Week 9 1.3.11

Tendring Topics…….on Line

The Big Society – all from a bedtime story?

I had always imagined that David Cameron had snatched his ‘Big Society’ idea of local communities being responsible for their own services and being independent of Big Brother central government in Whitehall, from his own fertile imagination. Having searched my own memory though, I wonder if, while he was a little child, his mother or possibly his grandmother may have lulled him to sleep at night with stories of a golden age in a golden land where just such circumstances existed.

It wasn’t actually either a golden age or a golden land (bedtime stories don’t have to be boringly accurate!) but it is true that before World War II – which David Cameron’s grandma and perhaps even his mum – may have remembered, local communities did provide and manage services that are nowadays controlled either by central government, enormous private corporations, or large area authorities. They did it by means of local government – but it really was ‘local’ and its functions and responsibilities were very different from what is called ‘local government’ today.

Now taken over by the NHS, this was formerly Ipswich’s Public Health Department where I began my local government career in 1937. It housed a Maternity and Child Welfare Clinic, A School Clinic, and a TB Clinic as well as Health Visitors, District and School Nurses, and Sanitary Inspectors.

My first job was with Ipswich Corporation. At that time the population of the town was under 100,000 (a smaller and much more compact population than that of the Tendring District today). It had its poor and its wealthy but I think that it could reasonably have been considered to be ‘a community’. It was a community that elected its own representatives to its own Town Council. Each member was directly answerable to the electorate and liable to dismissal at the next election if it was decided that he had been a bad choice.

These democratically elected representatives of the local community ran every service that is run by any County, Borough or District Council today. They were much more independent though; deciding, for instance, whether or not they needed to build homes for letting and whether or not they would sell those homes to sitting tenants. In addition they provided gas and electricity, public transport, water supply, a sewerage system and sewage purification plant, social security (called poor law relief), a General Hospital, a Psychiatric Hospital (called a ‘Mental Hospital’ in those days), an Isolation Hospital, a TB Sanatorium and a Maternity Home, a School Medical Service and a Maternity and Child Welfare Service. That truly was a Big Society!

Despite the range and complexity of the Council’s responsibilities, they managed without a highly paid ‘Chief Executive’. They had a Town Clerk, normally a solicitor or barrister, who was the ‘first among equals’ of the professional officers – doctors, surveyors, solicitors, architects, engineers, librarians and so on – who headed the council’s specialist departments and who were responsible to the Council Committee dealing with the provision of that particular service. Even allowing for the massive inflation that has taken place in the past seventy years, their salaries were nothing like those of ‘top people’ in local government today – and they wouldn’t have dreamed of expecting ‘bonuses’ for giving the council the very best service of which they were capable.

The rot set in with the advent of that first Labour Government after World War II. I helped vote them into power and I agreed, and still agree, with their stated objectives. They believed that all public services should be publicly owned and managed. Sadly, they imagined that this could be achieved only on a national scale. They dismembered existing community owned-and-managed services like public health, social security, water, gas and electricity supply, sewerage and sewage treatment and handed them over to giant state-owned corporations. They and their Conservative opponents, called this – whether in praise or in derision – ‘socialism’. It was, in fact, ‘state capitalism’ and lent itself to the sale of our vital services into private ownership (some abroad!) with the advent of Thatcherism. Another blow to the idea of the self-governing ‘community’ came with the Local Government Reorganisation of 1974. The ‘local’ was effectively removed from ‘local government’ as, all over England and Wales, communities with little if anything in common were thrust together into a smaller number of much larger local authorities, more easily controlled from Whitehall. Brightlingsea and Harwich; even Frinton-and-Walton, and Clacton, could have been regarded as integral ‘communities’. By no stretch of the imagination is the Tendring District anything of the sort. A further development was the pernicious ‘right to buy’ legislation that compelled local authority landlords (but not private ones!) to sell off their housing heritage at bargain basement prices. More recently, local authorities were compelled to abandon their historic ‘committee’ administration and adopt either ‘cabinet’ government or – central government’s preferred option – a single all-powerful executive Mayor!

If the present coalition government really wants Britain to evolve into a country of self-governing communities with minimal central control, they should begin by breaking up existing local authorities into much smaller community-based units and according them something like the degree of responsibility and autonomy that local authorities enjoyed prior to World War II.

Somehow though – I don’t think that that is quite what Mr Cameron has in mind. So far I haven’t seen any of central government’s functions being passed down the line to ‘local communities’. However he does seem quite keen to see existing democratically elected district and borough councils stripped of their remaining powers and responsibilities. These are to be taken on by private firms or charitable organisations that may be either local or national (or international come to that!) and certainly won’t, in any sense, be either ‘local communities’ or their elected representatives.

