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
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!
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!
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