Week 45.09

Tendring Topics………on line

Remembrance Sunday

Next Sunday (8th November) is Remembrance Sunday. It is, I think, a commemoration that towards the end of the last century was beginning to lose significance as the World Wars and their victims began to fade from contemporary memory and to take their place in the history books.

Born as I was in 1921, I can remember during my childhood the continuing desolation of the bereaved of World War I; the grieving mothers, the young widows, the attractive girls destined to become old maids because the love of their life was buried ‘in some corner of a foreign field’. Throughout my pre-teen years there were always women, in tears, wearing their Flanders poppies on black garments at Remembrance Services on what we then called ‘Armistice Day’. At tens of thousands of such services it was affirmed that, ‘They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them’.

But those who remembered them best wished so fervently that they had had the opportunity to grow old; the opportunity to be wearied by age and to endure (and enjoy!) those inexorably passing years.

I doubt if since 1945 there has ever been a single day in which the whole world has been at peace. At least though, we in Western Europe have been at peace with each other, and, for the most part, only marginally affected by conflicts raging elsewhere in the world. The ‘Cold War’ remained mercifully cold.

Then came the Falklands War and, after a relatively short gap, the first and second Gulf Wars, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Once again we have parents, proud of their dead hero sons and bravely keeping a stiff upper lip, weeping widows and orphans, and desolated girl friends……. not, of course, anything like as many as there were in the wake of the two world wars, but their grief is every bit as painful and as profound.

It will almost certainly be in the prayerful silence of our Quaker Meeting for Worship that on Remembrance Day I shall remember my fallen comrades from World War II. In my Territorial Medium Artillery Regiment (6in howitzers for those interested in such things) we were mostly in our late teens and early twenties, young men from Ipswich and other East Suffolk towns and villages, who had volunteered for the TA at the beginning of 1939 when we had had realized that war with Nazi Germany was inevitable.

From 1939 till July 1941 we were part of Britain’s defences against invasion. In 1941 we sailed to North Africa and, during the winter of 1941/1942 we helped to secure the surrender of Bardia and Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass) from the combined German and Italian Forces. When Rommel counter-attacked in the New Year we were for several months in almost continuous action in the Gazala Line, west of Tobruk. Eventually we became part of the Tobruk Garrison and were overrun by Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21st June 1942.

There were 100 fatal casualties among the 700 or so men in my regiment.. That was a quite a heavy death-toll for a Medium Artillery regiment serving in North Africa in World War II. What I find particularly appalling is that, while there were obviously some deaths in battle, the overwhelming number occurred after Tobruk had fallen and we had been taken prisoner.

There were deaths when a diphtheria epidemic raged through the large transit POW camp in Benghazi, Libya. There were deaths in Italian prison camps from starvation-related afflictions. I watched Jock McGregor, a Scotsman and a good friend of mine, simply take to his bunk and die of hunger and cold in a camp in northern Italy. A few lost the will to live after receiving ‘Dear John’ letters telling them that their girlfriends or wives had found new ‘true loves’. ‘Who is he?’ ‘I don’t know; some smooth s….. in a reserved occupation or b……. overpaid Yank I suppose’.

In Germany there were deaths on the long trek in the icy conditions of northern Europe during the winter of 1944/1945 as POW camps in Poland and East Prussia were evacuated to avoid prisoners being liberated by the advancing Red Army. By far the greatest number of fatal casualties from my regiment were though from ‘friendly fire’. Fifty young men whom I had known personally, drowned like rats in a trap on 14th November 1942, when a British submarine torpedoed the Italian SS Scillin, the prison ship transporting them from Tripoli to Italy. The commander of the submarine had thought that he was attacking an Italian troop ship.

Myself on my return to England from captivity in Germany and below Heather Gilbert, the girl who had waited for me for four years.

I received no battle injuries, escaped the epidemic in Benghazi, sailed earlier and uneventfully from Libya to Italy, and survived semi-starvation in Italy. On VE Day I liberated myself from German captivity (with a great deal of help from the Soviet Red Army!) and arrived home in Ipswich, safe and sound, just ten days later on 18th May, my 24th birthday! My girlfriend Heather Gilbert was waiting for me, having successfully resisted the attractions of both our American allies and those in reserved occupations during the four years that I had been overseas.

I was, as I have so often been, extremely lucky. On Sunday I shall remember with sadness the tragically wasted lives of friends and comrades who didn’t enjoy that same good luck.

Flanders’ Poppies

This morning (26th October) I heard a ‘what the papers say’ report on the radio that a letter in the Daily Telegraph, from a Lieut. Col. (retired) complained bitterly about tv news announcers wearing their poppies prematurely. ‘Poppies’, the good Colonel insisted, ‘should be worn only after 1st November’.

Who on earth says so? That sounds to me like one of those stupid Regimental Orders that used to appear on our Battery Notice Board insisting that ‘From 0800 hrs. 1st October, great coats will be worn on parade’, never mind the fact that 1st October might well be in the middle of an Indian Summer heat wave.

With Christmas catalogues in the post before the end of August, and Easter eggs and hot cross buns on sale the minute the Christmas decorations come down, it’s sad if we can’t wear our Flanders Poppies a week or so early!

In any case tv news announcers are not alone in having never heard of (or of ignoring) this prohibition.. No politician hoping to be returned to Westminster in next year’s General Election has been seen without a poppy for almost a week. Lots of ordinary people in the street, myself among them, are wearing them too.

