Week 48 30th Nov. 2010

Tendring Topics………on Line

Council Housing – once upon a time!

A job that I thoroughly enjoyed during my long local government career was that of Housing Manager. It was a position that I held in rural Suffolk and later in Clacton-on-Sea. Both Clacton Urban District Council and Gipping Rural District Council (just north of Ipswich) owned and controlled nearly a thousand council properties. I helped the Council with tenants’ selection, oversaw the general management of the housing estates including their maintenance, and tried to keep rent arrears down to a reasonable level. In Clacton, though not in Gipping, rent collection, the only regular direct contact with the tenants, was my direct responsibility

It was a satisfying role. I came to know personally all the housing applicants and a great many of the tenants. I went very thoroughly into the circumstances of every housing applicant so that his or her circumstances could be reported to the Council’s Tenants Selection Committee. Were they overcrowded? Were they compelled to live with in-laws? And what sort of relationship was there between them? Were the premises that they were living in at present damp, or otherwise unfit for habitation or, in the case of a sick or disabled applicant, unsuitable for that particular person? Did they have roots in the area where the houses were becoming available (particularly important in rural communities)? How long had they been trying to get more suitable accommodation?

Neither Clacton nor Gipping had a ‘points system’ of allocation. Had they had such a system it would have made life easier for me – but both Councils felt that no points system could adequately measure housing need. One question that I never asked applicants, and I am glad that I was never required to, was their income. Both Councils allocated houses on the basis of need for housing, neither wealth nor poverty being considered. Obviously it was those on the lower incomes who were most likely to be in need of accommodation – but not exclusively so. The son or daughter of a middle class family might be thoroughly miserable as a result of having to live with their spouse in an in-laws home, and might have a job with a great future – but still be unable to purchase a home, and unable to find anywhere private to let.


Both authorities for which I worked had modest, but steady, annual house building programmes. There were also ‘casual vacancies’ as tenants died, moved away or bought their own homes. This meant that, at least during my period of office both in Gipping and Clacton no-one and no family was ever left completely homeless, nor did we ever have to resort to bed-and-breakfast accommodation to prevent this.

Councils could attract key staff for themselves or for newly establishing enterprises by offering them council accommodation until they were in a position to buy a home in the area. My wife and I lived for a year in a Council House in Thorpe le Soken, and our younger son was born there. We then lived briefly in a Council House in The Chase, Holland-on-Sea before buying the bungalow in Dudley Road, Clacton, where I am typing these words today. There was no question of Council House provision being a ‘social service’, only available to the really needy. There was no stigma – or at least Heather and I never felt one, in being a ‘council tenant’.

39 Byng Crescent, Thorpe-le-Soken. The Council House in which Heather and I lived for a year and in which our younger son Andy was born.

The Council, and I as their agent, encouraged tenants to be proud of their homes. Tenants who wished to carry out, often quite expensive, structural alterations were usually permitted – even encouraged - to do so. We liked them to cultivate and to be proud of their gardens, front and rear. In the Gipping Rural District there was an annual Council house gardens competition which concluded with the Chairman of the Council and the Judges visiting each group of Council Houses and, at a subsequent ceremony, presenting the tenant with the best garden, and the runner up, with prizes. A number of other tenants would receive honourable mentions – all of which would be reported, with pictures, in the local press.

The result was that our Council houses, and our Council estates were a source of pride. A couple of years after I had progressed from being Clacton’s last Housing Manager to Tendring Council’s first Public Relations Officer, I escorted an American visitor, studying British local administration, round the Clacton’s Percy King Estate. He was deeply impressed. ‘Public Housing’ in the USA was not a bit like that, he assured me.

A Post-Shakespearean Sonnet!

It may be thought that I have painted rather too idyllic a picture of Council Houses and Council House Management in the pre-1980s. There were tenants who defaulted on their rent, had quarrels with their neighbours, had late-night parties, lit smoky garden bonfires or otherwise behaved in an antisocial way. There were, no doubt, some local government officials who were cold-hearted, unbending bureaucrats. I hope that I was not among them

Myself as Housing Manager in 1972. I have to concede that I do look like a smooth-tongued bureaucrat as the lady who inspired my sonnet suggested – rather more forcibly!

