week 18.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

A different glimpse of Jaywick

Where do you suppose these photographs were taken? Somewhere among Frinton’s leafy avenues perhaps…….in one of the posher parts of Clacton, possibly near the seafront in the Gardens Area ……or perhaps in some rural commuter haven near Colchester

Not a bit of it. They were taken in less-than-posh Jaywick, described as one of England’s most deprived areas, better known for squalor and ugliness than for beauty, where even a work of art, commissioned for £40,000, turns out to be at best a joke and at worst an insult. Mind you, this plot hasn’t always looked as it does on these pictures. It was a piece of waste land, adjacent to the home of my friends Rodney and Janet Thomas of Jaywick’s Crossley Avenue, which encapsulated the popular view of Jaywick! It was a depository for broken down furniture and every kind of odorous and unsavoury rubbish! It was when their pet cat proudly brought home the bodies of two adult and six baby rats that Janet and Rodney decided to do something about it.
The result is as you can see……a work of horticultural art, not produced on commission, for a large cash prize, or even for honour and glory, but simply out of the goodness of their hearts to improve the environment in which they live. Janet, as a Quaker and Clerk of our Clacton Quaker Meeting, would possibly say that it was in response to the leading of the Inward Light that is the heritage of every man, woman and child in the world. Still unmistakeably Jaywick - but not Jaywick as it exists in the popular imagination

Nobody’s Darling!

On Budget Days I always remember my mother’s contention: Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he will not be disappointed. Mr Darling’s (what a very inappropriate name for a Chancellor!) Budget was just a little different. This time nobody was expecting any good news. The world financial crisis made sure of that. It was really just a case of who would suffer most and how soon?

I judge Budgets as good or bad by whether they narrow or broaden the gap between the wealthy and the poor. It follows that it has been many years since we had what I consider to be a ‘good’ one. For as long as New Labour honoured its absurd promise never to raise the upper band of income tax, and continued with the previous government’s policy of reducing direct taxation (income, capital gains and inheritance tax) and increasing indirect taxation such as VAT and duties on petrol, alcohol and tobacco, there was no hope of the situation changing for the better.

My spirits were raised, very slightly, when I heard that the top rate of income tax was to be raised from a maximum of 40 percent, to 50 percent for incomes over £150 thousand a year. This seemed to be a move in the right direction. However its impact is reduced by the fact that it will not come into force until April of next year. The lawyers, accountants and financial advisers of the seriously rich therefore have plenty of time in which to work out clever schemes of tax avoidance. These are of course, quite different from the illegal tax evasion, sometimes practised by lesser folk.

It must be remembered too that that 50 percent isn’t half a millionaire’s income. It is only a half of that part of his or her income above £150 thousand a year. The new tax isn’t going to send anyone to the bread line or the soup kitchen!

I heard a financial ‘expert’ on tv claim that raising the income tax of the better off was simply removing the incentive that kept them working hard for us all. How strange that the wealthy have to be persuaded to work with cash incentives whereas the poor are compelled to work by threatening to cut their benefits!

Anyway, unlike the small minority affected by the new upper rate of income tax, motorists, smokers and drinkers won’t have a year’s grace to stock up with their supplies at the former lower rate. They’re going to have to make their contribution to national recovery right away.

Is offering £2,000 toward the cost of a new car to those prepared to have their old bangers crushed, a good idea? It is claimed to work in Germany but, as so often happens, our scheme is half-hearted by comparison with theirs and therefore that much less likely to succeed. In any case, brought up as I was in an environment in which very penny counted and we had no alternative but ‘to make do and mend’, I view with deep distrust the idea of deliberately scrapping an old car that may be perfectly serviceable for a shiny new one.

The staggering burden of national debt? The figures involved are so enormous as to be beyond my comprehension. In this blog I have consistently warned against incurring personal and family debt beyond the capacity to repay. I don’t believe, as a former prime minister claimed to, that managing the national finances is just the same as managing the household ones but on a larger scale. Neither can I believe though that a course of action that has proved to be disastrous to tens of thousands of individuals and households, can possibly be beneficial to a community or a nation.

Late News

The Post-Budget headlines of one national newspaper warned us that the new tax on the small minority of us whose taxable income exceeds £150,000 a year will drive many brilliant entrepreneurs from the City of London to other lands where they can accumulate wealth without having to contribute some of it to the communities in which they live and work.

Since these ‘economic refugees’ will undoubtedly include some of those whose greed and irresponsibility triggered the current economic situation I’m not quite sure whether that is a threat or a promise!

‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George!’

Thus, according to Shakespeare in his play Henry V, the eponymous hero ended the rallying speech in which he urged his possibly less-than-enthusiastic troops ‘once more into the breach’ at the siege of Harfleur. It is sad that in England, St. George, our patron saint, receives nothing like the regard that is accorded to his counterparts in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, particularly since he shares 23rd April with the birthday of William Shakespeare, our greatest national poet, whose work is revered world-wide. Imagine the celebration there would be in Glasgow if St. Andrew’s Day and Burns Night coincided!

23rd April 2009. St. George’s Red Cross Flag flies from the flagpole outside Clacton Town Hall and two miniature versions fly from the Tendring Helpline car parked opposite on the left.

A possible reason for English lack of enthusiasm for our patron saint is that we know so little for certain about him. Tradition suggests that he was a very appropriate patron for a multi-ethnic country like ours. He was probably of Greek origin, born in what is now Turkey. He was a legionary in the Imperial Roman Army and was martyred in Palestine early in the fourth century A.D. during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian. His legendary slaying of a ferocious dragon and the rescue of a fair maiden from its clutches is said to have taken place in Libya. He had certainly never heard of England (there was no country of that name in the fourth century) though he may well have heard of Britain as a damp, windy and inhospitable island on the extreme edge of the Empire.

There must have been something very special about him though, since he is the patron saint of Portugal as well as of England and is also much revered in eastern Christendom, particularly in Greece and Russia. He was an early Christian martyr and has inspired thousands of Englishmen and women over the centuries. Even the mythical image of St. George as a knight in shining armour slaying the dragon has its value as a metaphor of the courageous soldier of Christ struggling against, and overcoming, the forces of evil.

A New Renal Unit for Clacton

I didn’t think that the former Eastern Electricity site in Clacton’s Kennedy Road was at all a good idea as the proposed site of an up-to-the-minute comprehensive Medical Centre replacing existing doctors’ surgeries in both Great Clacton and Holland-on-Sea. It may well though be eminently suitable for a badly needed haemodialysis unit to meet the needs of the many Tendring District patients with kidney problems who currently have to travel three times a week to Colchester for their dialysis treatment.

It is a development that will certainly interest my granddaughter, who has recently been appointed as Social Worker with the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital.

As well as helping Clactonian renal sufferers, an eleven-station unit in Clacton with the capacity to treat up to sixty-six patients will help to take the pressure off the Colchester renal unit. Seventy percent of those treated at this twenty-station unit, opened in June 2006, come from the Tendring District, in or around Clacton.

If planning permission is granted, as it surely will be, and all goes according to plan (which is perhaps a little less certain!) the new unit, with a convenient ambulance drop-off point and ample parking, should be operational by next spring.

I have seen it suggested that it might make Clacton a more attractive holiday destination for kidney sufferers from elsewhere, offering ‘Sun, Sea, Sand and Dialysis’!

Perhaps; but without wishing to be too locally xenophobic, I hope that we’ll make sure that it meets local needs before offering its services nationwide.
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