I think that everybody who wishes the Poppy campaign well, should be very pleased that this year the poppies were on sale in good time and that people were already wearing them well before the end of October.

Pride cometh before a fall!

So says the proverb, and mine certainly did. On Saturday 24th October, my son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn, came to Clacton to visit me. After lunch at the Bowling Green we wondered what to do next. It was a damp and miserable day. ‘Let’s try the Martello Tower at Jaywick’, I suggested, ‘often there’s an art exhibition there’.

That Saturday was ‘between Exhibitions’ but Andy and Marilyn thought they’d like to see the view from the top. They looked at me doubtfully, ‘Anywhere you two can go, I can go too’, I said with eighty-eight year old pride, ‘I can climb those two flights of stairs. No problem!’

And so I could, holding on firmly to the hand-rail and pulling myself up. Andy and Marilyn followed behind, ready to try to break my fall if I had been over-optimistic. I reached the top safely. Here there was no hand-rail. I took two steps forward, lost my balance, and fell heavily on my front. Pride had indeed come before a fall!

No, I didn’t suffer any permanent injury. I broke the frame of my glasses and scratched the left lens (over my one ‘good’ eye!). The frame dug into my face and caused cuts that, at the time, bled profusely. I think though that my glasses probably saved my eye from more serious injury. Andy and Marilyn found some tissues to staunch my bleed and Andy dialled 999 for a paramedic to check me over. I made my way slowly and carefully to the ground floor (on the way up I had quoted Sir Thomas More’s piece of black humour as he mounted the scaffold to have his head cut off: ‘Would you be kind enough to help me up please. I’ll make my own way down!)

On the ground floor there was a comfortable settee on which I sat and waited for the Paramedic. He arrived in a very few minutes, applied plaster dressings to my ‘wounds’, told me that I had a lovely black eye developing and urged me to phone my doctor if during the next 24 hours I experienced sickness, faintness, serious headaches or dizziness. I had none of those symptoms and have been left with nothing worse than a still-lingering black eye and the need (that will soon be met) for a new pair of glasses.

I’m not surprised though that ‘Pride’ is listed as one of the seven deadly sins though, in my case, I am glad to be able to say that it proved to be a good deal less than ‘deadly!’

Tony Blair for EU President ………I think not!

Speaking as a Europhile (by fairly recent convincement!) and firm believer in closer European integration, I think that Tony Blair is the very last person who should be considered for the Presidency of the European Union. For one thing he would represent a country that is only a half-hearted member.

Even if our European partners were prepared to accept a British President, Tony Blair would be among the last names that would come to my mind. I think that, with his ever-ready smile and persuasive tongue, he would probably use his presidency to try to create a New-EU on the lines of New Labour, an organisation for which I feel minimal enthusiasm..

I have little doubt that his appointment would be welcomed by the CIA and by the Far Right in the USA who, judging him by past perfomance, would see him as ‘Our man in Brussels’. I can only hope that if by some mischance Tony Blair were elected President, he would prove them to be wrong.

Week 44.09

Tendring Topics……..on line

Is your County Council really necessary?

Colchester Liberal Democrats have launched a campaign for Colchester to be granted the same unitary status that is enjoyed by, for instance, Southend and Thurrock. Unitary authorities undertake all local government functions. While remaining geographically and socially an important part of the county in which they are situated, they are politically independent of its county council.

Supporting the campaign, the town’s Lib.Dem. MP, Bob Russell, told the local Daily Gazette:

‘The public has had enough of the county council. It treats Colchester very much as a second-class citizen – the bad relative of Chelmsford.

I think the final straw was when public opinion was overwhelmingly against the closure of two of our secondary schools, but it went ahead and closed them anyway.

Places much smaller than Colchester are now unitary authorities, so we know we are large enough.

The move would be cheaper for the town too, because instead of the silly issues we have at the moment, such as Colchester collecting waste but Essex County Council disposing of it, we would be doing it all ourselves.

While wishing the campaign every success, I don’t think that it goes half far enough. Regular readers of this blog will recall that several months ago I suggested that the Essex County Council was a very expensive stratum of local administration that we could very well manage without. There is, I believe, no reason at all why every district and borough council within the county should not become a unitary authority, and the Essex County Council be consigned to the history books.

The arguments that Bob Russell advances on behalf of Colchester apply equally to our own neighbouring Tendring District. Both authorities now cover both urban and rural areas with populations considerably higher than those of either Ipswich or Norwich before World War II. Yet, in those days, as County Boroughs they both had infinitely greater powers and responsibilities than today’s unitary authorities……and they exercised those powers and responsibilities to general public satisfaction.

As well as getting rid of such anomalies as the division between refuse collection and refuse disposal, it would spare us the continuing expense of the trips of influential county councillors and top county council officials to far-flung corners of the world, of the expensive ‘members only’ restaurant at County Hall, and of the need to maintain ‘a presence’ in Communist China! It would also bring accountable democracy closer to the people and might well increase the turn-out at local elections. When I was Tendring’s Public Relations Officer one of my most difficult tasks was convincing residents that while it was the District Council that had to send out Rate Demands (now Council Tax Demands of course) and the District Council that had to prosecute those who failed to pay them, by far the greater amount of money that they had to pay, went straight to the remote County Council in Chelmsford.

TENDRING SAYS NO

That was a headline in last Wednesday’s (21st October) ‘Daily Gazette’ reporting that Tendring was opposed to Colchester gaining unitary status. This surprised me because I hadn’t recalled ‘Tendring’, of which I am a tiny part, ever having been consulted about it.

