Tendring Topics…….on line
Prepared for the weather?
Do you remember last winter, how it went on and on? And do you remember how, directly it was over, Essex County Council, as one of England’s largest highway authorities, called a conference of all such authorities, to discuss dealing with snowed-up highways in future years. I can’t remember what the conference decided. I do remember though that Lord Hanningfield (then leader of Essex County Council) announced that it had been a great success. It was, he claimed, yet another example of Essex County Council leading the way and others following!
Well, winter has undoubtedly come onto us early this year and, before the end of November snow covered a great deal of the country. We had the usual toll of traffic accidents and of traffic halted or reduced to a crawl. Highway authorities began salting and gritting major roads in an effort to keep traffic moving. Most of them, (who knows, perhaps they had been inspired by that conference!) announced that this year they wouldn’t be caught out. They had enormous stocks of grit and salt available and had ample reserves accessible if they needed them.
I think that they may have been a little over-confident. They started using up their salt stock before the beginning of December. No-one can possibly know how long the winter will last and how many days and nights of freezing temperatures and lying snow we would have to endure before the spring. Shelley concludes his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ with the rhetorical question, ‘O Wind – if winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ The only honest answer to that is, ‘Yes, sometimes it can be!’ There are no certainties where the weather is concerned.
There were no such boasts from County Hall in Chelmsford. Unaccustomed modesty? Perhaps – but on 25th November the Coastal Gazette carried the alarming report that, ‘Essex may run out of road gritting salt if this winter becomes as bad as last year’. The report goes on to say:
‘Despite improvements to the quality of the salt and closer relationships with other authorities to improve gritting, another bad winter could make public highways dangerous for pedestrians, shoppers and drivers.
Figures in Essex County Council’s winter operational document for 2010/2011 show that Essex will have less than the minimum material recommended every week for the winter. Some depots do not have the capacity to store even the minimum.‘
‘
Norman Hume, county councillor responsible for highways and transportation agreed that the council had made provision only for a ‘normal’ winter and not for the conditions that we had experienced during the past two years. ‘We started with the salt barns full to capacity but the problem was re-supply. As a nation we can’t put resources into a policy not required except in exceptional circumstances’
I would hardly think that conditions that prevailed throughout the last two winters and look set to continue this year could be regarded as particularly exceptional!
The weather has been worse. Here is the sea frozen over near Clacton Pier in the early months of 1963. That year we had hard frosts until well into early spring
The county council does not plan to salt residential or minor roads, but will concentrate on major routes with local councils helping in town centres. Where, I wonder, will local councils find the funding to carry out this Highway Authority task?
Altogether, unless the weather gets much kinder, it is a pretty poor outlook this winter for local motorists, cyclists and pedestrians (and, of course, mobility scooterists; snowfall is the only circumstance that keeps my ‘iron horse’, confined to stable!) It’s not really what those who live in a county with a council that claims to ‘lead the rest!’ would expect.
In Vino Veritas
No, I didn’t have a classical education (I envy those who did!) but along life’s way most of us pick up a few Latin phrases and In Vino Veritas (Truth is in the wine) is one of mine. It means that alcohol loosens the tongue, frees us from our inhibitions and reveals our true nature. Thus, under the influence of a couple of drinks, a road sweeper may be revealed as a true gentleman and a Duke as something of an oaf.
The leaked (by Wikileaks) report of Prince Andrew’s indiscreet speech at a ‘brunch’ in Kyrgyzstan that he had attended as a British trade representative, suggests to me that His Royal Highness should have had a little more ‘tonic’ in his host’s pre-meal vodka-and-tonic. Surely he wouldn’t otherwise have made unflattering remarks about our American cousins with the American Ambassador present.
More serious though was his claim that it was ‘idiocy’ to investigate the allegations of bribery having taken place during the course of a major arms deal with Saudi Arabia, and to have denounced snooping Guardian journalists investigating bribery and corruption in other overseas trade deals. Perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that the American report on the incident said that the other Brits present had greeted these remarks not with disapproval but with enthusiasm.
Perhaps they too had had a drop too much. I hope so. It would be very sad indeed if, when stone cold sober, representatives of our country believed that there was some moral difference between offering a bribe and accepting one, and that it was quite all right for Britons to bribe influential ‘foreigners’ to obtain lucrative overseas contracts for British firms.
