Week 16.10

Tendring Topics……on line

‘Lies, dam’ Lies……and Percentages!’

William Connor, who, under the pseudonym Cassandra, wrote a perceptive and hard-hitting column in the Daily Mirror in the years before, and immediately after World War II, once illustrated the deceptiveness of percentages with the story of an elderly hen, which in the course of one year produced just one egg. The following year she excelled herself, producing two eggs. In a time of food shortages her owner was therefore able to boast that by careful husbandry and efficient fowl management, he had been able to increase egg production by no less than one hundred percent over a period of twelve months.

Cassandra was making the point that even a large percentage of what is very small isn’t very much, while quite a small percentage of a large amount is likely to be rather a lot.

I thought of that highly productive hen when I read the headline about Chief Executives of Hospital Trusts getting a pay increase twice as great as those of hospital nurses. Most of us probably have only the vaguest idea of what either chief executives or nurses earn except that we know instinctively that the former are, by ordinary people’s standards, very well off and that the latter are not. We may have imagined that the Chief Executives were getting an extra £1,000 a year and the nurses only £500, and that would have seemed clearly unfair.

Perhaps it would have been – but it would have been a model of justice and equity compared with what had actually happened. The pay increases both these groups received were, in fact, percentage increases. The Chief Executives had received an increase of over 6 percent of their very large salaries and the nurses only about 3 percent of their much smaller ones. The actual salaries of both these groups vary widely but a Chief Executive of a Hospital Trust would be unlikely to be in receipt of a salary of less than £150,000 a year. Six percent of this sum is about £9,500, a pretty hefty pay rise for anyone in a time of financial stringency. A fully qualified nurse with several years experience and a measure of seniority might expect to earn about £20,000 a year. Three percent of this amounts to £600 – a great deal less than half the rise of the Chief Executives.

Compared with many of our fellow countrymen and women, nurses are by no means ‘poor’. Nor, by the standards of the super-rich, are Hospital Chief Executives particularly wealthy. However the ever-widening gap between the pay of the two groups, both working within the same public service, typifies the yawning gap between the rich and the poor in Britain today.

It is a gap that must be closed if we are to mend the ‘broken society’ of which David Cameron, possibly our future Prime Minister, warns us.

Those Manifestos

The three major political parties have published, and publicised, their manifestos – what they would hope to do if they should win the election.



The New Labour manifesto was as one might expect from a party that has been in power for over a decade; solemn, dependable – just a little boring. Its message seemed to be; ‘These are difficult times. A steady hand is needed at the wheel. We haven’t done too badly so far. You’d be wise to give us another term in office. Yes – we know you are disillusioned with politicians – but better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Let ‘middle England’ note that we’re leaving income tax alone. There’s nothing remotely revolutionary about us’.

It could have been a Conservative manifesto in the pre-Thatcher years. I think that if the electorate wants conservative policies, as may well be the case, they’ll most likely vote Conservative. Nothing that New Labour can do or say will ever win the hearts and minds of the leader writers of The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and The Daily Telegraph. Why bother to try?

I was pleased to hear Gordon Brown’s admission that as the financial crisis was developing he should have been less kind to the banks. Regular readers (I feel sure that there are a few!) of this blog may recall that I remarked a few weeks ago that just as Ramsey Macdonald had been ‘dazzled by duchesses’, so the leaders of New Labour had been ‘blinded by billionaires’. It was nice to receive confirmation of this.

The Conservative manifesto was quite different, anything but ‘conservative’ in fact. I wonder if the two main parties have ever considered exchanging their names? ‘Power to the people!’ really is a strong message. It reminded me eerily of Lenin’s clarion call when in 1917 he arrived in St. Petersburg, home from exile; ‘All power to the workers and soldiers councils – the dictatorship of the working people!’ We all know where that led.

Communities, David Cameron said, should be allowed to run their own schools and their own local services. There should be local referendums on controversial issues. They should be able to veto Council Tax rises and sack their local MP if he wasn’t performing to their satisfaction. How, I wonder, would communities do any of these things? We don’t live in the small Greek city-states of classical times where everybody (who wasn’t a slave) could have his say and be listened to. Our communities consist of thousands, often tens of thousands, of people. At least a thousand parents have a direct personal interest in the average comprehensive secondary school.

Such ‘communities’ are rarely, if ever, unanimous in either their likes or dislikes. They would surely have to select representatives to organise and carry out their wishes. It can hardly have escaped the notice of the leaders of the Conservative Party that there is already machinery in place to do just that. It is called local government – a local government that, since World War II has been systematically robbed of its powers of independent action by successive Labour and Conservative Governments. Nowadays, local authorities have become little more than local agents for carrying out central government’s policies.