The news story under the headline made it clear that neither the whole of Tendring, nor even the whole of Tendring Council, had so far expressed an opinion on the matter. Councillor Neil Stock, a Conservative councillor, and leader of the majority group (by one member!) in the Weeley Council Chamber, had told a reporter that he opposes Colchester becoming a unitary authority.

He went on to say, The idea is ridiculous. Everyone knows there are going to be massive cuts to local government funding. You would have to replace many services that are currently based at County Hall. We would continue doing our things and we would continue working closely with the county council’

I believe that it is precisely because there are bound to be massive cuts in local government funding that we should campaign for autonomy for district and borough councils and end the expensive and extravagant (with our money!) tier of local government operating from County Hall, Chelmsford. We should be working with Colchester Council, and with other district and borough councils in Essex, toward that common end.

The money that we currently have to pass on to Chelmsford could be used to provide the same services that are at present the responsibility of the County Council, but locally organised and supervised – and I am convinced that, if organised locally, they could be provided more humanely, more efficiently, and more economically.

Put the question to the people of Tendring squarely, without urging them to follow any particular party line, and I have little doubt that the Gazette headline would read TENDRING SAYS YES!

‘It’s an ill-wind…….

that blows nobody any good’, insists the proverb, and we all know that that is true. There are those who have made a fortune, not just despite the recession, but as a result of it. When a substantial part of my income came from royalties and public lending right payments on my plumbing books, there was nothing like a really hard winter to boost sales and public library loans. A wet summer pushes up the sales of raincoats and umbrellas!

This year, on the Essex Holiday Coast and in East Anglia generally, we haven’t had a wet summer. We have had a very good one. Clacton has been full of holiday visitors. Hotels, boarding houses and campsites have been fully booked, and the tills of beachwear and beach equipment retailers have been ringing merrily. The weather was kind to Clacton’s carnival and to the air-show. The summer of 2009 was in sharp contrast to those of 2007 and 2008.

But fine warm weather doesn’t bring joy to everyone. East Anglian farmers have found their land too dry and hard for them to sow their autumn seed. Perhaps the rainy spell that we are experiencing as I write will have come in time to save the day. Perhaps too, it will have come in time to rescue the nature reserve at Minsmere in Suffolk, normally an earthly paradise for wading birds. Just a few weeks ago though, they could hardly find enough water to wade in!

Tendring Districts beach patrols and seafront wardens were stretched to the uttermost by no less than 1,250 incidents, an all-time record for a holiday season. The greatest number of swimmers who had previously had to be rescued from the sea in any one year had been eight. This year the number rocketed to thirty-four. Saddest and most traumatic event of the season was the accidental drowning of ten-year-old Stella Akanbi in August. She went missing while bathing off a busy and normally safe beach on a sunny Sunday afternoon. A massive search was launched immediately but it was the next day before her lifeless body was found.

Other activities of the beach patrols included reuniting ninety lost children with their parents, attending two attempted suicides and giving minor first-aid on the seafront to no less than 700 holidaymakers!

Seafront manager Tim Sutton and his team were deeply saddened by the tragic loss of little Stella but I have no doubt that they would otherwise welcome similar seafront challenges next year…..and the year after!

Tempting Fate

When, just over a year ago, Trent Wharfage, owners of Mistley Quay decided to erect a two-metres high steel fence along the edge of Mistley Quay for ‘health and safety reasons’ local people were furious……and sceptical. The fence was an ugly monstrosity effectively fencing off and denying access to the Stour.

‘Health and Safety?’ No-one could remember anyone, not even after a few too many drinks at a local hostelry, falling off the quay into the Stour. They could though, remember occasions on which casualties from boating accidents on the river had been brought ashore there to be brought back to life and health. ‘That there fence’ll lead to tragedy. Dew yew mark my words!’

And so it….very nearly…. did; and sooner than even the most pessimistic of the local wiseacres could have imagined. During the afternoon of Saturday 10th October a private boat sank in the distinctly chilly waters of the Stour not far from Mistley. Passing yachts rescued from it three adults and a teenage boy and transferred them to the Harwich lifeboat, which made for Mistley Quay. There an ambulance awaited – on the other side of the fence!

Coastguards needed the help of locals to unbolt and remove a section of the offending barrier before those rescued could be brought ashore. A near tragedy was prevented simply because the incident took place during the daytime when there were local people available to help.

Not surprisingly, the Health and Safety Executive who, it seems, had never asked for a fence on that scale in the first place, is reviewing the situation ‘in the light of what has happened’. When asked how much power the Executive had to enforce any ruling it made, a spokesman replied, ‘Any organisation would have to follow HSE instruction’.

It seems likely therefore that when my son, daughter-in-law and I next lunch at Mistley’s Quay Café, that offensive fence will have been removed.

Nick Griffin and the BBC

Was the BBC right to give Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, airtime by inviting him to take part in Any Questions? On balance I think they probably were. Excluding someone who has been proved in the polls to have considerable support, on the grounds that ‘right thinking people’ abhor everything about him, would set a dangerous precedent. Should spokesmen for the Green Party be similarly banned? I know from personal experience (in the correspondence columns of the local press!) that quite a lot of people believe that concern for global warming is ‘just scare mongering’.

In the event, I’d be surprised if his contribution to Any Questions? found him a single additional supporter. Charismatic, hypnotic, spell-binding were not adjectives that came instantly to mind. He was certainly not an Adolf Hitler, a Benito Mussolini or an Oswald Mosley.