Certainly, after every meeting of the Council’s Tenants Selection Committee there were bitterly disappointed people with whom I had to deal. An overheard snatch of conversation after just such a difficult interview inspired me to compose a sonnet that I thought might, forty years on, interest blog readers. It represents my first and only attempt at real poetry (as distinct from doggerel to entertain the grandchildren) and it did, many years ago, earn me an ‘honourable mention’ in a regional amateur poetry competition.

After the Interview

‘No, nothing doing yet, “A thousand on the list”,
He says, “Come back in early May”.
Our application “missed
The last committee”. It’s “coming up next time”.
I answered all his questions; gave him proof
We paid the rent, and still had got to quit.
The smooth-tongued sod! He’s never lacked a roof
Over his head! I stripped our marriage bare,
Told him we fight; how Craig and Tracy yell.
Told him about the dampness on the stair,
And in the bedroom. It was wasted breath.
I’d like to see all Council men in Hell!

And that blonde bimbo with her bawling brat,
That lives above the pub – she’s got a flat!’

There was a ‘happy ending’. I am sure that the lady’s opinion of me changed a little two months later, when I was able to offer her husband, her two children (whose names, incidentally, were not Craig and Tracy) and herself, the tenancy of a new three bed-roomed council house.

The Future – Rubbish homes for Rubbish People?

All the above was between forty and sixty years ago. While I was in their employ, both Gipping Rural District Council and Clacton Urban District Council had Conservative majorities, though in those days no councillor was ever expected to follow blindly a ‘party line’ contrary to his or her conscience or common sense. Neither council ever agreed to sell any of their council houses either to their occupiers or to anyone else – although both were asked to do so on a number of occasions.

They both believed that their housing stock was a sacred trust passed on to them by their far-sighted predecessors who were determined that, in their district at least, the aim would always be to have no-one homeless, overcrowded or badly housed – and that there would always been a home, in their local community, for those growing up there. They were determined to expand that legacy and pass it on to their successors.

Right to buy ended all that! In this blog I have already denounced, probably ad nauseum, this 1980s legislation that compelled local authorities to sell off their houses at bargain basement prices - the chicanery of the government that introduced it, (‘buying votes with other people’s money) the cowardice and myopia of the New Labour Government that failed to repeal it.

It is really impossible though to exaggerate its malign effects, some of which have only become evident in recent years. Few, for instance, could have realized at the time of its passing the way in which it would help destroy village communities that had existed for generations. Their council houses were sold on – as second homes or as weekend residences for businessmen and women commuting to the nearest city daily. At the same time, Right to Buy was playing a part in the house price inflation that put new homes beyond the means of ordinary villagers. It also, of course, played a part in the nation-wide borrowing spree that culminated in the financial crisis we are currently struggling to overcome.

The best council houses have long since been sold off to ‘the best’ – or at least the better off – tenants, many of whom have since sold them on at a comfortable profit. There are, as had been eminently predictable – long waiting lists for Council and Housing Association property that show no sign of shortening. The present government’s solution will complete the destruction of ‘social housing’ begun by its predecessors. Council (and presumably Housing Association?) tenancies will, in the future, be of two years duration only. At the end of that period tenants will have their incomes assessed and, if they are deemed to be high enough to permit them to buy or to rent privately, they will be expected to do so. Social housing in the future is to be for the very poor only!

Can you imagine any situation less likely to encourage tenants to cultivate their gardens, decorate their rooms or to take a pride in their homes? All Council Estates will become unredeemable slums. In less than half a century we will have progressed from properties and estates of which local communities could be proud, through second class homes for second class tenants, to rubbish homes for those perceived as rubbish people! There’s progress for you!


We Brits are a rum owd lot!

Only a week, or was it two weeks, ago I was suggesting that our Prime Minister should take a little more care in choosing his advisers. One of them, needless to say someone whom Lady Thatcher would have unhesitating accepted as being ‘one of us’, had announced that despite all the much-publicised cut-backs, most people (I suppose he meant most of the people who really mattered) ‘had never had it so good’.

He resigned his honorary position but I don’t suppose for a moment that he has changed his opinion. Now we have another protégé of the Prime Minister – one destined, on his recommendation, for the House of Lords – assuring us that the exclusion of those paying the higher rate of income tax from child benefit would simply prevent ‘Middle England’ ‘from breeding’, while all those terrible oiks on unemployment benefit would continue to breed like rabbits!