Can they really believe that morality, like religion, is a private matter for the individual conscience ………but that business is business and obeys no rules but its own?
Healthy North-East Essex?
I have always believed that the Tendring District, and in particular its coastal area is a good and healthy place to live. Low rainfall, fresh air blowing in off the sea, and lots of sunshine, combine to account for the fact that there are a great many oldies in our district. Some, like me, have grown old here, others have chosen to come here on retirement. More of us than in most areas survive and even thrive, into our eighties.
This is just as well because a recently published NHS report makes it clear that appreciably less is spent by the NHS in north-east Essex, in the Colchester and Tendring Districts, than in other parts of our county. The North-East Essex Primary Care Trust spends up to £8,000 per 1,000 residents less on cancer treatment (cancer is a condition more likely to afflict the old than the young) than Trusts in south Essex. Our primary care trust spends between £140,00 and £170,00 on mental health while in the south-east of the county they spend between £200,000 and £240,000.
People in north Essex are less likely to receive a needed hip replacement than their counterparts in the south and patients with chronic lung disease (another affliction of the elderly) are likely to face a longer hospital stay in Colchester and Clacton than elsewhere in the county. This, says the report, ‘does them more harm than good’.
Will the government’s plan to abolish primary care trusts and put commissioning of health care in the hands of GPs help reduce these inequalities. Bernard Jenkin, North Essex and Harwich MP thinks so. He is reported as saying, ‘What the government is going to do is remove the bureaucrats from the decisions about who gets treated, and the doctors are going to be put in charge of health treatment budgets. GPs choosing what treatments are made is the best way to create greater equality.’
Perhaps – but in the same issue of the Coastal Gazette that carries the NHS report we learn that a Dr Shane Gordon is the joint chief executive of the new GP consortium that will take over health-care budgets for Colchester and Tendring by 2013. I reckon that Dr Gordon will need quite a few lay clerical and administrative staff to help him with this task. Could it be just another bureaucratic organisation in the making
A Question of Extradition
Wikileaks revelations have brought the sad case of Gary McKinnon back into the public eye. I have to confess that I had completely forgotten this young IT genius who – clearly with no evil intent – had hacked his way into the defence secrets of the USA’s Pentagon! The sensible course of action of the US government would have been to ask him how he had done it, and ask him to co-operate in helping them to design a truly hack-proof system.
But no, for this dire offence ‘that threatened US security’ the USA wanted him to be extradited, in accordance with an extradition treaty accepted by Tony Blair, and to face trial in the USA. My opinion of Gordon Brown and David Cameron went up a notch or two when I learned that they had both intervened on Gary McKinnon’s behalf – and my opinion of Hilary Clinton dropped like a stone on learning that she had rejected their pleas.
I remember all too well how American Courts repeatedly refused to extradite convicted IRA murderers to England during the still-recent ‘troubles’. I remember too how a British Government had refused to extradite to Spain, General Pinochet, who had presided over the murders of hundreds of his fellow countrymen and others, and the torture of hundreds more, including Sheila Cassidy, a British doctor*. What a British government could do for Pinochet, its successors can do for Gary McKinnon.
But then, of course, General Pinochet had been a personal friend of Mrs Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) and of Norman Lamont (now Lord Lamont) her less-than-successful Chancellor.
*See ‘Audacity to Believe’ by Sheila Cassidy, published 1977 by Collins of London, Publishers.
Not all Surprises!
I was certainly surprised by some of the revelations from Wikileaks, which – as I write – are being fed to us daily. I was, for instance, quite astonished to discover that the Governor of the Bank of England’s assessment of the qualities of our Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer was much the same as my own – though his judgement is of course, much more firmly grounded in knowledge and experience than mine is.
I was not however in the least surprised that the British and American governments were both seriously concerned about the possibility of Pakistan’s Nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of terrorists, who might use those weapons against us and/or India. In fact, I’d have been very anxious had I thought that that they were not worried about this possibility.
I reckon that the fact that Pakistan, India and Israel actually have nuclear weapons should cause us a lot more anxiety than the thought that Iran may possibly one day acquire them.