Real community control of local affairs has been and is – ‘Going….going…..gone!’

Revolution in Libya

When, in recent weeks I published in this blog photos taken in the eastern Libyan desert in the winter of 1941/’42, I didn’t dream that that country would shortly be making front page news in our press. It was of course with eastern Libya, Cyrenaica, that I became unwillingly familiar during that time.

It was strange to hear Tobruk, Derna and Benghazi featuring in news bulletins, as they had - though in quite a different context – over seventy years ago! It was in Tobruk, on 21st June 1942, that I met my Nemesis when our defences were overrun by the tanks of General Rommel’s DAK (Deutsche Afrika Korps). The Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a member was preparing to make a last stand when we were ordered by the Garrison Commander (the South African General Klopper) to burn our vehicles, put the guns out of action and surrender.

Derna was a staging post in our thoroughly miserable journey as POWs, in the back of an Italian army lorry to Benghazi and thence, in the hold of an elderly tramp steamer, to Italy. At Derna I was at my lowest ebb. I had been a prisoner of war for about a week. I was unwashed, unshaven and without hope. The ‘prison transit camp’ was a barbed-wire-surrounded Muslim burial ground. I was suffering from diarrhoea and stomach cramps and, for the first and only time of my life, wishing that I had the means to end it. The transit camp at Benghazi was a little better. We did at least have tents to sleep in and sufficient water to wash ourselves. I was only there about a week until about 100 of us were picked out at random and marched through the town to the docks and our transport to Italy.

I saw little of those three Libyan towns, all of which were in the news last week, and even less of their Libyan inhabitants. They are all in an area of eastern Libya, Cyrenaica, the population of which liberated themselves from the clutches of Colonel Gaddafi. How extraordinary that, according to a BBC report, local people should have challenged airborne troops landing on Tobruk’s El Adhem airfield (which I remember well!) and beaten them off.

I wish the rebels all success and sincerely hope that they will succeed in unseating Gaddafi, and in leading their country into a free and prosperous future. At least they have a source of revenue, Libya’s oil reserves, at their disposal. Let us hope that they can distribute that oil income wisely and equitably, for the benefit of all Libyans – not just a ruling elite! They have yet to oust Colonel Gaddafi. That is unlikely to be easy. Watching him ranting on tv brought Adolf Hitler to mind – and we all know how much how much trouble we had getting rid of him!
Meanwhile as I write, a week before posting this blog, hundreds of Britons are stranded while our government belatedly fumbles ineffectively to arrange their evacuation. France, Germany, Portugal, Russia, Belgium and Holland were all days ahead of us. By next Tuesday I’ll no doubt know how effective our efforts have been.

I imagine that the leader writers, and probably most of the readers, of the Daily Mail the Daily Express and the Sun would consider it high treason for me to suggest that if we had been an active partner in a Federal Europe, all our citizens as well as all other EU citizens would probably by now be safely home.

‘Carpe Diem!’

Just another of those Latin phrases that tend to give those who use them a totally spurious aura of scholarship! It means, loosely translated, ‘Seize today’s opportunities – no-one knows what will happen tomorrow’. (I remember it because it is also the name of a very pleasant restaurant in Brussels where my son and grandson have taken me on a couple of occasions!)

David Cameron may have been a little tardy at plucking Brits stranded in Libya out of danger – but no-one can accuse him to failing to seize the business opportunities arising from the crisis in North Africa and the Middle East. He was the very first world leader to visit the ‘new Egypt’ and has been visiting other countries in the Middle East not yet affected by the wind of change there. He lectured those countries’ rulers, most of whom closely resemble those deposed in Egypt and Tunisia (if not being quite in Colonel Gaddafi’s league!) on the joys of free speech, a free press and free and fair elections.

At the same time the arms dealers in his entourage were, no doubt, impressing on those rulers’ lackeys the superiority of British-made water cannon, tear gas, rubber bullets, shot guns and stun grenades. This, of course, would be just in case Mr Cameron failed to persuade those rulers of the benefits of liberal democracy, and their subjects decided, like the Egyptians, the Libyans and the Tunisians, to take matters into their own hands.

Today is certainly be a good time to be selling the means of effective crowd control to Middle Eastern despots.

