Week27.08

                    Tendring Topics……………….on line

 

Health and Safety

 

            I'm glad to be able to record that the well-publicised swim across the Colne of those two intrepid ladies from Rowhedge that I mentioned last week, went ahead very successfully.  The two swimming grandmothers were, in fact, joined in the water by some fifty other protestors, and on the riverbank by the press, tv and a great many sympathetic onlookers. They certainly achieved their aim of publicising the possible closure of their doctor's dispensary for the absurd reason that there was likely to be a pharmacy within 1.6 km of it; but it would be in Wivenhoe on the further side of the river and with no crossing for three miles!  The protest was featured in the local and regional press and on television and radio.

 

            Nor, I understand, were any of the swimmers harmed or even inconvenienced by all the dire perils threatened by the Environment Agency; contaminated water, treacherous currents, underwater hazards and freezing temperatures.  I note from a press photo that there were a couple of small boats on the river with them but their rescue services were not required.

 

            I sometimes think that these days, we take health and safety precautions, and the responsibility of public authorities to ward off any possible peril that might befall us, to ridiculous lengths.

 

            Whenever there is a spell of warm weather we can expect to hear official warnings of the dangers of swimming in rivers, reservoirs and lakes – anywhere, in fact, other than in a properly constructed and thoroughly chlorinated public swimming pool with life savers instantly to hand. 

 

In my childhood and adolescence we didn't do idiotic things like leaping fully-clothed off Clacton or any other pier ('tombstoning' do they call it?) but, in hot weather, we young Ipswichians certainly did make our way along the towpath of the River Gipping for a refreshing swim at one or other of half a dozen or so suitable spots.  When, in teenage, I became an angler, I would in the summer take swimming trunks with me on fishing expeditions.  Then, if the fish weren't biting, or if an over-enthusiastic cast resulted in my tackle being tangled in undergrowth on the further bank, I would slip them on and take to the water

 

Bathing in the river was free and, in those days, our parents had quite literally to watch every penny.  Anyway, swimming in the river; plunging into the 'pound' between the lock gates or racing ones mates across a wide stretch of river was much more fun!   Yes, I suppose that we could have been drowned but I can't actually recall any fatal accidents.

 

A local incident has recently highlighted the health and safety issue.  In Walton a visiting family parked their car on the Naze car park and, as they were all getting out of it, their two-year-old daughter, apparently unnoticed, made off on her own.  A moment or two later she was spotted heading straight for the Naze cliffs!  The family couldn't get to her in time but, luckily, another visitor realized that she was running into danger, caught her and returned her to her parents.

 

Now I can imagine the parents being pretty cross with their runaway daughter and I can imagine them blaming themselves for their momentary inattention.  Perhaps they did both those things.  All that we know though is that they instantly blamed the Council.  What they wanted to know was, why weren't those 'sheer cliffs' fenced off?

 

Fence off the Naze cliffs?  I hope that that family never decides to take a picnic at Beachy Head.  Somehow England's white cliffs of Dover wouldn't look quite the same with a child-proof fence running along the top.  And how about fencing off the sea?  If a runaway child escaped drowning there would always be the risk of her getting wet and contracting pneumonia.  The Council's fault?

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'So much to do!'

 

            How ironic that during the same week that Tendring Council's Planning Committee yielded to vociferous local protest and refused permission for five wind turbines to be erected at Earls's Court Farm, St. Osyth, nearly a mile a away from the nearest home, the government announced its intention of encouraging the provision, not of several hundred but of several thousand wind turbines, on shore and off shore, all over the United Kingdom.

 

            Bernard Shaw remarked in the preface to one of his plays that our faith does not consist of the things in which we think we believe but of the assumptions on which we habitually act.  The government claims to believe that global warming is the biggest problem facing mankind today – and I have no doubt they are right in this claim.  This means, of course, that they believe it is far more important than the war against terrorism.  It is, of course.  Drought, flood, hurricanes and typhoons, a few of the results of global warming, have already claimed more human lives and destroyed more human homes than even the most ambitious terrorist could hope to achieve in a lifetime.

 

            Despite its somewhat belated enthusiasm for wind turbines, is the developing disaster of global warming really 'an assumption on which the government habitually acts'?  I don't really think so.  If it were there would surely be more and bigger subsidies for urgent research into renewable sources of energy other than wind power. Solar power, wave power and never failing tidal power remain to be fully researched and exploited.  All of them have an important part to play in this war against global warming; a war in which even the most peace-loving of us can volunteer with enthusiasm.