Prepared for the weather?
Do you remember last winter, how it went on and on? And do you remember how, directly it was over, Essex County Council, as one of England’s largest highway authorities, called a conference of all such authorities, to discuss dealing with snowed-up highways in future years. I can’t remember what the conference decided. I do remember though that Lord Hanningfield (then leader of Essex County Council) announced that it had been a great success. It was, he claimed, yet another example of Essex County Council leading the way and others following!
Well, winter has undoubtedly come onto us early this year and, before the end of November snow covered a great deal of the country. We had the usual toll of traffic accidents and of traffic halted or reduced to a crawl. Highway authorities began salting and gritting major roads in an effort to keep traffic moving. Most of them, (who knows, perhaps they had been inspired by that conference!) announced that this year they wouldn’t be caught out. They had enormous stocks of grit and salt available and had ample reserves accessible if they needed them.
I think that they may have been a little over-confident. They started using up their salt stock before the beginning of December. No-one can possibly know how long the winter will last and how many days and nights of freezing temperatures and lying snow we would have to endure before the spring. Shelley concludes his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ with the rhetorical question, ‘O Wind – if winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ The only honest answer to that is, ‘Yes, sometimes it can be!’ There are no certainties where the weather is concerned.
There were no such boasts from County Hall in Chelmsford. Unaccustomed modesty? Perhaps – but on 25th November the Coastal Gazette carried the alarming report that, ‘Essex may run out of road gritting salt if this winter becomes as bad as last year’. The report goes on to say:
‘Despite improvements to the quality of the salt and closer relationships with other authorities to improve gritting, another bad winter could make public highways dangerous for pedestrians, shoppers and drivers.
Figures in Essex County Council’s winter operational document for 2010/2011 show that Essex will have less than the minimum material recommended every week for the winter. Some depots do not have the capacity to store even the minimum.‘
‘
Norman Hume, county councillor responsible for highways and transportation agreed that the council had made provision only for a ‘normal’ winter and not for the conditions that we had experienced during the past two years. ‘We started with the salt barns full to capacity but the problem was re-supply. As a nation we can’t put resources into a policy not required except in exceptional circumstances’
I would hardly think that conditions that prevailed throughout the last two winters and look set to continue this year could be regarded as particularly exceptional!
The weather has been worse. Here is the sea frozen over near Clacton Pier in the early months of 1963. That year we had hard frosts until well into early spring
The county council does not plan to salt residential or minor roads, but will concentrate on major routes with local councils helping in town centres. Where, I wonder, will local councils find the funding to carry out this Highway Authority task?
Altogether, unless the weather gets much kinder, it is a pretty poor outlook this winter for local motorists, cyclists and pedestrians (and, of course, mobility scooterists; snowfall is the only circumstance that keeps my ‘iron horse’, confined to stable!) It’s not really what those who live in a county with a council that claims to ‘lead the rest!’ would expect.
In Vino Veritas
No, I didn’t have a classical education (I envy those who did!) but along life’s way most of us pick up a few Latin phrases and In Vino Veritas (Truth is in the wine) is one of mine. It means that alcohol loosens the tongue, frees us from our inhibitions and reveals our true nature. Thus, under the influence of a couple of drinks, a road sweeper may be revealed as a true gentleman and a Duke as something of an oaf.
The leaked (by Wikileaks) report of Prince Andrew’s indiscreet speech at a ‘brunch’ in Kyrgyzstan that he had attended as a British trade representative, suggests to me that His Royal Highness should have had a little more ‘tonic’ in his host’s pre-meal vodka-and-tonic. Surely he wouldn’t otherwise have made unflattering remarks about our American cousins with the American Ambassador present.
More serious though was his claim that it was ‘idiocy’ to investigate the allegations of bribery having taken place during the course of a major arms deal with Saudi Arabia, and to have denounced snooping Guardian journalists investigating bribery and corruption in other overseas trade deals. Perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that the American report on the incident said that the other Brits present had greeted these remarks not with disapproval but with enthusiasm.
Perhaps they too had had a drop too much. I hope so. It would be very sad indeed if, when stone cold sober, representatives of our country believed that there was some moral difference between offering a bribe and accepting one, and that it was quite all right for Britons to bribe influential ‘foreigners’ to obtain lucrative overseas contracts for British firms.