‘OLDER PEOPLE WILL BE CONSIDERED FOR ADOPTION AS
GUIDE LINES ARE RELAXED’

That, believe it or not, was a headline in the Daily Telegraph a week or so ago. What a vista of new career opportunities it could have opened up to we oldies! I had a vision of a 'professional' Grandad (I think that that may be a little more ‘Public School’ than Grandpa) living comfortably in his corner of the luxurious mansion of the new-rich family who had adopted him. A dignified figure, white haired and leaning heavily on a stick, he would emerge from his lair when required to be introduced to visitors, ‘Grandad’s one of the old school you know’. He would help himself to a large whisky and soda, dispense homely wisdom, inject something of the past into the very brief history of his new family, and then his adoptive 'grand-daughter' would explain, ‘Grandad gets tired very quickly these days’, and he would retreat to the familiar comfort of his den.

It sounded too good to be true – and it was. The Daily Telegraph’s sub-editor hadn’t been quite as familiar with the subtleties of the English language as lone might have expected. Older people will be considered as possible adopting parents, not for adoption. Never mind. I wouldn't really have wanted to be a professional grandad. Being a real one - and a great-uncle - is far more satisfying.

week 8.11 22.2.11

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘You are old Father William, the young man said,
And your hair has become very white…….
Yet nobody cares when you’re ill and in bed
I really don’t think that is right!’

The first two of the lines of verse above are Lewis Carroll’s and can be found in Alice in Wonderland. The other two were inspired by the Health Service Ombudsman’s recent report on the treatment of some old people in NHS Hospitals. It was a report that made those who, like me, have left both youth and middle age behind them, and who are becoming aware of increasing physical (and possibly mental) disability, feel a tremor of apprehension at the possibility of needing hospital treatment at some time in the future.

Some elderly patients had been left unattended, in pain and with open wounds. Some had been unwashed and had no opportunity for a bath or shower. Some, unable to feed themselves or attend to their own toilet needs, had pleaded in vain for help. These were, of course, only ‘a minority’ of elderly patients but the fact that they were a substantial minority should be a cause for shame.

I listened with interest as an ‘authority’ on the subject explained on tv that the problem was one of lack of communication. Nurses and other carers need to listen to their patients and discuss their problems with them. I began to wonder if that ‘authority’ lived in the same world as I do!

It was seven years ago, when she was just eighty, that my late wife Heather, having had a broken hip repaired in Colchester General Hospital, found herself, for rehabilitation, in the Kate Grant Ward of the Clacton Hospital. Heather had had a wider-then-most experience of hospitals. Illness led to her spending time in several London hospitals in her childhood. At the age of 24 (when we had been married for just two years) she spent two years in a Sanatorium with pulmonary and laryngeal TB, including two months in Papworth Hospital undergoing major surgery. In middle age she spent two brief periods in the Essex County Hospital for minor gynaecological surgery.

Visiting Heather at what was then the British Legion Sanatorium at Nayland. It had been taken over by the newly created NHS. Heather had to put on a stone in weight before having major surgery at Papworth Hospital near Cambridge which, at that time, specialised in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis

She was not a complainer. She had never liked being in hospital, but she was always cheerful and optimistic and prepared to make the best of it. She made friends with the nurses and other patients, and helped where she could. In the Sanatorium she made friends with whom she corresponded for the rest of her life.

It was only in Clacton’s Kate Grant Ward that she was desperately unhappy and keen to get out and come home at any price. It was not that the nurses or other members of the staff were unkind, uncaring or incompetent. There were simply not enough of them. One or two nurses or nursing assistants may well be adequate for a ward in which a good proportion of the patients are able to get into and out of bed, put on their dressing gowns and attend to their toilet needs and their meals. One or two nurses are not enough to cope with a ward of ageing or elderly women, the overwhelming majority of whom are unable to walk unaided.

Added to this is the (new?) rule that no nurse or nursing assistant may ever attempt to lift a patient on her own. This is an operation for which two helpers are always required. Then again, nurses disappear from time to time ‘for their breaks’ and at weekends regular nurses disappear and are temporarily replaced with ‘supply’ staff who know nothing of the patients. Is it surprising that getting the patients out of bed and dressed and back into bed again at night are operations that can take hours? Is it surprising that bells are unanswered; cries of distress unheard, and patients become incontinent for the first time in their lives? I wouldn’t for one moment suggest that any nurse should do lifting beyond his or her capacity, or be denied a break or a weekend off, but there should be enough nurses and/or other staff to cope with the special circumstances that exist in a ward of this kind. When that is done the nurses may well have the time and energy to ‘communicate’ better with their charges and discuss their problems. Perhaps, in the past seven years, things have changed in the Kate Grant Ward. I hope so – but I hope that I never personally find out!

