Twenty years time!  How fortunate that that is several General Elections, and Presidential Elections away!  Few, if any, of those who signed the agreement will still be running the world's affairs in 2,028. It will be for their successors to explain how it was that the targets hadn't been met and that in any case they had been inadequate to deal with the enormity of the problem.

 

            I shan't, nor would I wish to be around to say 'I told you so'.

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                                  Go-ahead Frinton-on-Sea

 

            Let no-one say that Frinton-on-Sea doesn't keep up with the times!

 

            Their very genteel Golf Club for instance, once had a dress code that insisted that all male players should wear collars and ties on the green.  That rule has long been relaxed and, for some time now not an eyebrow has been raised at players wearing shorts – knee-length of course; one must preserve the decencies!

           

        However, until the 11^th July this year, one rule that was strictly enforced was that those wearing shorts must also wear long, knee-length socks.  This applied even to the members of visiting clubs and it is said that one such team had to purchase suitable socks at the golf club before being permitted to play.

 

            Now though, on what I think is likely to be known as 'Black Friday' in the annals of the club, all that was changed. The ruling committee decided that short socks will permitted but, presumably as a sop to the traditionalists, they must be white and ankles must still be decently covered.

 

            Where will it all end one wonders? Bare, unwashed feet in battered sandals? grubby T-shirts with rude messages printed on them? Baseball caps worn back to front?  The floodgates are open!

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Knife Crime

 

            Were there four, five, six or seven fatalities from knife crime in just one day a week or so ago?   All four figures were proclaimed in newspaper headlines or tv news bulletins.  Even just one would have been one too many.

 

            Politicians and newspaper pundits are keen to put forward their own remedies for the situation.  An automatic five years in gaol for anyone carrying a knife; shock knife carriers by taking them to see victims of knife crime in their hospital beds (I wonder what the victims think of that idea?), punish the parents, give schools further rights to search their pupils.  I warmed to the suggestion from a voluntary social worker that the remedy was not to be found in the perpetrators' schools but in their homes.

 

            Some politicians and tabloid leader writers are convinced that most of the troubles of our society today have their origin in the 'swinging 60s' when a very vocal minority rebelled against convention and established authority. I feel that the spirit of the avaricious eighties was even more to blame.  That was the decade in which we were urged to abandon our faith, whether it was one that was expressed in attendance on Sundays in Church, Chapel or Meeting House or a secular faith in the eventual achievement by political means of a material earthly paradise in which there would be universal brotherhood with no poverty and no class distinction, and in which peace would reign for ever and ever.

 

            Over a century earlier Edward Fitzgerald had expressed that idea eloquently in his translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam:

 

                  Alike for those who for 'the day' prepare

And those who unto a 'tomorrow' stare,

The Muezzin from the tower of darkness cries,

'Fools, your reward is neither here nor there!

 

            The zeitgeist, the spirit of the '80s, assured us that hoping for a heaven beyond the grave and working towards the idea of an earthly paradise were equally fruitless exercises.

  Darwin, and common sense, assured us that life was a struggle in which the strong survived and the weak went under.  There was no such thing as 'Society'.  It was up to all of us to stand on our own feet and seize for ourselves and our families our share of the world's wealth.  There was no purpose in life beyond the gratification of the senses, personal survival, the survival of the species, and the creation of the wealth that ensured that survival. 

 

We were by then sufficiently remote from the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps to have forgotten that fundamentalist Darwinism of this kind had been the justification for their existence.  It was the manifest destiny of the world's 'superior races' to subjugate and eventually exterminate 'inferior' ones.  The policies of the Nazis were, so many of them genuinely believed, helping along the inexorable progress of evolution.

 

 We, in the '80s and '90s did our best to make the most of the materialist environment (sometimes referred to admiringly as 'the real world') in which we were assured we were living.  Whereas in the past just one partner in every marriage had been the principal breadwinner and the other the home-maker, both were now encouraged to go out and work, to acquire that wealth that was our reason for existence.  Women were liberated from the drudgery of the kitchen and the wash-tub to enjoy the freedom of wage-slavery instead.

 

  The forces of nature dictated that women had to desist from gainful employment while actually having babies and for a month or two afterwards.  However, just as soon as was humanly possible, babies were passed on to the care of nurseries, kindergartens, and schools so that their mothers could return to their supermarket check-outs, their lathes and their word processors to get on with their real task of 'wealth creation'.

 

            When I returned home from school in the benighted '20s and '30s, my mother was always there to welcome me, to ask about my day at school, to give me my    meal, and encourage me to get on with my homework.  When Dad got home from work he always had at least a little time and energy for me.  My two sons had the same experience.  In the '50s and '60s many women carried on at work until their first baby was born, but then decided that homemaking and childrearing was a satisfying and full-time job.