We Brits really are a run owd lot! Wealthy people have to be bribed with millions of pounds to persuade them to give of their best. Poor people have to be threatened with the loss of the little that they have, to persuade them to work at all. Now, it seems, the loss of a few quid threatens the reproductive capacity of the very-comfortably-off!

Week 47.10 23rd Nov. 2010

Tendring Topics……….on Line

Back to the Wild West?

I have always had quite a warm feeling for the Coalition’s Justice Minister, Ken Clarke. I don’t care for his connection with the tobacco industry. Nor do I share his enthusiasm for Formula One motor racing. He does though seem more human than the average politician and (now that smoking has been banned on all railway trains!) I can imagine that he might be a congenial accidental companion on a long rail journey!

I admired his public opposition to the invasion of Iraq against the policy of his own party and that of the government, and his consistently pro-European attitude that lost him the leadership of the Conservative Party and infuriates such Europhobes as our own MP. I agreed too with his contention that short prison sentences are more likely to lead to relapses into crime shortly after release than to the reformation of the criminal.

I even found it in me to feel sorry for him as he broke the news that the government, rather than defend protracted civil law suits, was paying thousands of pounds in compensation to prisoners and ex-prisoners who alleged that they had been tortured with British connivance. Clearly he had had nothing to do with the interrogations at which the alleged torture had taken place and I doubt very much if he had made the decision to pay out generous compensation.

His arbitrary cutting of legal aid though, was surely a step to far. Find ways of eliminating frivolous law suits by all means. Limit the fees of barristers and reduce the salaries of judges. Reduce the time wasting involved in any legal action. But to make British justice inaccessible to the poor and underprivileged, the very people who most need its protection, is surely inexcusable.

Think particularly of the position of vulnerable spouses and innocent children where marriages or partnerships have broken up and child custody is involved. Those who cannot afford the services of a barrister (a very large proportion of those concerned!) will be denied the judgement and protection of the law. I foresee an increase in cases of domestic violence, of child abuse, of child abduction and kidnapping – perhaps of children being transported, against their will and against the will of ‘the other parent’, to distant lands where customs, cultural and moral values, and human rights are very different from our own.

Nor does it seem likely that the police will any longer be readily available to protect the vulnerable. The maintenance of law and order has always been in the forefront of Conservative Policy. The Party’s members yearn for a return of the days when ‘the policeman on his beat’ was a symbol of the availability of the enforcement of the law and struck terror into the hearts of vandals, hooligans and petty criminals.

That, I fear, is something that under the present government, they are not going to get! Police Authorities all over the country are cutting their budgets. This means that they are not going to maintain even their present standard of policing, never mind improving it. Manchester for instance, not exactly a crime-and-problem- free city, is cutting its police budget by 25 percent. There is no way in which ‘front line’ police services will be maintained after a cut of that magnitude. One might almost imagine that our prison population had already been enfranchised and that the coalition was angling for the ‘criminal vote’! They are certainly creating a brighter future for professional criminals, if for nobody else.

I hope that members of the government aren’t imagining that David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ volunteers will step into the law-and-order breach. It is easy to imagine our country descending into lawlessness resembling that of America’s 19th century Wild West. It certainly won’t be put right by issuing enthusiastic vigilantes with ‘Deputy Sheriff’s stars’, forming them into a posse, and encouraging them ‘to leap onto their mustangs and head off them goldarned thieving rustlers (or whatever) at the pass’

The World of the 1930s

Have you been watching Turn back Time: The High Street, on BBC1 tv on Tuesday evenings? They have been ‘re-creating’ a small-town High Street at various periods of its history. Last week’s (on 16 November) was of particular interest to me as a shop in Clacton’s Pier Avenue – not that you would have recognised it! – was one of the businesses re-created. The date of re-creation was 1938 and it was supposed to be typical of the 1930s generally.

Me (left), about 1935, with cousin Ron from London. Ron and I were good friends and occasionally got into terrible trouble together.

In 1930 I was ten years old and moving from primary to secondary school. In 1939, before my 18th birthday, I joined the Army as a Territorial volunteer. The ‘thirties were a decade in which I progressed from childhood through teenage to being almost-an-adult. It was a period in which I left school, started work and joined the army. In 1939 (on the day World War II broke out) I met the girl to whom I was destined to be happily married for sixty years. I well remember those fateful ten years; remember them better, in fact, than the events of yesterday or of last week!