If there is blame to be attached to his appearance in the limelight, blame the misguided folk who voted for him and his party in the European and local election, and those who have created, and continue to create, the conditions in which Nick Griffin and his like flourish.

I reckon that,

Members of Parliament who have submitted fraudulent claims for expenses…and are now moaning about having to pay back a fraction of their ill-gotten gains.

Bankers who have been rescued from ruin with our money, but have resumed handing out enormous salaries and huge bonuses to those whose greed and incompetence created that ruin.

Political Parties full of schemes to ease the national debt by reducing the incomes of the poor, the old and the disadvantaged, but from whom we have yet to hear proposals for extracting a proportionate sum from the coffers of the seriously rich.

do more to recruit supporters for one or other forms of political extremism than Nick Griffin and his followers could manage in the whole of their lifetimes.



Our Man in Nanjing - 'my man in Taiwan' comments.

My grandson Chris, who currently lives and works in Taiwan, but who previously lived and worked for some time in mainland China, is a regular reader of this blog. I had thought that my item last week about 'Our man in Nanjing', might interest him. It certainly did! Here is an extract from his email that I have just received:

'I was amazed by the office in Nanjing. I am really curious to know what they are expecting? How exactly do they think they would profit from it?

I was amazed at the man in Nanjing's salary! That is far too much! Do you know how well he could live on that in China? He could have his own chauffeur for that! I think that Essex could get a better deal if nothing else. £24,000 in China and £24,000 in England are very different things! I would like to know what he will be doing to earn that salary. I wonder what kind of return they expect to get on that investment?

No doubt Lord Hanningfield and his colleagues know the answer to that.

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Cheap and Cheerful?

After my early retirement from Tendring Council’s service in 1980, I pursued a new career as a freelance writer. In the 1980s and ‘90s I wrote five commercially successful books about domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage, as well as the plumbing sections of such d-i-y manuals as The Reader’s Digest Complete DIY Manual. I also wrote a great many articles on the same subjects for Do-it-yourself and later for Practical Householder magazine. For twenty-three years I wrote Tendring Topics in print for the Coastal Express, and I also wrote innumerable ‘advertising features’ for all of Essex County Newspapers, now the Newsquest Group, as well as for other East Anglian magazine publishers.

The last of these, although not the best rewarded, was often the most challenging. A voice on the phone would demand ‘Can you do 500 (or 350 or 200) words on this, that or the other, pub, restaurant, hairdressers, jewellers, undertakers or whatever and a thousand words on shopping in Frinton, or some area within the district or elsewhere?’ often adding, ‘Oh, and can you get mugshots of the proprietors and a general view of the pub, shop or shopping centre?’ I could and I did. Often I’d be writing with enthusiasm about businesses for which I felt no personal enthusiasm whatsoever. I regarded myself as being in the same position as a barrister. It was up to me to stress my clients’ good points and see if I couldn’t manage to turn their bad points into well-disguised blessings. My contributions were, after all, labelled ‘advertising feature’ and while I always tried to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, I sometimes took comfort in the thought that no-one could ever hope to tell the whole truth!

Here I am, at the ‘workbench’, with a ‘Brother’ electronic typewriter I think, which places it about twenty years ago and me in my late sixties. Around me are some of my plumbing books and just behind my left wrist, a copy of ‘Coastal Express’, ‘The read one’ as its banner headline proclaimed.

There were some words that were absolutely taboo in advertising features. ‘dull’, for instance, was never used as a description of the weather at any of our holiday coast resorts. Our skies might, very occasionally, be ‘cloudy’ but nothing whatsoever about one of our holiday towns was ever ‘dull’. Similarly nothing, whether food, clothing, entertainment or any kind of service to the public, was ever described as ‘cheap’. ‘Cheap’ implied, at its best ‘Cheap and Cheerful’, with overtones of fish and chips with a sprinkling of salt and vinegar, eaten with the fingers out of a greasy newspaper on a windy beach. At its worst it meant ‘Cheap and Nasty’, the sort of gadget that claims to have half a dozen purposes but actually performs none of them. Goods and services might be ‘competitively priced’ or ‘inexpensive’. In the world of advertising features though, they were never cheap.

All of this is why I felt nothing but dismay when I read in bold headlines in the Daily Gazette CLACTON IS CHEAP AND CHEERFUL RESORT with, underneath it, a picture taken just west of Clacton Pier of a crowded beach and a lower prom so crammed with holiday makers that movement must have been all but impossible. The caption said Busy - Clacton is the cheapest UK holiday. We Clactonians were, no doubt, expected to greet this with gratitude and enthusiasm. My own thought was, ‘while we’ve got friends like that, we certainly don’t need enemies!’

The news story, that accompanied the headline and the picture, was in fact quite cheering. A survey, commissioned by Virgin Money Travel Insurance had revealed that Clacton was the least expensive holiday resort in the whole of the UK, followed by Orkney, Bournemouth (that was a surprise!), Morecambe and Bognor (and so were they!). The survey, which took into consideration hotel and restaurant availability and charges, quality of beaches, and the overall cost and number of nearby tourist attractions, also listed the ‘best’ holiday resorts in order.

In this list Clacton-on-Sea was 19th best, well ahead of Southend-on-Sea who were 28th. The survey also praised the quality of Clacton’s beaches. The news report doesn’t say how many resorts were surveyed but as we know that among them were resorts on the south coast and Orkney in the far north, it may be assumed that 19th was well towards the top.