 

            How many children these days come home to an empty house?  When Mum and Dad do get back from work they're too tired, too busy and too preoccupied with the events of the day to take any real interest in their children.  Occasionally they feel that they deserve a little relaxation and go out for the evening, leaving the children with the latch-key, a video and a games console.

 

            If children don't receive the interest, friendship and attention for which they crave at home, they'll go out for it and find it among their mates 'in a gang'. Eventually their gang will be threatened by another gang. Someone will suggest that it would be a good idea to carry knives 'for protection'.  Thus is knife crime born.

 

            Do I want to put the clock back?   Perhaps I do.  I have no doubt at all that children are best brought up in a stable home where a parent is always there to welcome them back from school or play.  In the past that parent was usually their Mum but I am not so sexist as to believe that men are incapable of fulfilling the role of home-maker and women that of bread-winner.

 

            I know, none better, that there are some circumstances in which that ideal situation just isn't possible. Few families are one-parent from choice. Those circumstances though, should be an exception, an exception that society should do its best to alleviate, rather than shrug its shoulders and 'pass by on the other side'.

 

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A Personal Footnote

 

            This blog will be posted a little earlier than usual this week.  Tomorrow (Friday) morning at about 8.00 a.m., when I would be normally posting it, I expect to be speeding on my way to the Essex County Hospital in Colchester to have a cataract operation performed on my right eye.  The left eye was similarly dealt with almost two years ago.

 

            I have already this week had some experience 'in the front line' of today's NHS in action when, last Monday, I went to see a consultant about quite a different matter at the Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford.  I hope to share with you my impressions of the two visits in my next blog.

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Week 28.08

                    Tendring Topics…………….on Line

 

Realize Health Ltd rides again!

 

            Do you remember Realize Health Ltd?   They are the commercial firm, in which the North-east Essex Primary Care Trust is a partner, (I am convinced a junior partner) that is now responsible for new hospital provision and the delivery and maintenance of health care within the Colchester and Tendring Districts.

 

            They, you may recall, are the firm that was responsible for the design and construction of the new Fryatt Memorial Hospital in Dovercourt, with its kitchen  unfit for its purpose and its floors buckling within two years of being laid!  They also had the brilliant idea of replacing existing doctors' surgeries in Holland-on-Sea and Great Clacton with a large 'super-clinic' in Kennedy Way half way between the two communities.  This would have been positioned at the summit of a slope, on a site equally inconvenient for the greater part of the residents of both Great Clacton and Holland, and near a main road along which there is currently no bus route!

 

            Belatedly Realize Health Ltd has come to appreciate, what everybody living locally knew from the very beginning; that the residents of Great Clacton and Holland-on-Sea were two quite separate communities separated from each other geographically, each of which needed at least one centrally situated medical centre or doctors' surgery (call it what you will!) to meet its needs.

 

            They have scrapped the idea of a super-clinic at Kennedy Way serving both Holland and Great Clacton and, as far as Holland-on-Sea is concerned, are now proposing to close the present unsatisfactory Frinton Road Medical Centre and replace it with a new one built on the present Brighton Road Car Park.   Local people are a good deal less than happy with the idea.  They point out that the present premises, however inadequate, are at least central to Holland-on-Sea and easily accessible by public transport. This is more than can be said for Brighton Road Car Park at the far end (on a street map, near the bottom right-hand corner) of the seaside town.  Probably that is why it is a car park that Tendring Council is happy to dispose of!

 

            At a public meeting held to discuss the options, residents said that the Ipswich Road Car Park, beside the main Frinton Road, was more central, more accessible and much to be preferred as a medical centre site.  This though, has been ruled out, because Realize Health Ltd has conducted research into the possibility and decided that 'it is too small for our needs'.  Their needs?   All Holland residents want is a good, roomy medical centre, possibly for several doctors; not a new hospital, or even a polyclinic! 

 

            There is a ray of hope.  Project manager Tonia Parsons told protestors that they would be happy to look at any evidence to support the view that Realize Health's judgement was wrong.  The consultation period ends on 31^st August so – keep the protest going!

 

            What of the residents of Great Clacton?  The site of their new medical centre to replace surgeries in North Road and Epping Close is still in Kennedy Road – once again, on a street map in the bottom right hand corner of a much larger area than that of Holland-on-Sea.  I haven't yet heard of local reaction there but I think it unlikely that it will be enthusiastic. Since public car parks seem to be popular as possible locations, I would suggest that either the St. John's Road Car Park (near Elm Grove) or the car park behind the arcade of shops in North Road, could prove much more suitable for a medical centre than Realize Health's proposed site in Kennedy Way.

 

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'Bobbies on the Beat!'

 

            It was good to learn that Essex's Chief Constable is proposing to put an extra five hundred police officers 'on the streets' of our county to deal with nuisances, criminality and disorder as well as an extra one hundred specialist officers to combat terrorism.