Myself in February or March 1939. Not yet 18, I had volunteered to be a spare-time soldier in the Territorial Army

As so often happens when I watch a documentary or drama set in the ‘30s or ‘40s (Foyle’s War was an exception), they never seem to get the atmosphere or the details quite right.

The High Street grocer in the programme had a very large stock of sweets in jars and these really seemed to be a considerable part of his trade. In 1938 I had progressed beyond sweets and was into fags! In earlier years though my mates and I would never have dreamed of going to a High Street grocer for our sweets. They had them, of course, but they’d have been expensive and the, to us posh, grocers wouldn’t have welcomed unaccompanied ‘scruffy kids’ into their shops To get the most out of our ha’pennies and pennies we’d go to the back-street and corner shops – often the front room of a terraced house well stocked with a few cheap but popular sweets which were sold at a tiny profit to bring the ‘shop keeper’ a few inches above the poverty line.

Heather and I when we first met in September 1939. I was in the army but preferred to wear ‘civvies’ to take my new girlfriend to ‘the pictures’.

High Street Grocer’s shops I remember for their distinctive smell – a blend of the aromas of cheese, ham, tea and coffee; and for the wonderful slicing machines with which they’d cut perhaps just two or three slim slices of ham exactly to customer requirements, and the thin wire with which they would cut huge cheeses into manageable pieces. Then there were the wooden paddles used to shape pounds or half-pounds of butter or lard, and the scoop for flour, sugar or tea – all sold loose and packed into paper bags of course. Selling Groceries in those days was a skilled job, very different from getting packets off a shelf!

Another matter that on the tv programme certainly wasn’t as I remembered it, was the preparation for a street party held on Empire Day (24th May). We did remember Empire Day of course but it wasn’t a public holiday and, it was just an ordinary workday for most people. At school things were different. In my primary school I remember that we marched round the playground and saluted the Union Jack that fluttered proudly overhead. At Assembly the headmaster would pray for the Empire and its people and we would sing patriotic hymns and songs.

At my Secondary School we didn’t do any saluting but we too had a ‘patriotic’ assembly with a brief history lesson about The Empire and we always sang Kipling’s Recessional. As we cheerfully sang ‘Our faded pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre’ we little thought that fifty years on that prophecy at least would be fulfilled – and that most of us would then think that that was a good thing. Also on that day we always had a guest speaker – from India, New Zealand, Southern Rhodesia or some other outpost of Empire – who would tell us about the great careers that beckoned ‘out there’ to ambitious young men prepared to carry the white man’s burden and help the natives toward civilisation. There were certainly no street parties or all-age celebrations.

Despite these reservations I did enjoy last Tuesday’s Turn Back Time. It was an interesting programme that stirred a few memories for me, and would have given younger viewers at least a flavour of the time. I am glad that I watched it.

Never had it so good?

David Cameron really should choose his advisors more wisely. He surely has already enough very-comfortably-off upper middle class folk around him to be well aware of how they are enduring his efforts to solve Britain’s financial problems. What he badly needs is a few opinions from the real world of shabby streets with broken paving stones and obscene graffiti, of crowded and unreliable public transport, of job insecurity, a struggle for survival for the sick and disabled, and of Saturday night binge drinking for the young.

Lord Young, one of David Cameron’s closest advisors, really put his foot in it when he echoed a former Prime Minister who had announced, with a great deal more justification than Lord Young, that most people ‘had never had it so good!’ This confirmed my own opinion, that of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of every truly independent observer, that it is the poor and the vulnerable who are suffering the pain imposed by attempts to remedy Britain’s economic problems, while those likely to be in Lord Young’s social circle have not suffered even the mildest inconvenience.

There’s one little matter of fact on which Lord Young – and a great many other people – need to be corrected. Home owners (and I am among them!) do not benefit from low mortgage interest rates. We have paid off our mortgages and have, for the most part, put our subsequent savings into accounts administered by the same banks or building societies that had formerly loaned us the money for our home purchase. We are now seeing our hard-earned savings diminish in value as inflation outpaces the miserable amount of interest paid on these accounts.

Those who do at present benefit from the low interest rates, are the home buyers who are paying off their mortgages. They should make the most of that advantage because, as they will find out soon enough that if circumstances compel them to default on their repayments, the bank or building society is the true owner of their home. What is more, house prices are now falling. If they are now compelled to sell, they risk losing not only their homes but much of the money that they have already paid off their mortgages.