           

The government could make rail travel more attractive – not just negatively by penalising motorists but by giving the rail companies large subsidies, ring-fenced so as to reduce passenger fares without enriching share holders.  Make it cheaper for a family to travel on holiday by rail than in a car or by plane, and cheaper for business men and women to get to their destinations by rail?  Most people would like to go on their holidays and return from them on a Saturday.  Bully or cajole Railtrack (or whatever its current name is!) into speeding up their everlasting 'engineering work' so that weekend rail travel is as easy and reliable as once it was.

 

             When the President of the USA recently visited the UK, advantage could have been taken of our 'special relationship' by publicly urging him to take urgent action to reduce American discharge of greenhouse gases, rather than by announcing the despatch of yet more British troops to the killing grounds of Afghanistan and our intention to stay, unloved and unwanted, in Iraq, 'for as long as it takes' – whatever 'it' may be?

 

            'So much to do! So little done!' are said to have been the dying words of the Victorian Empire builder Cecil Rhodes.  Let us hope that they don't prove to be an epitaph for western civilisation as it is overtaken by ever-accelerating global warming!

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                      The Case of the Stolen Laptop

 

            I was one of the 'thousands' who received an apologetic letter from Colchester General Hospital about the laptop stolen in Scotland (what on earth was it doing there, I wonder?) that may have contained details of my medical history.  Unlike those interviewed on radio and tv or who have penned furious letters to the local press, I'm really not bothered who reads my medical history.  It's hardly likely to feature in the 'best seller' lists!

 

            What's more, I think it highly probable that the thief had no interest whatsoever in the laptop's contents.  He is much more likely to have wiped it clean of its contents (if he knows how to do that!) and sold it to someone in a local pub as 'nearly new'.

 

            My only, very minor, concern is that it could possibly have held the only record of my medical history.  It just so happens that this month I have to see no less than two hospital consultants – one at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford and one at the Essex County Hospital in Colchester.  It isn't very likely that either of them will need to know more about my past medical history but if they do, I wouldn't be too happy to think that the only record of it had probably been sold for the price of a couple of bottles of scotch in a Glasgow bar!

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The Case of the MP's Rubbish!

 

            'MP is cleared of fly-tipping………Tory proved he was in Commons', announced a headline in the East Anglian Daily Times on Tuesday of this week (1^st July).  Needless to say there was a bit more (or perhaps a bit less) to it than that.

 

            A few weeks ago two black bin bags were found dumped outside a scout hut near our local MP's (Mr Douglas Carswell's) home.   Inside were found items including a wedding list and a letter from a constituent that linked them to Mr and Mrs Carswell.  In their determination to clamp down hard on fly tipping the Council sent them both £75 fixed penalty notices, just as they would have sent them to the Chairman of the Council, the Lord Lieutenant of the County, or me, had they found evidence that on the face of it suggested that we had dumped rubbish illegally.

 

            Mr Carswell claims that Hansard proves that he was in the House of Commons at the time the rubbish was dumped.  Perhaps he was – I am surprised that the Council, or anyone else except the dumper, knows exactly when that happened.  Anyway the Council has now decided not to proceed with the otherwise automatic next step when a fixed penalty fine is not paid; testing Mr and Mrs Carswell's guilt or innocence in the courts.

 

            Hence the EADT headline.  It must be said that not everyone agrees with the Council's latest decision.  Councillor Michael Talbot, the Council's Portfolio Holder for the Environment is reported as saying, 'I suspect that the Council has decided that the safest thing was to say that we would not proceed.  I can't pretend that I am happy about this'.

 

            I have to say that I can't really imagine either Mr or Mrs Carswell sneaking out with bags full of rubbish and dumping them near the scout hut.  However, much of the material clearly emanated from the Carswell home.  Either that home was burgled and the material taken and then dumped, or it reached its resting place via a member or employee of the household.  That surely deserves further investigation.

 

            Mr Carswell claims that he was 'stitched up' by the Council and says, in support of this theory, that he was told about the fixed penalty notice by a journalist before he was notified by the Council.  There is, I am quite sure, an innocent explanation of this.  Council decisions are taken in public and are communicated to the press, probably by email, directly they are made.  The fixed penalty notices would have been sent to Mr and Mrs Carswell's address by 'snail mail' and would have arrived two or three days later.   Also, as Mr Carswell has reminded us, he is in Westminster and not at home for much of the time.

 

            I am quite sure that the fixed penalty notices were not a 'stitch up' and had nothing to do with the fact that Mr Carswell is our MP and a very influential citizen.  I wish that I could be equally sure that those facts had nothing to do with the decision not to prosecute.

 

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