For a week I arrived at the hospital before 8.00 am so that I could get Heather out of bed, washed and dressed. I spent most of the day there and I was always there in the evening to get her undressed and into bed again. I did this to impress on the Nursing Sister in charge of the ward that I was well able to be my wife’s carer. There was no need therefore to delay her discharge until a ‘care package’ could be organised. I soon realized though that by doing this I was also providing a real support for the hard-pressed nurses; a foretaste of David Cameron’s Big Society perhaps?

My most vivid, and most painful, memories of the time that Heather spent in Clacton Hospital were her distress when I parted from her every evening, and her joy ‘I thought you were never coming’ when I turned up in the morning. Until then I hadn’t fully appreciated the sense of loneliness and desolation that can overwhelm patients when they are alone with their thoughts in what they feel to be an uncaring atmosphere.

The late John Betjeman caught a glimpse of it in his poem Five O’clock Shadow, the time of the day when the visitors have departed. Here are the first and third verses:

This is the time of the day when we in the men’s ward
Say ‘one more surge of the pain and I give up the fight’.
When those who struggle for breath can struggle less strongly.
This is the time of the day that is worse than the night.

Below the windows, lots of loving relations
Rev up in the car park, changing gear at the bend.
Going home to a nice big tea and an evening of telly.
‘Ah well, we’ve done what we can. It can’t be long till the end’

‘Concentrate on something else – and it won’t hurt so much’

That’s the kind of advice that dentists used to give their patients before getting to work with their drills. Perhaps they still do.

Something similar seems to have motivated both politicians and newspaper editors in recent weeks. In Britain, government cuts threaten public services on which we have relied for many years. The number of unemployed is steadily increasing. Folk who had imagined they were ‘home owners’, when they were really only ‘home buyers’, are threatened with homelessness when they find themselves unable to continue their mortgage payments. Young people leaving universities with degrees are unable to find employment but are burdened with a lifetime of debt that, the government tells them ‘reassuringly’, they may never clear! Inflation has risen steadily. It is now at 4 percent (double the government’s ‘target’) and experts forecast a rise to 5 percent. Meanwhile incomes remain static or actually fall. In the Middle East, the ‘west’s’ policy of selling arms to, and supporting corrupt and tyrannical regimes. is rapidly falling apart. Worldwide, natural disasters make clear the reality of Climate Change, but national governments decline to take effective action to counter it.

It might have been thought that these circumstances provided both politicians and the popular press with plenty of material to arouse their fear and anger. But those haven’t been the issues that have aroused most ire. They have preferred to concentrate on the trivial and the irrelevant. Take, for instance, the case of the army’s redundant warrant officers. Twenty, one actually serving in Afghanistan, were sent their redundancy notices by email. All the indignation has been vented on the email. It should surely have been concentrated on the redundancy, no matter how those concerned were informed of it. Does it make sense to discharge 20 experienced professional soldiers, still in their forties, while a war of attrition is being waged in Afghanistan – and while millions of pounds are being spent on nuclear submarines armed with Trident missiles purposelessly prowling the oceans?

Then there are the two rulings of the European Court of Human Rights – that most prisoners in Britain’s gaols should have the right to vote, and that after fifteen years, sex offenders should have the right to appeal against their names being retained on the register of offenders. From the outrage in press and parliament you’d have thought that an invading army had landed on our shores! We would be better engaged in persuading a majority of those of us who are not in prison, to vote, rather than making sure that prisoners can’t. It would surprise me if many prisoners want to vote anyway. I reckon though that most of them would welcome with enthusiasm the possibility of cash compensation for having been refused that right!

As for sex offenders; they have been punished for their crime. Surely it isn’t unreasonable to consider the possibility that those who have lived an unblemished life for fifteen years since their discharge from prison may have permanently changed their ways. The right to appeal doesn’t mean an automatic right to have their names removed. In many cases it well be decided that they should remain on the register.

Ah well – these issues gave us all something about which to think and vent our indignation. For a few days they successfully diverted us from the real threats to our world and our civilisation.

A part-time job?

A short while ago Colchester Borough Council approached Tendring District Council with the idea of ‘sharing’ an expensive Chief Executive – in effect ‘Two for the price of one!’ They were rebuffed, but have now reached agreement to share a Chief Executive with Braintree Council. Colchester’s Chief Executive is currently paid £117,107 and Braintree’s £119,000. It is claimed that the agreement will save Colchester £150,000 a year, and we must surely assume that Braintree is hoping to achieve a similar saving. Mathematics was never my strongest subject at school but I can’t quite follow the arithmetic there.