Footnote: I wrote the above before Lord Young resigned his honorary office of adviser to the Government. When I heard that he had done so I was considering erasing it. Then I heard on BBC Radio 4, David Mellor who served with Lord Young in a Thatcher government, strenuously defending his former colleague and castigating David Cameron for having had the impudence to rebuke him. It was obvious to me that although Lord Young had departed, his spirit was still among us. My comments remain unchanged!

Week 46 10 16th Nov. 2010

Tendring Topics………on Line

Full Marks for Ingenuity!

I have to give Britain’s coalition government full marks for ingenuity. The announcement of their new ‘workfare’ idea revealed true genius. Originating, as I suppose we might have guessed, in the USA, it means that people on benefit who are considered capable of any sort of work (never mind the fact that there may not be any appropriate work for them) will lose some of their meagre allowance unless they undertake ‘voluntary work’ for the community. The tv image of a ‘benefit volunteer’ happily swabbing hospital floors in a tv news bulletin revealed the true brilliance of the scheme.

In order to achieve the cuts demanded by central government, local and other public authorities, and managers of large private institutions, are having to ‘downsize’, ‘rationalise’, or ‘re-evaluate their human resources’, or whatever else may be the current fashionable euphemism for sacking some of their staff. Among those sacked will be computer programmers, draughtsmen, and other holders of jobs demanding skill, long training, and experience. There will also be holders of menial jobs – cleaners, porters, gardeners and so on. But floors will still need to be cleaned and rubbish cleared away, trolleys pushed from one place to another, hedges trimmed, lawns swept clear of leaves, vehicles hosed down, and so on.

That’s where those happy, smiling volunteers appear on the scene. ‘Menial tasks’ (I quote a government spokesman) that had been undertaken by employees on at least the minimum wage, will now be carried out by ‘volunteers’ regardless of their professional skills and experience, for a benefit guaranteed to be lower than the pay obtainable by anyone ‘in work’. Further cuts will ensure a never-ending supply of such cheap labour. This is called ‘encouraging the workless (and by implication the work-shy) back into work!’

Not even the most hard-nosed owners of Blake’s ‘dark, satanic mills’, of the early nineteenth century could have dreamed up a better way of obtaining cheap labour!

The Chinese ‘Secret Weapon’

No, there’s no cause for alarm. It’s not that kind of a weapon and it is not in the possession of the present or any likely future Chinese government, but of the ethnic Chinese whether they live in mainland China, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan or in London. It is a weapon that hurts no-one and is available to us all if we wish to have it. It is, I am convinced, of immense value to those who possess it, yet in Britain in recent years, fewer and fewer people seem to appreciate this.

It is a thirst for and a deep appreciation of the value of education. I first became aware of this as a result of emails from my grandson Chris who teaches English both to young children and adults in Taiwan, after having first done this in mainland China. We had been reading in our British newspapers about rising truancy in British schools, disrupted classes, violence toward teachers, and children who expected to be rewarded for simply turning up regularly and refraining from disruptive behaviour. Chris, on the other hand, was telling me about children eager to learn, and to please and earn the praise of their teachers, and of parents who gladly offered co-operation and respect to those who were helping their offspring to ‘get on in the world’.
Chris (at the back on the right) with some of his colleagues

It seems that this attitude towards education is to be found in Chinese worldwide. My younger son Andy (when one is old, how helpful it is to have eyes and ears elsewhere than in Clacton!) sent me a press cutting from the Guardian about the prowess of British Chinese in the field of education.

Nationwide in 2009, 26.6 percent of pupils eligible for free school meals (children from poorer families) achieved five or more GCSE grades (including maths and English) between grades C and A*. British Chinese children who were also eligible for free meals achieved 70.8 percent. Overall there was a wide attainment gap between children from the poorest and those from the better-off children. Among the Chinese, the gap between that of the children of the wealthy and the poor was just two percent. The Chinese poor are obviously just as keen as the wealthy to further their children’s education. So it is for young people and adults. British Chinese people of school-leaving age and over, are four times as likely to be full-time students as the rest of us.