Had I been writing that story in my advertising-feature days, the illustration would have been of children enjoying themselves on a busy, but not crowded, sandy beach in full sunshine. This would have been my headline and my news story:

HOLIDAYS AT HOME?….CLACTON’S THE BEST!

An independent survey, conducted by Virgin Money Travel Insurance, has rated Clacton-on-Sea, whose beaches were specially praised, as the best holiday resort in Essex, and among the ‘top twenty’ within the UK. It was also declared to be the least expensive resort in the whole of the United Kingdom!

The survey took into account the weather, the cost of a week in an hotel, price and availability of restaurants, quality of beaches, and the overall cost and number of nearby tourist attractions.

So, if you’re holidaying in Britain and have been flooded out (or ripped off!) in the Lake District, the West Country or the Scottish Highlands, try Clacton-on-Sea next year. It’s the best in Essex and rated among the best in the UK, it has the lowest annual rainfall in the British Isles, some of the best beaches – and the lowest prices!

‘Cheap and Cheerful’ never!

This picture, of my younger son enjoying himself on a Clacton beach in the early ‘60s is the best illustration that I could find at short notice. I am sure that the ‘Gazette’ has many much better and more recent ones on its files

Our Man in Nanjing!

Much as I might have liked to forget Essex County Council for at least a week, its members force themselves upon our attention. They have sold off all their old people’s residential homes, are eager to turn their schools into privately controlled ‘academies’, have incurred Colcastrian wrath by closing two schools and bussing their displaced pupils miles across the town, and have been severely criticised for the standard of their child care and social services. Unabashed, triumphant in fact, they have now established a ‘company’ in Nanjing, in Jiangsu Province of the People’s Republic of China. This must surely be ‘a first’ for local government enterprise!

It is going to cost the County Council (which means, of course, that it’s going to cost us) £40,000 a year. £26,000 of this will go as salary to a Chinese citizen, and the remainder to running his office in Nanjing. As a life-long trade unionist and a retired life-member of UNISON I hope that existing staff at County Hall, Chelmsford will offer their new Chinese colleague membership of our Union!

The purpose of the County Council’s new overseas venture is to help Essex businesses meet potential buyers and sellers and it seems that under Chinese law, the county council cannot operate unless it has a company there. Lord Hanningfield, eloquent as ever, explains:

‘Essex has a long-standing relationship with the province (of Jiangsu) and the establishment of a permanent office there will allow us to identify potential inward investment and opportunities for local businesses. The downturn has shown us we must look at alternative ways to sustain our local economy and keep local businesses thriving, and we have taken the initiative on this.’

That is all very worthy and done, I am quite sure, with the very best of intentions. When, many years ago, I was learning about the nature of local government, I was taught that a big difference between a local authority and a private person was that while a private individual was permitted to do anything that wasn’t prohibited by law, a local authority could lawfully only undertake tasks specifically entrusted to it by central government. Anything beyond that was ultra vires, or beyond its powers, and illegal. Essex County Councillors have, I am sure, the very best legal advisers in their employ. Perhaps the law has since been changed. If not, the County Council must surely have found some statute that permits a local authority to use public funds to establish a company on the other side of the world, in a country with laws and traditions completely alien from our own.

Common sense tells me that such a venture should be funded by the businesses hoping to benefit, not by the council taxpayer. Council tax and Government grants should surely be spent on tasks entrusted to County Councils; social services, education, highways, refuse disposal and so on; admittedly pretty boring old jobs compared with jetting round the world, running banks and post offices, and founding and managing businesses in faraway lands.

‘It was us wot won it!'

Most people will remember The Sun’s proud, and deliberately semi-literate, boast after supporting John Major’s successful general election campaign. The sad thing about it is that that boast was probably justified. Whatever politicians may say, I have no doubt at all that daily newspapers do influence public opinion.

At the very least they reinforce and strengthen opinions and prejudices already half-formed. To some extent readers are influenced by leading and feature articles; even more though by large black headlines and brief punchy reports that never tell more than a fragment of any news story. Such reports distort the truth, as much by omission as by anything that actually appears in print. I think that I have demonstrated this in this blog in my piece about advertising features. At least my contributions to the press were labelled 'advertising feature'.

Why is it that Eurosceptics can be confident that referendums held in England on the Lisbon Treaty, or on the adoption of the Euro, would almost certainly produce a large ‘No’ vote? Certainly not because a majority, or even a sizeable minority of us, have carefully studied the pros and cons and have decided that they would be to Britain’s disadvantage. The reason is simply that in a large section of the press; The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, the Daily Star and, though rather less stridently, The Daily Telegraph, never mention the Treaty, the Euro or the European Union without a sneer.

For that reason I think that the Government has every reason to be angry (however much they may claim not to care) not only at The Sun’s change of policy, but at its having been carefully timed to fill news bulletins that might otherwise have been occupied by reports of the Prime Minister’s speech at the Labour Party Conference.

I don’t think that regular readers of this blog are likely to accuse me either of uncritical support for New Labour or of mindless xenophobia. I do feel very strongly though that the means of moulding/manipulating/distorting public opinion should not be in private hands and under private control. This is surely particularly important when those hands are based in, and that control exercised from, a foreign country, even if that country is one with which we are said to have a ‘special relationship’.

Week 41.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Footing the Bill

There’s a short poem by A.E.Housman that includes the following lines:

The candles burn their sockets,
The blinds let through the day,
The young man feels his pockets
And wonders what’s to pay.