I believe that Tendring Council’s outgoing Chief Executive enjoyed a salary comparable with those of both Colchester and Braintree. He also had two Assistant Chief Executives each on a salary higher than that of any other Council employee.

Colchester and Braintree are by no means unique nowadays in sharing a Chief Executive. Tendring Councillors must surely be wondering if they have been paying three very substantial salaries for what now appears to be regarded as a part-time job!

Week 7 15.02.11

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Another trip through Space and Time!

A few weeks ago I published in this column some photographs taken in North Africa in 1942 that had transported me in mind and memory across a continent and an ocean to the Egyptian/Libyan border area of nearly seventy years ago! There was a picture of one of the 6in howitzers with which I had served as a gunner in action – and also semi-submerged in a flooded gun-pit after a tropical storm. There was a group picture of a gun-crew which could have been – but wasn’t – the one of which I had been a member.

I have now received from the same source a picture that I am finding even more evocative. It is again a photograph of a gun-crew standing round the ‘trail’ of a 6in howitzer during the winter (despite the sunshine we all have jackets on!) of 1941/’42. This time though it really is the gun crew of which I was a member. It was nearly seventy years ago and I have, and have always had, a bad memory or faces. However I can recognise and name five (including myself) of those on the picture. Sgt. Peter Harris and Lance Sgt. ‘Busty’ Taylor are the first two on the left. Fifth from the left is Lance Bombardier Alfie Bloomfield, sadly destined to die of diphtheria in a POW Camp in Benghazi later that year. I am the one, seventh from the left, wearing a woolly hat. Behind me, to the left of me in the picture, is a Gunner Fletcher who, in his early thirties, was some ten years older than most of us, while at the very end is Dick Pulford, former manager of a seed store in Woodbridge, with whom I shared a ‘bivvy-tent’

On the picture, though I can’t positively identify him, must also be Jim Palmer, a former Ipswich milkman. He and I remained together while prisoners of war and arrived back together in Ipswich on 18th May 1945, ten days after VE Day. It was my twenty-fourth birthday!

Also there, must be ‘Ferret’ Hawes, a fisherman from Orford. He and I were good mates. I have a picture of myself with him in a rickshaw in Durban, where we enjoyed a brief ‘shore leave’ on our outward voyage to Egypt in August 1941.

‘Ferret’ Hawes (left) and myself in Durban. The rickshaw man never pulled that rickshaw. He just stood around smoking (you can see a fag between the fingers of his left hand) until British soldiers came along wanting to be photographed with him. There must have been hundreds of similar photos taken!

I can’t say that I ‘enjoyed’ either the time I spent in the army or as a prisoner of war. Both though were experiences that, looking back over my life, I am glad to have had.


Prophetic Topics

A month or so ago, when I learned that the Government, were ‘taking on’ the bankers whose activities triggered the current financial crisis, who had been rescued from bankruptcy with millions of pounds of our money and who were once again proposing to hand themselves astronomical salaries and bonuses, I suggested in this blog that it was a conflict between the representatives of the British people and the High Priests of Mammon. Furthermore I predicted that whatever smooth words and phrases might be used to make a defeat sound like a victory, it would ultimately be Mammon’s servants who would come out on top.

And so, it has proved – including the attempt to make defeat sound like a victory. What was the outcome of weeks of negotiation? The top moneylenders (that is what bankers actually do isn’t it?) will still get their million pound salaries and their million pound-plus bonuses, but they have promised to make a few billion pounds more available for loans to businesses, and there’s to be more ‘transparency’ about the salaries and bonuses that are paid. Making a few billion pounds available for loans doesn’t mean that more loans will actually be made. The bankers will still be able to withhold funds from those businesses that are not considered to be ‘a good risk’. It is they who will do the ‘considering’, and they who will set the interest rates and terms of repayment. As for transparency, I don’t particularly want to know who gets those multi-million salaries and bonuses. I don’t think that anyone should get them.

Top people in the public service (any public service) with a large salary are immediately pilloried for getting ‘more money than the Prime Minister’. Quite right too! But I have never heard of anyone working out how many Prime Ministers could be bought with the total remuneration of the Chief Executive of any major bank?

‘Of all the local councils, in all the Town Halls, of all the counties, towns and districts of the UK………’

(Apologies to the late, but unforgettable, Humphrey Bogart)…our District Council of Tendring has to be the one to pick up the gauntlet that the city of Liverpool tried and found didn’t fit. They have applied for and have accepted the ‘Big Society’ partnership challenge of the Coalition Government.