The explanation, the Guardian reporter was told, was that with the Chinese, ‘education isn’t just desirable; its an obsession. Parents don’t just want their children to do well; they assume a ferocious duty to make it happen. Young children know that they have to study hard not to disappoint parents. The children have their own incentives too. A lot grow up in restaurants and want a different life for themselves. They work ten times as hard. Customers see the front of the restaurant. They don’t see the son or daughter of the proprietor bent over homework on a little table somewhere in the rear, under the occasional watchful eye of an adult’.

I dare not think what a twenty-first century British ‘educationalist’ or child psychiatrist would think of it all. I have little doubt though that it is dedication of this kind that will produce Britain’s leading lawyers, doctors, scientists and top politicians of the future.

'Thank you My Lord Archbishop'

It is always very pleasant to have our ideas, particularly when they are a little controversial, endorsed by someone for whom we have the greatest admiration and respect. I was delighted therefore to note that my concern about the effects of the government’s cuts on the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society are shared by no less a person than Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and head of the Church of England and of the Anglican Church world-wide.

Not only did he endorse my general concern on this subject. He also referred to a matter that hadn’t occurred to me but had been raised by my son Peter in his letter to his Lib. Dem. MP; the fact that capping housing benefit at £400 a week would have the effect of driving all but the very-comfortably-off out of city centres, particularly out of central London.

A glaring example of this was recently illustrated in Metro, the London free newspaper. A two-bedroomed council flat in London’s Elephant and Castle area (a traditionally working class neighbourhood) had been sold to an existing tenant under the infamous ‘right to buy’ legislation. It had subsequently been resold and was now advertised to let – at £500 a week! Here was a property that had been provided by local taxpayers at public expense to house working people. It was now being made inaccessible to the people for whom it had been intended. It could however be expected to make a comfortable profit for its now-private owner.

Needless to say, the Archbishop’s warning was greeted with derision by the popular press. In the columns of the Sun the Archbishop was described as ‘a chump’ and his words as ‘Bish-bosh*’. I don’t imagine that Dr Rowan Williams was greatly concerned. He was the latest in long line of spiritual leaders who have dared to criticise established authority, ranging from the Old Testament prophets through St Thomas a Becket, one of Dr Rowan Williams’ distinguished predecessors, and Fr. John Ball of Colchester, a leader of the Peasants Revolt, to the martyred Archbishop Romero of Costa Rica, Sheila Cassidy who endured torture at the hands of the henchmen of General Pinochet of Chile and later became a nun, Trevor Huddlestone, Archbishop of Mauritius and the Indian Ocean, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.

We hear a great deal in the press about ‘The Christian Religious Right’ particularly in the USA (Sarah Palin and her ‘Tea Party’ friends for instance). It is good to be reminded from time to time that there is, and always has been, a Christian Religious Left and a Christian Religious Centre, and that among their leaders have been men and women of renowned courage and spirituality!

*The Sun tries desperately hard to speak the language of the English Working Class of whom it aspires to be the voice. It never quite succeeds. When, for instance, did you last hear anyone wearing workman’s overalls describe a stupid person as ‘a chump’ or his utterances as ‘bosh’?

Week 45.10 9th November 2010

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Worse than heroin?

The official claim that alcohol does more harm to individuals and to society than heroin and cocaine, must have come as something as a shock to a great many of us. There have always, of course, been a number of drunks and alcoholics who wrecked their own lives and those of their immediate families. However, until the Government relaxed the licensing laws ‘so that we could learn to drink sensibly like our continental neighbours!’ one rarely, if ever, saw anyone visibly drunk in a town centre. The idea of groups of young people, mostly under 20, going out together at weekends and drinking for no other purpose than to get drunk, was totally alien.

Now, we have all become accustomed to tv news bulletins of the Police trying to clear the streets of drunken, abusive and violent teenagers, often fighting each other after binge drinking on a Friday or Saturday night. Even more disquieting is the news that, at weekends, the treatment of victims of genuine accidents in Hospital Accident and Emergency Departments is often delayed while professional staff deal with the out-of-control subjects of self-inflicted alcohol poisoning. Nowadays too, no one is particularly surprised to see someone lurch unsteadily out of a pub doorway at three o’clock in the afternoon!

Recently I saw a number of tv documentaries about the way in which some – I am sure a small minority – of teenagers abuse their bodies and shorten their lives as they pursue ephemeral pleasure through promiscuous sex and unrestricted consumption of alcohol. A nineteen year old diabetic girl, who had been brought into hospital (not for the first time!) unconscious and suffering from alcohol poisoning summed up the attitude of ‘a lost generation’ by announcing after she had regained consciousness ‘I’m gonna do what I wanna do when I wanna do it’.

