Week 13. 2011 29.3.11

Tendring Topics…….on line
Spring is here – at last!

Well, it is as I write these words, but it is possible that by the time I post them on the web winter will have returned. However, no matter how low the temperature may yet fall, the evidence of spring will still be present in the daffodils in tens of thousands of gardens and parks and on roadside verges and traffic roundabouts throughout the land. They are one feature in our public gardens that, this year at least, shouldn’t have been too badly affected by ‘the cuts’. Most of those lovely golden and white flowers will spring from bulbs planted several years ago! From the kitchen window of my bungalow there is a splendid view of my quite-large back garden. From it, my late wife Heather used to watch the evidence of the changing seasons – in winter the bare boughs of the apple trees, and, by the rear boundary wall, the four silver birches that we brought back as tiny saplings from a long-ago Devon holiday. My bungalow from half way down the back garden. The kitchen window is the one on the left. The apple on the left of the picture is a Bramley cooker on a tree directly behind the camera. Also behind the camera is an eating apple tree around which the daffodils grow, a large now-uncultivated plot where there was once a once-productive ‘kitchen garden’ and, against the boundary wall, four silver birches. The first indication that spring was on its way was the flowering of a few tiny snowdrops round the apple tree. They were followed by the crocuses, and finally the daffodils, though their shoots had sprung from the soil weeks before the flowers appeared. As spring progressed into summer Heather would watch me mowing the lawn and working in the kitchen garden. There were potatoes, broad beans, garden peas, spring cabbages, courgettes and tomatoes. There would be at least one colourful row of sweet peas, mostly destined to grace the table at the Quaker Meeting House on early-summer Sundays, or to be given to friends and neighbours. Finally, as summer was drawing towards its close, there would be a bumper crop of runner beans. Sadly, for the past five years, there has been none of these. I can garden no longer but I have a gardener who comes in once a fortnight to keep the grass cut and the garden tidy. The daffodils are still there. It was there, where they are reborn annually from the slowly warming soil, that on one sad day nearly five years ago, I scattered Heather’s ashes. I hope that when my time comes, my ashes are scattered there too.

Sex – and the Census!

Have you filled in and sent off your census form yet? I mine was posted on the 28th. It had looked a little daunting at first glance but in fact, it was easy enough to complete and it does help the government to distribute resources where they are most needed and to identify areas where there are specific problems. Retired folk are asked about their ‘last job’. I immediately thought of mine as being a local government Public Relations Officer. Then I remembered that after taking early retirement at the age of nearly-59 I had pursued, for over twenty years, a second modestly successful career as a self-employed freelance author and journalist, writing several technical books and innumerable feature articles and advertising features of all kinds. In fact, although I now do no paid work I have not, at 89, entirely given it up! That was surely my ‘last job’. In today’s Godless world, the question relating to religion is an obstacle for some people. I understand that some of my fellow-Quakers hesitate to describe themselves as ‘Christian’. George Fox whose faith, charisma and organising ability founded the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in the 17th Century, would surely have been astonished. His moment of inspiration had come when, in a moment of deepest despair with the established and dissenting churches of his day, he had heard an inward voice proclaim that ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition’. And then, as he recorded in his journal, his heart, ‘did leap with joy’. It was an affirmation that was at the heart of early – and not-so-early – Quakerism. One feature of the census form that pleased me is the fact that we are asked to fill in our sex, male or female, not – as has now become politically correct – our gender! Gender was, and still is for some of us, a grammatical word differentiating words, not people. Our French master at Ipswich’s Northgate School in the 1930s pointed out that the French word for an army recruit was in fact feminine though, in those days, all recruits were male. He would routinely ask the class ‘Is gender the same as sex?’ to which we were expected to reply emphatically and as one! ‘No sir!’ I think that the popularity of gender in politically correct English is due to the fact that we have so misused the word ‘sex’ that it has become a rude word that ‘nice people’ are reluctant to use. That is surely extraordinary when, in conversations in the street, and often in radio and tv programmes, one can hear real rude words (the use of which would have resulted in the speaker being barred from well-run pubs in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s) being used loudly and with careless abandon!