It seems that Tendring got in on the act at an early stage by including a Big Society fund of £500,000 in this year’s budget and by organising a meeting of all local voluntary bodies (or as many as cared to be represented) at the Jaywick Community Centre on 31st January. I am not sure what, if anything, was decided at that Meeting, but I was interested to learn that the representative of one local charity commented that there had been a recent change in the character of their volunteer helpers. They used, at one time, to be the ‘recently retired’ but were now increasingly younger and from among the unemployed.

The main purpose of‘ ‘The Big Society’ idea seems to me to find unpaid volunteers to do tasks (in parks and gardens, in hospitals and care homes, as gardeners care assistants, circular deliverers and so on) previously performed by paid labour. Success in doing this will certainly ensure an ever-increasing pool of unemployed from which to find suitable volunteers! And, as the government has promised that folk ‘on benefit’ will never be better off than those in employment, the incentive to seek non-existent jobs will remain, and quite a lot of money will be saved!

Meanwhile Tendring has been accorded the government’s highest accolade – description as a ‘can-do council!’ Communities Minister Eric Pickles is quoted as saying, ‘Can-do Councils like Tendring show what can be achieved by local government working tirelessly with and for their communities’. Mr Stock, leader of Tendring Council, said, ‘To be working with the Government in this way is a significant coup for the council and the district. We have shown ourselves to be ahead of the game in coming up with our Big Society fund and it has been recognised on a national level’. He added that he looked forward to further details being revealed.

And so do I!


The New Levellers

Towards the end of our Civil War in the 17th Century there was a movement (it never really did become a political party) called The Levellers. There was even a Levellers Manifesto advocating popular sovereignty, an extension of the suffrage (not, of course, going so far as suggesting that all adult men and women should be allowed to vote!) equality for all before the law, and universal religious tolerance. These very modest aims, which we take for granted today, were too much for either King Charles I or Oliver Cromwell. Levellers were persecuted, thrown into prison and executed. Eventually they disappeared from the scene.

If I were fifty years younger (if only!) I would seriously consider founding – or, more likely, trying unsuccessfully to found - a new Political Party, The New Levellers. Its main objective would be to narrow the currently enormous gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest in our country, which (rather than 'Europe', 'the last Labour Government' or even 'the bankers') surely lies at the root of our current ills. This could be achieved only slowly and over a number of years but I believe that when the benefits began to reveal themselves, the pace of change would accelerate.

Already there are at least tentative moves in the right direction, if only in the public sector. It has been suggested that the highest paid employee of any public body should not earn more than twenty times the lowest paid. I have heard it said that while that might be possible in the public sector it would be quite unacceptable in private enterprise – in stock broking or banking for example.

Why should it be? The current minimum wage is £5.93 an hour. That gives a weekly wage of £237 for a forty-hour week or an annual income of about £12,000. Twenty times that amounts to £240,000 – not far short of a quarter of a million pounds. That is, as they say, more than the salary of the Prime Minister and should surely be more than adequate for anyone’s needs. I certainly don’t think that any public employee should get a higher salary than that and – unless it is considered that gambling on the stock exchange or large-scale money-lending is of greater value to the nation than the duties of the Prime Minister, or of any public servant, I don’t see why incomes higher than that should be tolerated in the private sector either.

I think that levelling should be at both ends of the income spectrum – raising the incomes of the lowest paid and reducing those of the highest. A variety of means could be employed to do this – the minimum wage; a reformed and progressive income tax; more services and industries being carried out by local authorities, by co-operatives and by employee partnerships like John Lewis; splitting up the big banks and giant business corporations to provide real competition.

Progress would be slow but sure. Neither Socialism nor unfettered Capitalism can, in itself, provide a solution. The important thing would be to persuade the general public that greater economic equality would be to everyone’s benefit, and to work towards that objective.

Utopian? Pie-in-the-sky? Revolutionary nonsense? Perhaps, but that is what was said of the objectives of the 17th Century Levellers and of the Chartists two hundred years later. All of those aims have now been achieved!

Week 6 8.2.11

Tendring Topics…..on Line

‘Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble’

So sang the three witches in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ as they added ever more revolting bits and pieces to their bubbling brew. What, I wonder, will eventually emerge from the currently seething cauldron of the Muslim-majority states of North Africa and the Middle East. As I write, the Tunisian people have overthrown a corrupt and tyrannical ruler, who had enjoyed the support of ‘the West’. The Egyptian people appear to be in the process of doing the same. There is no shortage of similar rulers in the same area and the successes of anti-government forces in Egypt and Tunis have encouraged similar dissidents elsewhere. There are demands for freedom in the Yemen, and the King of Jordan has taken what I am sure he hopes will prove to be effective pre-emptive action to dampen down rebellion in his country.