It is, no doubt, shaming incidents like these that have led to the conclusion that alcohol is more dangerous than heroin and cocaine. It takes no account of other equally valid images of working men chatting companionably with their mates over a friendly evening or weekend pint, of a bottle of wine broached and shared at a celebratory meal, or of elderly pensioners (I can’t be the only one!) sipping a nightcap of watered down whisky while watching a tv programme before going to bed. We are urged ‘to drink responsibly’ and tens of thousands of us do just that. Neither heroin nor cocaine ever is, or can be, used moderately, companionably and responsibly.

I think it very unlikely that announcing that alcohol does more harm than heroin or cocaine will turn a single heavy drinker into a moderate one, much less a teetotaller. What it very probably will do is to produce more junkies drawn into drug abuse by the whisper; ‘Come on, try it. There’s nothing else quite like it, and - haven’t you heard? – it is now officially recognised as being less harmful than alcohol.

‘Kick away the ladder – I’m safely up it!’

Every current Member of Parliament who holds a University Degree had his or her University tuition fees paid by the state. Those whose parents might have had difficulty maintaining them during their time away from home, received a generous grant towards their living costs. They wouldn’t have had to be desperately poor to qualify for such a grant. I was a middle rank council official in 1971 when my elder son was offered a place at Cambridge. The County Council, as Education Authority, paid half the estimated cost of his maintenance. The other half was the ‘parental contribution’ paid by me.

These are facts that should be written in letters of fire in the House of Commons when those same MPs are deciding to limit undergraduate living grants only to ‘the very needy’ and raise the sum that Universities can charge students for their tuition fees to as much as £9,000 a year! It’s a policy which, in the army we used to describe as, ‘Up ladder Jack!’ shorthand for ‘Kick away the ladder Jack, I’m safely up it!

Nowadays students are expected to recognise and repay the advantage that a University degree gives them in the jobs market. They can obtain student loans to cover living costs and tuition fees, which they repay by instalments once their income rises above £21,000 a year. This means that graduates typically begin their working lives with a burden of debt in the region of £20,000. With increased tuition fees, that sum is clearly destined to increase, probably to double, in the future.

My wife Heather and I had been brought up in working class homes with a horror of debt. Had the situation been the same in the 1970s as it is today, we certainly wouldn’t have encouraged our offspring to aspire to a university education.

The present government complains repeatedly (and probably with good reason) about the burden of debt imposed on us all by the policies of their predecessors. How extraordinary therefore that they should be cheerfully transferring some of that burden to the individual shoulders of the very gifted young people on whose skills we are relying to get us out of this crisis brought about primarily (let us never forget) by the avarice and incompetence of our financial services and the short-sightedness of our politicians.

How should the situation be dealt with? We could bear in mind that a university degree hasn’t quite suddenly conferred on its possessors an unfair advantage in the jobs market. Those graduate MPs were undoubtedly helped in their political careers by their university successes. So were most successful bankers, businessmen and women, captains of industry, and high flying civil servants

Why shouldn’t they begin, however belatedly, to repay the unfair advantage that they have had over their less fortunate fellow men and women. And what about those who, by the accident of birth, followed their parents into privileged positions? Being the son or daughter of a Press Lord, a merchant banker or the head of an international corporation confers an advantage far greater than that enjoyed by even the most distinguished scholar.

A properly graded (and loophole free!) income tax system would solve this problem, and give the wealthy the opportunity to bear their fair share of the national burden. No one would be asked to pay a penny more than they could afford and it might have been thought that our MPs would sleep more soundly at night in the knowledge that they were no longer imposing on others a burden that they themselves were not bearing.

But that is the one remedy that so far has never been seriously considered!

A footnote

Did you see that the new head of one of our Banks is to have an annual salary of £1 million, plus estimated bonuses of £2 million? It was explained that the justification for this was that the bank had to secure the very best for the post. It is a poor outlook for Great Britain and indeed for the world, when the very best in any field of human activity, can be obtained only by offering bribes on this scale.

Many of those whose memory we shall be honouring in churches and at war memorials next Sunday (14th November) lost their lives, the most precious thing that they possessed, for as little as ‘two bob a day*!