 

            This is in response to a continuing public demand for more 'bobbies on the beat'.   I have heard it suggested that regular patrolling is a waste of valuable resources because the chances of a police officer actually encountering an act of criminality while on the beat is negligible.  Exactly so, but while the sight of a policeman or woman may not deter an armed bank robber setting out on a nefarious enterprise, it will make a vandal, a drug dealer, a pick-pocket, an apparently threatening group of yobs, a mugger or a drunken hooligan think twice before breaking the law.  The value of on-the-beat police officers lies not in the number of arrests that they may make, but in their deterrent effect on the perpetrators of small crimes and nuisances.  It is regular encounter with minor acts of criminality of this kind that law-abiding members of the public find hard to endure.

 

            How are the extra police to be paid?  The Chief Constable expects to have to find an extra £27 million on top of the £300 million a year that the force already costs.  This, so it is claimed, will not be obtained by an increased police precept on the  council tax that we already pay to Tendring and other Essex councils , but by selling such services as IT and training, and sharing resources such as the police helicopter with other forces, and renting out police premises.  Let's hope that this will do the trick.

 

            Perhaps we shouldn't get too excited at the prospect of more police on our streets.  Five hundred seems an awful lot, and so it is.  Essex though, is a big county and I am sure that there are areas where they have a greater problem with criminality than we have in the county's north-eastern corner..

 

            However, it's nice to find a top official who doesn't just listen to complaints (saying complacently, 'They're a useful safety valve!')  but actually takes action to remove their cause.

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                                          MP's Pay 

            Most of us ordinary folk feel, I think, that our members of Parliament are pretty adequately paid.  Thousands of hard-working people doing important jobs would be pleased to get half as much.  We were quite pleased gherefore when we learned that MPs had voted themselves a modest 2.25 percent pay rise which, like the pay rises of many other public servants, is below the current level of inflation.  They also agreed that future rises should be linked to those of other well-paid public-sector workers.

 

            I am sorry though that at the same time, they voted to allow themselves up to £24,000 a year, 'for expenses' and decided that money so claimed should not be subject to external audit.

 

            I don't take quite as harsh a view as our MP Mr Douglas Carswell. He declined to vote on the issue, saying that, 'we need to have a system so that if MPs want to buy things they pay for them out of their salaries and stop buying them on these expenses at the cost of ratepayers'.  That's what the rest of us have to do, of course.  However I can see that most MPs need a 'second home' reasonably near Westminster as well as one in their constituencies.  Obtaining, furnishing and maintaining such a home obviously costs money and it does seem reasonable to me, if not to Mr Carswell, that MPs should have help with this.

 

            I do feel though that every penny of such 'expenses' should be declared, independently audited and made available to the press and public.  One argument put forward to oppose this is that it would reveal the addresses of MPs' second homes, which would present a security risk.  I don't think that any determined criminal or terrorist who wanted to find the address of an MP's second home would have difficulty in doing so now.  Why not follow them to their destination when they leave the House?  Private investigators do that kind of thing all the time.  So, no doubt, could criminals.  In any case it would surely be possible to publish all the expenses without revealing the addresses to which they refer.

 

            Mr Bernard Jenkin another Conservative MP, whose constituency takes in part of the Tendring District, appears to take a different view from his colleague.  He voted for the recommendation of the independent commission on MPs' pay, for a larger increase of 4.55 percent this year.  He is reported as saying, 'If an independent body believes that there should be an increase I think it is bad for the quality of future parliamentarians if you don't have the courage to pay what is recommended'.

 

             Public service workers will hope that he will take a similar strong line if independent enquiries into their pay result in similar above-inflation recommendations!

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                             SATS examinations

 

    There has been something of a furore about this year's SATS examinations; not about the exams themselves but about the marking of the exam papers.  Some, having been collected, have simply not been returned.  Others, particularly it seems in the Eastern Region, have come back exactly as they were sent out - unread and unmarked.

 

    I had, in my innocence, imagined that these exams were marked by newly retired school teachers or, in their spare time, by working teachers or university lecturers as a useful additional source of income.  The examiners, I felt sure, would have had their qualifications and references thoroughly checked before being employed by the Department of Education for that purpose.

 

    I should have known better.  New Labour has privatised examination marking, no doubt in order to bring  'some of the energy and efficiency of private enterprise into our education system'.  The present 'marking contractors' are ETS Europe, the European arm of ETS Global BV, an international corporation based in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, providing  a worldwide network of educational services, with clients in 180 countries.

 

    I suppose that I am simply being xenophobic in feeling a little unease at the thought that a foreign based firm is quite so deeply involved with the education of British children.   If only that base had been in Brussels instead of Princeton I am sure that UKIP and much of the tabloid press would have beeen sharing my unease!

 

    I suppose, mind you that in true colonial style, the top executives of ETS are content to leave the somewhat tedious business of reading and marking examination papers to native labour.  They will be concentrating on administration, supervision (but they have slipped up a little on that this year!) and, of course, banking the proceeds.

 

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