Well, there’s little doubt about what’s to pay (to the nearest two or three billion pounds) for the long night of greed and extravagance that led to the economic crisis from which we hope we’re emerging. Now we are learning who is going to have to pay it and how it is to be extracted from pockets, wallets and handbags.

Two measures that the Conservatives are proposing to introduce if or when they become the ruling Party, caught my eye. They propose to put up the age at which the government retirement pension will be payable from 65 to 66, and to comb through those who are surviving on disability benefit, weeding out those who are capable of doing any kind of paid work. The money saved will be used for the training of the long-term unemployed. Needless to say they promise a much better and more effective means of training than that provided by the present government!

I wish them all success, though it will be several years before the change in the retirement age brings any reward. As for weeding out those falsely claiming disability benefit, I suspect that when it comes actually to identifying them, there will be far fewer than is imagined. The fact that social security and disability scroungers regularly make headlines in the tabloids doesn’t necessarily mean there are lots of them.

These measures may or may not bring in the anticipated savings but one thing that they will most certainly do is increase the number of people looking for jobs. Isn’t the number of unemployed in Britain – still steadily rising – already worrying enough? And what on earth is the point of introducing expensive schemes to train unemployed folk for non-existent jobs.

Both the main political parties intend to freeze public sector pay, though in different ways. The Conservatives propose to exempt those with salaries below £18,000 a year, while New Labour has its eyes on only the really well-off ones; judges, NHS top administrators, local authority Chief Executives and so on. As a former public servant whose job today must surely be worth more than £18,000 a year, I suppose that I ought to warm to the New Labour proposals.

However, these proposals are for 2011/2012 still two years away. History suggests that today’s depression may be followed by run-away inflation; certainly not a good time in which to try to impose a pay freeze.

Why penalise those in the public sector to remedy ills that, whatever else may be said about them, originated squarely as a result the failures of private enterprise? The simplest and fairest way to deal with national debt is by means of a properly graduated income tax, so that all those who can afford to do so, pay a similar proportion of their incomes towards national recovery. This is a solution that no politician so far has had the courage to suggest!

‘We’re all in this together’, says the Shadow Chancellor. All of us? Cuts in public services, later age of entitlement to the state pension, weeding out social security and invalidity benefit scroungers, freezing Public Sector pay? I have yet to hear of a single suggested measure that will cause even the least inconvenience to the seriously wealthy; the sort of people, for instance, who own and control national newspapers, or own luxurious private yachts like the one in which both the Shadow Chancellor and the Government’s Business Secretary were happy to accept hospitality just a few months ago.

Blame the BBC!

The BBC is almost as popular a scapegoat as ‘The EU’, or ‘Brussels’. Last week the Daily Gazette carried a news story with the headline, ‘Council hits back at BBC’. It had been suggested in a BBC Essex talk programme that Essex County Council had used taxpayers’ money unwisely in having spent £79,000 on food and drink.

The period over which that sum had been spent wasn’t included in the newspaper report but if, in fact, it was in one financial year, then the criticism surely does seem justified. In response, Nicola Spicer, county council spokesperson said that the £79,000 spent on food covers some of the authority’s 38,000 staff and councillors. Really? That makes the miraculous ‘feeding of the 5,000’ seem positively easy! However, we are surely entitled to ask exactly how many of the councillors and staff qualify for free or subsidised meals….and why?

Hitting back at BBC Essex, Ms Spicer went on to say that ‘Since 2004 BBC Essex has spent £10,610 on food and meals publicly funded via the licence fee. BBC Essex employs some 35 fuand control national newspapersll time members of staff’. £10,610 over five years doesn’t sound all that excessive to me and BBC Essex points out that this sum includes all food for production purposes such as travelling on BBC business, and also includes refreshments for guests on the station.

I must say that when, some years ago, I was interviewed by BBC Radio Essex in connection with a recently published plumbing book of mine, I didn’t feel that the cup of tea and couple of biscuits that I was given were particularly lavish hospitality. A year or two earlier, in ITV’s Regional HQ in Norwich for a similar interview, I had been offered a large scotch!

In ‘hitting back at the BBC’ the County Council had, in any case, selected the wrong target. The BBC had merely been the vehicle for criticism made by one of the Council’s own members, who is also a member of the ruling Conservative Party. It was my own representative (though not my choice!) on the County Council who should have been the object of their wrath. While it was BBC Essex that the County Council attacked, it had been County Councillor Stephen Mayzes of Flatford Drive, Clacton-on-Sea (representing Clacton North) who had been the whistle-blower. In a radio interview he had had the temerity to criticise his colleagues for spending that £79,000 of taxpayers’ money on food and drink! I bet that he received a few sour looks in the ‘Members only Restaurant’ (that's where nearly £65,000 of that £79,000 went!) where county councillors recharge their batteries after coping with the exhausting task of deciding how to spend our money.

Lord Hanningfield……..again!

I can see that for as long as the much-travelled Lord Hanningfield remains the political leader of Essex County Council, it is unlikely that Tendring Topics…..on line will be short of material for comment. It seems but yesterday that he was facing criticism for taking a cross-party group of county councillors on an expensive outing to the USA, not long after he had returned from another trip abroad to India. The event on the other side of the Atlantic had clearly related to Harwich and it might have been thought that the modest Harwich delegation (members of which had paid their own fares) provided ample British representation.

His total claim for expenses during the last financial year included £7,141 for travel and accommodation on a trip to China for the Beijing Olympics. He didn’t, of course, travel alone. With him was Councillor Stephen Castle, ‘County Portfolio Holder for the 2012 Olympics’ and four council officials. This jaunt cost us in total over £32,000.