A week or so ago I quoted the refrain from one of Bob Dylan’s popular ‘protest’ songs of the ‘60s – ‘The answer is blowing in the wind’. Here’s a refrain from ‘Where have all the flowers gone’, another popular protest song of that period. It seems particularly relevant to the matter of bankers’ monetary rewards:

‘When will they ever learn, Oh, when will they ever learn!’ When indeed?

*‘two bob’ (two shillings or 10p) a day was a private’s – or gunner’s - pay when I was called up into the army in 1939. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I it was one shilling (5p) a day.

Name Calling!

Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have referred to England as ‘Perfidious Albion’. I suppose therefore that our neighbours across the Channel can’t complain too bitterly at being described by Bernard Jenkin, Conservative MP for Harwich and North Essex (whose judgements don’t have quite the same weight as Napoleon’s) as the Duplicitous French. Criticising the Government’s decision to share some defence facilities with the French, he is reported as having said ‘We need to recognise France has never shared, and is never likely to share, the same strategic priorities as the UK. There is a long track record of duplicity on the French part’.

David Cameron’s grasp of twentieth century history seemed a little shaky when he asserted (and was quickly corrected!) that Britain was the ‘junior partner’ of the USA in the struggle against Hitler in 1940. It seems that Mr Jenkin’s grasp is even shakier. I would have thought that French sharing with us the carnage on the Western Front of World War I indicated a certain unity of purpose with the UK. The USA, whom I imagine Mr Jenkins does regard as a reliable ally, took part only in the final year of the struggle. Then again, Britain with the Commonwealth, and France were alone among the world’s nations in declaring war on Hitler’s Germany when the Nazis invaded Poland. Hitler had not directly attacked either country but both believed that destroying Nazi Germany was ‘a shared strategic priority’. The USA? They joined in only when Hitler declared war on them in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Duplicitous? Well – the French did supply the Exocet missiles that the Argentines used with murderous effect on our Naval Task Force, but then we had trained some of the Argentine troops who had invaded the Falklands. They didn’t know that it was to be against British ships that those Exocets would be used - any more than when we helped train the ‘gallant and freedom-loving Mojihadin’ to kill and maim Soviet troops, had we known that those heroic Mojihadin were to become the fanatical Taliban using the skills we had taught them, to kill our troops!

The French did have the independence and force of character to resist being drawn into an illegal war in Iraq which, as well as costing thousands of lives and ruining the country's infrastructure, has done more to recruit volunteers to Islamic terrorism than any number of inflammatory sermons could ever hope to do. Come to think of it, wasn’t it just a little duplicitous to persuade British MPs to vote for war against Iraq by convincing them of that country’s non-existent links with international terrorism and its imaginary weapons of mass destruction?

Christmas Stamps

The celebratory Postage stamps for Christmas 2010 are now available in Post Offices. The secular stamps feature Wallace and Gromit, and very cheery and colourful they are.

However for those of us who like our Christmas greetings to be carried in an envelope with a stamp bearing a relationship to Christ’s Nativity, the very attractive 1st and 2nd Class Madonna-and-child stamps, that have been available for the past two years are available again. You do have to ask for them specifically though. At my branch Post Office the usually-very-helpful lady behind the counter looked at me in total astonishment when, after enquiring about Christmas stamps, I added that I would like the religious ones. ‘You mean you don’t want the Wallace and Gromit ones?’ she asked incredulously. ‘That’s right’, I said, ‘I believe that there are some 1st and 2nd Class Virgin-and-child stamps available. Those are the ones I want please’. Clearly taken aback, she disappeared into a back room for several minutes, and emerged bearing some sheets of the stamps I wanted in her hands.

She was even more astonished when I asked for quite a lot of each denomination. I could almost read the thoughts going through her head. ‘The poor old chap’s really off his rocker this time. He can’t possibly be sending off that number of Christmas cards and letters. Ought I to take his money?’ She was, of course, quite right about that. I don’t send off that amount of Christmas post. However I do like to use those stamps throughout the year as a quiet and unobtrusive affirmation of Christian Faith. I think that the supply that I bought last Christmas lasted me through to mid-October!

Oh yes, and they can prove a worthwhile investment too. When, as happened this year, the price of stamps goes up, First and Second Class stamps retain their value, whatever may have been their price at the time of purchase!