Restore to local authorities just some of the powers that they had between the wars and, knowing that their votes could actually make a difference, many more people would bother to vote in local elections. Local Councils would become truly representative of the local communities that they serve, and David Cameron’s call for ‘power to the people’ could be realized.

Just as a footnote it must be added that the power that the Conservatives propose to give to ‘the people’ does have its limits. They’d be able to veto Council Tax rises and hold referendums on local issues – but there’s no word of their having power to veto VAT rises, or rises in alcohol, tobacco or petrol duties, or to hold a referendum on whether or not we need Trident submarines.

The Liberal Democrat Manifesto is, as I had expected, the one that I find most attractive. It promises reform of the tax system to narrow the yawning gap between rich and poor (something that this blog has urged since its advent), an improved education system (The other two parties haven’t been very successful. Perhaps the Lib’Dems. could do better) and generally ‘clean up’ politics (that certainly needs doing). The Lib.Dems. claim to have costed their proposals most meticulously. I would certainly pay less income tax if their proposal to make the first £10,000 of income free of tax were to be put into effect, but I am not totally convinced that it would be a good idea.

The Famous Debate

Did you ‘help to make history’ by watching on tv the first-ever pre-election debate by the leaders of the three main parties, one of whom is, of course, still the Prime Minister?

It wasn’t as formal and boring as I had feared it might be. Nor did any of the participants give an embarrassingly poor performance. David Cameron and Gordon Brown interrupted each other once or twice. The former was a little flushed at one stage and the latter once looked distinctly cross. Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat, stayed aloof from the squabbling and I thought that he came out the best, an opinion that seems to be shared by most relatively neutral observers.

He, of course, had an advantage in that his Party, not having been in Government, couldn’t be blamed for any of the catastrophic blunders made by the other parties in the past few decades. Had they held office they might well have made their own mistakes (I never was a fan of Paddy Ashdown!) but, since they didn’t, they enjoy the benefit of the doubt.

I can’t forget that the Conservatives, when in power, severed the link between pensions and the average wage, and gave council tenants the right to buy their homes at a fraction of their true value. ‘Buying votes with other people’s money’, as a cynical colleague of mine described it. They didn’t, of course, even consider giving a similar right to private tenants. They wouldn’t have wished to offend private landlords, many of who were their generous supporters.

New Labour, in power for 13 years, had redressed neither of those wrongs – and had deceived Parliament into voting for the illegal invasion of Iraq!

I am increasingly sorry that Tendring’s Liberal Democrats were apparently unable to find a well-known local candidate to contest the Clacton seat. This time, he or she really would surely have been ‘in with a chance’!

Fed up with politics? Here’s something quite different.

Where do you suppose this photograph was taken? Somewhere in the Middle East? Or possibly in a mosque in one of the more multicultural parts of a big British city – London or Birmingham perhaps?

It is certainly in London, but it dates from the height of Victorian imperial power (long before the capital became multicultural) and is to be found in a palatial upper middle class home in Kensington.

It is, in fact, in Leighton House, the former home of the late Lord Frederic Leighton, whose life, from 1830 to 1896, spanned the greater part of Queen Victoria’s reign. The photograph was sent to me by Andy and Marilyn, my art-loving younger son and daughter-in-law, who visited Leighton House (now a museum) in connection with this interest.

Lord Frederic was himself a celebrated painter. He was once President of the Royal Academy, and was made first a knight, then a baronet and finally a baron by Queen Victoria. There could hardly have been a greater contrast between the decoration in the picture above and his own work. He was in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition and specialised in biblical and classical scenes, exhibiting special skill in his depiction of the human form. Two pictures of his that I have just seen thanks to Google, were familiar to me. They were Moses surveying the Promised Land and The Artist’s Honeymoon. I think that I may have seen reproductions of both as book illustrations but I had had no idea who had painted them.

I reckon that the Middle Eastern style of the decoration of part of his Lordship’s palatial home may have been intended to remind him of a happy holiday spent in Cairo or Damascus – the wealthy Victorian art connoisseur’s equivalent of the ‘holiday snaps’ of my generation, the ‘holiday video’ I suppose, of today.

Oh, one other piece of trivia about Lord Leighton, that might prove useful in a rather intellectual pub quiz, was that he occupied the most short-lived barony in British history. The day after Queen Victoria had made him Baron Leighton he died of a heart attack. He had no male heirs so the Barony died with him, having been in existence just twenty-four hours!

Thanks Andy and Marilyn, for giving us something else to think about!