Its purpose was ‘preparation for hosting the mountain biking event in Essex’ at the Olympics in London in 2012 (I still find it difficult to take seriously the idea of an international ‘mountain biking event’ taking place in one of England’s flattest counties!) As well as these preparations, the visiting group encouraged competing countries to set up camp in Essex during the games, and built business, educational and cultural links with the area. Goodness! they can hardly have found the time to watch any of the games!

Lord Hanningfield also claimed a further £930 for attending an exhibition and conference in the Chinese province of Jingsu, with which Essex has ties, and a further £2,205 to allow him to join a group of Essex business men visiting India in February of this year. That, of course, was all on top of the £59,011 that he claimed in expenses as a councillor and leader of the Council. To be fair to Lord Hanningfield, he wasn’t the sole claimant for expenses. The 75 councillors claimed in total £1,584,085 between them…..slightly up on the previous year’s figure of £1,547,341.

One of my most vivid memories of Lord Hanningfield’s fairly regular appearances on tv was hearing him solemnly discussing the difficulty of funding pensioners’ bus passes. ‘Journeys cost money’, he declared….and he certainly should know!

A Suggestion for a Future Chancellor.

If many, or indeed any, other local authorities spend an annual sum similar to that of Essex County Council on overseas travel for councillors and/or officials, a worthwhile amount could be saved by banning (or at least submitting to searching scrutiny) all such travel at public expense in the future.

Going down?

My wife Heather and I were always grateful for, and appreciative of, the primary education that both our sons received at Clacton’s Alton Park Junior School in the 1960s. Head teacher at the time was Mr Cordwell, whom I am sure many now-middle-aged Clactonians will remember with respect and affection. Heather and I had no doubt that Alton Park was the best Junior School in Clacton and we considered ourselves to be very fortunate that it should also be the nearest school to our home.

This was, of course, in the ‘bad old days’ of the eleven-plus examination. We had no doubt that it was the professionalism and discipline that they had encountered at Alton Park that had resulted in both our sons gaining places in Clacton County High School, and had laid the educational foundation on which, later in their lives, both were to build satisfying, successful and socially useful careers.

All that, of course, was some forty-five years ago. Things have changed, at Alton Park School as elsewhere.

I have just read in the Clacton Gazette that Alton Park Junior School has been on the way down. An earlier Ofsted Report had rated the school at ‘good’. Had there been such a report in 1960 I think it would surely have been ‘outstanding’ – but then perhaps I’m biased! The current report just rates the school as ‘satisfactory’.

The inspectors weren’t happy about how pupils with poor motivation and difficulty in managing their behaviour were dealt with, and found the level of attendance unsatisfactory. Poorly motivated children who can’t manage their own behaviour affect the progress of other pupils. (Isn’t it the task of the school, rather than that of children, to ‘manage’ behaviour?) I am sure that if that, or persistent truancy, had been a problem way back in the early sixties, Heather and I would have heard all about it.

The report wasn’t all bad. The school’s care of children ‘with special needs' was considered outstandingly good and sports and music classes were both praised.

The inspector conceded that measures had been put in place to remedy the school’s defects and that these hadn’t yet had time to take effect. I sincerely hope that they will prove effective and that the next Ofsted report is a more favourable one.

It is very clear to me though that the school has changed a great deal in the past four and a half decades. But then so has society generally. Is it the teaching, the way the children have been brought up, or the general attitude of other children and of the adults with whom they come into contact, that is responsible?

Week 41.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

An Atmosphere of Suspicion

There was a time, years ago, when if the Friend who normally took the Quaker Children’s Class at our Sunday morning Meeting for Worship was absent, other members would step in and take the half dozen or so children we had at that time, under their wing. After the first fifteen minutes of based-on-silence worship, they would take them through to the Children’s room for their ‘lesson’ for the forty-five or so minutes remaining. Fifteen minutes were reckoned to be as long as normal kids could be expected to remain still and silent!

I took my turn, and so long as it happened only very occasionally, I quite enjoyed it. I doubt if I ever taught them anything very useful, but they got to know me, and at the very least, it made sure that their parents could relax in Meeting in the knowledge that their offspring were safe and out of mischief.

When I was a Public Health Inspector, and again when I was the Council’s Public Relations Officer, I would occasionally be invited to visit one or other of the local schools to chat to the children about subjects as varied as food hygiene, road safety, their future civic responsibilities, vandalism, litter dropping and so on.

As I grew older I rejoiced in seeing young children enjoying themselves at play and might occasionally pause for a few moments to watch them.

The first two of those activities I could now undertake only after my past had been searched for criminal activities and it had been certified, not only that I had never been convicted of any paedophilic activities, but that I had never been suspected of them. Were I nowadays to engage in the third one, watching children at play, I have little doubt that there would soon be a police officer on the scene, at the best ordering me to ‘move on’ at once, but more likely inviting me to accompany him or her to the Police Station for interrogation.

Child abuse is a detestable crime. It also seems to be the one crime in which the accused are not only deemed to be guilty until they have proved their innocence, but even when they have successfully done so, are likely to remain under suspicion for the rest of their lives. I feel particularly sorry for schoolteachers, youth leaders and members of the clergy. How easy it must be for a spiteful or revenge-seeking child to ruin forever a reputation and a career by claiming that the teacher, or the vicar, or the new curate, or the scout master, ‘behaved inappropriately’, one of those wonderful 21st century euphemisms that can mean anything from violent sexual assault to laying a friendly arm across the shoulders in sympathy or encouragement.