Can they really believe that morality, like religion, is a private matter for the individual conscience ………but that business is business and obeys no rules but its own?
Healthy North-East Essex?
I have always believed that the Tendring District, and in particular its coastal area is a good and healthy place to live. Low rainfall, fresh air blowing in off the sea, and lots of sunshine, combine to account for the fact that there are a great many oldies in our district. Some, like me, have grown old here, others have chosen to come here on retirement. More of us than in most areas survive and even thrive, into our eighties.
This is just as well because a recently published NHS report makes it clear that appreciably less is spent by the NHS in north-east Essex, in the Colchester and Tendring Districts, than in other parts of our county. The North-East Essex Primary Care Trust spends up to £8,000 per 1,000 residents less on cancer treatment (cancer is a condition more likely to afflict the old than the young) than Trusts in south Essex. Our primary care trust spends between £140,00 and £170,00 on mental health while in the south-east of the county they spend between £200,000 and £240,000.
People in north Essex are less likely to receive a needed hip replacement than their counterparts in the south and patients with chronic lung disease (another affliction of the elderly) are likely to face a longer hospital stay in Colchester and Clacton than elsewhere in the county. This, says the report, ‘does them more harm than good’.
Will the government’s plan to abolish primary care trusts and put commissioning of health care in the hands of GPs help reduce these inequalities. Bernard Jenkin, North Essex and Harwich MP thinks so. He is reported as saying, ‘What the government is going to do is remove the bureaucrats from the decisions about who gets treated, and the doctors are going to be put in charge of health treatment budgets. GPs choosing what treatments are made is the best way to create greater equality.’
Perhaps – but in the same issue of the Coastal Gazette that carries the NHS report we learn that a Dr Shane Gordon is the joint chief executive of the new GP consortium that will take over health-care budgets for Colchester and Tendring by 2013. I reckon that Dr Gordon will need quite a few lay clerical and administrative staff to help him with this task. Could it be just another bureaucratic organisation in the making
A Question of Extradition
Wikileaks revelations have brought the sad case of Gary McKinnon back into the public eye. I have to confess that I had completely forgotten this young IT genius who – clearly with no evil intent – had hacked his way into the defence secrets of the USA’s Pentagon! The sensible course of action of the US government would have been to ask him how he had done it, and ask him to co-operate in helping them to design a truly hack-proof system.
But no, for this dire offence ‘that threatened US security’ the USA wanted him to be extradited, in accordance with an extradition treaty accepted by Tony Blair, and to face trial in the USA. My opinion of Gordon Brown and David Cameron went up a notch or two when I learned that they had both intervened on Gary McKinnon’s behalf – and my opinion of Hilary Clinton dropped like a stone on learning that she had rejected their pleas.
I remember all too well how American Courts repeatedly refused to extradite convicted IRA murderers to England during the still-recent ‘troubles’. I remember too how a British Government had refused to extradite to Spain, General Pinochet, who had presided over the murders of hundreds of his fellow countrymen and others, and the torture of hundreds more, including Sheila Cassidy, a British doctor*. What a British government could do for Pinochet, its successors can do for Gary McKinnon.
But then, of course, General Pinochet had been a personal friend of Mrs Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) and of Norman Lamont (now Lord Lamont) her less-than-successful Chancellor.
*See ‘Audacity to Believe’ by Sheila Cassidy, published 1977 by Collins of London, Publishers.
Not all Surprises!
I was certainly surprised by some of the revelations from Wikileaks, which – as I write – are being fed to us daily. I was, for instance, quite astonished to discover that the Governor of the Bank of England’s assessment of the qualities of our Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer was much the same as my own – though his judgement is of course, much more firmly grounded in knowledge and experience than mine is.
I was not however in the least surprised that the British and American governments were both seriously concerned about the possibility of Pakistan’s Nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of terrorists, who might use those weapons against us and/or India. In fact, I’d have been very anxious had I thought that that they were not worried about this possibility.
I reckon that the fact that Pakistan, India and Israel actually have nuclear weapons should cause us a lot more anxiety than the thought that Iran may possibly one day acquire them.
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