A sense of foreboding that I feel about these on-the-surface encouraging moves arises from the fact that history demonstrates that the overthrow – particularly the violent overthrow – of cruel and autocratic regimes is all too often followed by the establishment of equally bad or even worse ones.

Liberal minded people throughout Europe welcomed the overthrow of the French Monarchy in 1789 and the advent of the republican government with its slogan of Liberty, Fraternity, Equality (aims that many of us pursue today!) – but the cruel and oppressive monarchical system was followed first by the ‘reign of terror’ of Robespierre, Danton and Marat, which was itself supplanted by that of Napoleon Bonaparte! The medieval tyranny of the Russian Tsarist government maintained by bands of Cossack ‘enforcers’ armed with sabres and whips, the threat of Siberian exile and the CHEKA (a secret police force differing little from the KGB), was followed, ultimately, by Stalin!

More recently in Iran, the overthrow of the all-powerful Shah was followed by the rule of the Ayatollahs, enemies of any form of liberalism. In Afghanistan; was the Soviet rule that ‘the west’ conspired with the ‘gallant mojihadin’ to overthrow, really much worse that that of the Taliban, whom we had supported against the Soviets, and who are now taking an almost daily toll of the lives of our young men striving to oust them?

Will freedom-loving democratic forces emerge triumphant from the present turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East? I very much hope so, but fear otherwise.

We in Britain, where the level of freedom and democracy that we enjoy today has been gained slowly and after centuries of bitter struggle, may overestimate the attractions that parliamentary representative government has to people in an entirely different environment and with an entirely different history and culture. It is worth remembering that, even in Britain, the idea that everyone over 18, men and women, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, should have a vote and therefore a small share in the country’s government, would have been regarded less than two centuries ago as dangerous and seditious nonsense. Only the Chartists, regarded by contemporary ‘responsible citizens' as ‘the loony lefties’ of the nineteenth century, even suggested such an idea.

It was not until within my own lifetime that universal suffrage was achieved. It was in 1928, when I was seven years old, that the right to vote in Parliamentary and Local Government Elections was conferred on all men and women over the age of 21. It was in 1969, when I was 48, that the voting age was lowered to 18. We have yet to achieve the proportional representation that I believe is a prerequisite of true democracy.

It is not very likely that people whose experience of government has been limited to one or other kind of tyranny, and who believe that all the laws of any importance were dictated directly by God some 1,500 years ago, will find the idea of electing human lawmakers an attractive one. Surely, they will think, all that is needed is experienced theologians able to interpret those God-given laws in the light of modern circumstances. To suggest otherwise must undoubtedly be blasphemous.

For this reason I fear that the present turmoil in Africa and the Middle East is just as likely to end in the triumph of one or other of the extreme forms of Islamism as in the kind of liberal democracies that most of us in ‘the west’ would like to see.

The Crime Map of the United Kingdom

I reckon that the publication of the ‘On line Crime Map’ of the United Kingdom was one of the dafter projects of the present government.

Type in your postal address and postcode and a street map will appear of your district with numbers shown in strategic places. Click on the number nearest to your home and you’ll learn how many incidents of various kinds of crime have taken place in the immediate vicinity during December last year. Residents of Clacton’s Jubilee Avenue, just off the old London Road on Clacton’s outskirts, had a nasty shock when they discovered that the number of burglaries that had taken place in their vicinity made them the third most crime-ridden area in the UK. They weren’t aware of any law-breaking whatsoever in their quiet residential road.

The explanation lies in the fact that Jubilee Avenue is adjacent to one of Clacton’s largest and most popular holiday caravan sites (I remember it well from my public health inspecting days!) It was there, ‘in the vicinity’ of Jubilee Avenue, that the crimes had taken place. Several caravans had been burgled ‘by person or persons unknown’.