The latest idiocy in this connection has been the case of the two women police officers, both with young children and with different working shifts, who agreed to look after each-others’ children while the other was on duty. An eminently sensible arrangement that has resulted in their being accused of breaking the law! Very obviously someone whose path they had crossed during the course of their duties had made a complaint. It will, I suppose, have to be pursued. The final result is likely to be that they will both be compelled to pay a stranger to look after their children, rather than have a close friend and colleague look after them for nothing! If that is the law, then the law really is an ass!

Ironically, at almost the same time, a ‘children’s nurse’ in a day nursery who had presumably been thoroughly vetted, was pleading guilty to a series of charges of horrific child abuse! That of course, was a dreadful exception. In the overwhelming majority of day nurseries children are perfectly safe and secure.

Similarly, it can’t be stressed too strongly that most people aren’t paedophiles. Most men are neither rapists nor wife-beaters, most women don’t neglect or physically abuse their kids, and most kids aren’t malevolent little hooligans. There must surely be some way of protecting children without creating the fog of suspicion that nowadays hangs over us all!

Another Time Traveller?

Who, you may well ask, is this aristocratic lady who looks as though she has just stepped out of a tv costume drama set in the 18th Century.

No, she is neither an actor nor a time-travelling visitor from an earlier century. She is, in fact, my good friend Ingrid Zeibig, well-loved aunt of little Maja and Tom Friedrich, whom I mentioned last week. Born and brought up in Zittau, the little German town where I was once a POW, she now lives in historic Bayreuth in Bavaria, home of the Wagner festival and a Mecca for all lovers of Wagner’s music. From time to time she volunteers to transform herself into the Margravine Wilhelmine*. Bewigged and suitably gowned, she graciously agrees to accompany and inform visitors as they stroll round her domain.

Ingrid doesn’t always look quite as regal as that. On my recent trip to Germany with grandson Nick, she made the long journey from Bayreuth in Bavaria to Zittau in the most easterly part of Saxony, to meet Nick and myself again and to act as interpreter and ‘honorary daughter’ to me during my stay in her country.

The picture below was taken at the ceremony to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the restoration of the 500 years old Great Fastentuch or Lenten Veil (in the history of which I am believed to have played a tiny role!) and its establishment in the Museum/Church of the Holy Cross. I had just been presented with copies of the illustrated booklet ‘Rückkehr nach Zittau’, the German version of my article ‘Return to Zittau’ which I had written after my first visit to Zittau as a free man, in 2007.

Ingrid and I are both clutching copies of the German translation of ‘Return to Zittau’.

The Great Fastentuch has, incidentally, recently had its 300,000th visitor since it was installed and exhibited in the Church of the Holy Cross ten years ago. He was an Englishman from Dorset!

*The Margravine Wilhelmine (1709 - 1758) was a daughter of the King of Prussia. Her grandfather, on her mother's side, was our King George I. She married Frederick, Margrave (Marquess) of Bayreuth in 1732. There, decades before the advent of Richard Wagner, she established and nurtured the town's musical and operatic traditions.

Speeding and Cutting the Cost of dealing with Vandals and Hooligans

Public officials’ expensive and time-wasting note taking, box ticking and report writing are a constant complaint both of the victims of anti-social behaviour and of the tax payers who have to pay for it to be tackled. Yet these activities have to be noted and recorded by those on the spot, and passed on to those who will deal with them.

A report in Inside Housing, the official journal of the Institute of Housing, reports the way that Scotland’s South Lanarkshire Council are using mobile technology to deal with this problem.
The local authority has given wardens a piece of technology that lets them enter the details of an incident into a mobile phone which wirelessly transfers the details of the incident directly to a data base in the council’s offices.

Before this technology, developed by software consultants HUB Solutions, had been introduced, wardens had to log the details in a notebook, rewrite them as a report and pass them onto a data entry clerk who entered the details on the database. All of this took forty-eight hours, was prone to backlogs and occupied two staff members. Now, transmission is instant, and some of the warden’s time and all of the clerk’s time is saved.

Peter Hall, Managing Director of Hub Solutions says that his firm has also developed a system, to be tested by Portsmouth Council, that will enable members of the public to report incidents of anti-social behaviour via the internet. Their Gateway System will replace the old method of giving incident diaries to affected members of the public and from these collating a list of events that have to be keyed into a database.

Inside Housing reports Mr Hall as saying that Gateway will reduce the time staff spend recording anti-social incidents by twenty percent and that an added advantage of the system will be that staff will be immediately notified of any incidents, so that they will be able to nip problems in the bud. How valuable such a system might have been to that distraught woman who recently killed herself and her disabled daughter rather than face further persecution from a gang of youths!
Pete and I on holiday in 2007. European travellers may recognise the backdrop, the skyline of Prague

Yes, as you may have guessed, I do have a personal interest in all of this. Peter Hall is my elder son. He rose through the ranks of the staff of Hackney’s Housing Department to the position of Assistant Director of Housing and was in fact, for several months Acting Director. Made redundant following one of the borough’s political and administrative upheavals, he launched HUB Solutions Ltd. a software consultancy specialising in finding solutions to the problems of public authorities. HUB Solutions now has clients throughout the United Kingdom (South Lanarkshire and Portsmouth are pretty distant from each other!) and, as well as an HQ in London, has a base in Glasgow from which to service the firm’s many Scottish clients. Viewers of Taggart on tv may be interested to know that among these is the Strathclyde Police Authority!