I typed in my address and postcode with some trepidation. I have lived in my present bungalow in Dudley Road since 1956. My family and I have certainly never felt threatened in any way here and I wouldn’t wish to live anywhere else. It must be said though that Dudley Road hasn’t had an exactly crime-free past. Immediately opposite my bungalow is a narrow passageway in, or in the vicinity of, which at least three muggings have taken place over the years. Some years ago I recall that a small ‘cannabis farm’ was found in the roof space of a dwelling in Dudley Road some distance from my home, and I have heard that drug dealing has taken place in the neighbourhood. I have even, in the over-half-a-century I have lived here, added to the crime statistics myself by reporting to the Police (for insurance purposes, rather than in any hope of the perpetrators being caught) the theft of hubcaps from my car, the theft of a bicycle left in my driveway and, more recently, the systematic destruction of my front boundary wall by vandals. No doubt there were other crimes in the vicinity, some more serious, that I didn’t hear about. I don’t go out looking for trouble!

The work of the vandals! The rubble had already been moved from the nearer section of the wall.

However the ‘crime map’ revealed that during December 2010 the vicinity of my home was relatively crime-free. There was one violent crime, and just one complaint of antisocial behaviour. The ‘one violent crime’ is rather disturbing – another mugging perhaps? There are many kinds of violent crime. Clicking on nearby streets in the area of Clacton in which I live (I have heard it described as ‘working class residential’, which is OK by me) it is clear that the overwhelmingly most common problem is ‘antisocial behaviour’. This is very worrying since I have little doubt that most antisocial behaviour goes unreported either because of fears of reprisals or of the well-founded conviction that ‘there’s not a lot that the Police can do about it’.


My new ‘Vandal-resistant’ garden fence

I whiled away an entertaining half-hour with the Crime Map but, at a time when the government tells us that we must get our pennyworth out of every penny spent, what on earth was its purpose? It doesn’t tell the Police anything they didn’t already know. They supplied the information. How on earth can the crime map possibly, as the government claims, ‘empower’ me? Supposing, for instance, instead of there being one violent crime in my neighbourhood, there had been twenty. I would have been seriously worried but there would be nothing I could do about it. The Police would have already been aware of it. Particularly nowadays, when they are compelled to limit their resources and cut down on staff, they can only increase the policing of one area by cutting down elsewhere. They have more knowledge on which to base their decisions on priorities than either local people or local or national politicians, and I have more faith in their judgement than in that of politicians!

I’m ready to be persuaded otherwise, but it seems to me that the ‘crime map’ will alarm some people unnecessarily, induce a false sense of complacency in others, and move yet others – like the folk of Clacton’s Jubilee Avenue – to righteous indignation. I wonder how much of our money was wasted in setting it up?

‘The easy speeches that comfort cruel men’

As far as I know G.K.Chesterton, author, essayist and minor poet (best known perhaps for his ‘Father Brown’ detective stories) wrote just one hymn. It begins ‘O God of earth and altar….’, and includes a verse that asks for deliverance from, ‘lies of tongue and pen, and from the easy speeches that comfort cruel men’. I think of that verse when I hear some of the speeches of our political leaders today. They are not, of course, cruel men (and women), but well-meaning ones who inflict unintentional (but none the less real!) cruelty on others as a result of their political convictions. It can’t be denied though that they use ‘easy speeches’ to comfort themselves and justify their actions.

They cut benefit paid to the unemployed and tell us that they are actually helping them by giving them an extra incentive to find work. They overlook the fact that thanks to their own policies, there is already a growing army of unemployed competing for fewer and fewer jobs. They cut grants to Citizens’ Advice Bureaux and for the salaries of debt advisers and say rather patronisingly that their aim is to stop people getting into debt in the first instance rather that helping them out of it at a later stage! They overlook the fact that their policies on University Tuition Fees and support for Further Education will put a large proportion of the younger generation heavily in debt for most of their working lives!

There was once a top politician who, between puffs on his pipe, would sometimes begin a televised statement with, ‘Now let’s be absolutely honest about this…..’ That was when we knew that our credulity was going to be stretched almost to breaking point.

Today’s political watchword is clarity. If I had a fiver for every time I have heard a government spokesman claim ‘We have always been absolutely clear……..’, or, echoing one of his predecessors ‘Let’s be absolutely clear about this…….’ or, ‘We stated very clearly…..’ I would be able to buy myself a new mobility scooter!

Usually whatever they were talking about was far from clear. But it leaves us wondering uneasily if we may be exceptionally stupid and that whatever was being discussed was perfectly clear to everyone else.

‘The times are out of joint!’

What a strange world we live in today!

Sex education, including ‘safe sex’ techniques, is taught in schools to senior pupils in mixed classes. Full sexual activity among teenagers is regarded as normal and taken for granted. Yet I have just read of two senior girls at a Colchester school having to face disciplinary action for holding hands – behaviour that would have seemed perfectly natural, even commendable, among the most demure and bashful young lady characters of a staid Victorian novel!