Referendums

Mr Douglas Carswell, Clacton’s MP, is well known for his extreme Euro-Scepticism and his conviction that, if climatic change is taking place, it is nothing to do with human activity. His latest campaign is for a national referendum on whether or not the United Kingdom should remain in membership of the European Union. There was, of course, a referendum on the subject in 1975 in which the general public decided conclusively that they did wish to retain membership. But, says Mr Carswell, that was then. Only those who were of voting age before 1975 were able to vote. We now have a new generation of voters – and their voices should be heard. Perhaps there should always be regular referendums on matters of national importance. As far as the EU is concerned not only were those born subsequently to about 1955 unable to vote but many who voted then may have changed their minds. I have, for one! I voted NO then but I would vote YES now. It has become clear to me that it is only from within a more closely integrated Europe that we can hope to co-operate and, where appropriate compete, on equal terms with the Americas, and with the new still developing powers in the East. But is it about membership of the EU that the public should first be consulted? We have already had one referendum on this issue. Aren’t there other, even more important issues, about which the public has never been consulted. Do we really need those vastly expensive Trident submarines roaming the oceans, for instance? We have certainly never been consulted about them! That would be my first priority for a referendum. Then how about Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the USA? We have never been consulted about that – yet it has involved us in an illegal war in Iraq that cost hundreds of British and American and many thousand Iraqi lives, destroyed the infrastructure of a once prosperous nation and served as an effective recruitment inducement for international Islamic terrorism. And all because of a belief in weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist and a completely mistaken idea that Iraq was in some way connected with the outrage on 9/11! It has also involved us, with NATO (have we ever had a referendum on NATO membership?) in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, from which we hear news of fresh British casualties (the loss of some young woman’s husband or lover, some child’s Dad, some ageing couple’s beloved son) virtually every week. I reckon that our continued membership of the EU would be well down the list of subjects on which I would like a national referendum to be held.

I am not alone!

I have long believed that the Government places too much emphasis on benefit fraud and much too little on tax evasion and avoidance. It seems that I am far from being alone in this. Here is an extract from last week’s (25th March) Church Times, an authoritative Church of England newspaper with a readership by no means limited to Anglicans. ‘On Tuesday, the Methodist Union, the Baptist Union and the United Reformed Church (URC )issued a statement calling on the Chancellor “to apologise to benefit claimants” for using figures on last year’s Comprehensive Spending Review which inflated benefit fraud threefold and played down the levels of unpaid tax contrary to the Government’s own figures’. The Rev. Graham Sparkes, the Baptist Union’s head of faith and unity said “Let us be clear: the government’s own figures show that benefit fraud costs £1.6 billion – not £5 billion as he said in October – and unpaid tax costs £42 billion. Benefit fraud is clearly unacceptable but unpaid tax is obviously more damaging to our economy. The same issue of Church Times recorded that Church Action on Poverty c laimed that the Budget fell short of the promise to protect the poorest. ‘In April, the housing benefit and other welfare cuts will fall hard on the poorest people in our communities – people who did not cause this financial crisis, and are being made to pay the price for it’. The Church of England may be the ‘established church’ of this country but it is good to see that neither it, nor other Christian traditions, are in any sense the voice of ‘the Establishment’! Long may this remain so. Long may they remember that the mother of Jesus Christ proclaimed a God who, ‘Scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, put down the mighty from their seat, exalted the humble and meek, and filled the hungry with good things, while sending the rich empty away!’ Her son Jesus identified himself with the poor and said that anything that we do, either good or bad, to even the humblest of our fellow men and women, we are doing to him.

Week 12 22.3.11

Tendring Topics……on line

Some good news!

Yes, there is some good news for a change. What’s more, it’s good news for Clacton! The recession has cost the town some of its best-known and, it might have been thought, most firmly based businesses. There was the Co-op Departmental Store in Station Road – Clacton’s only departmental store. There was the well-stocked and welcoming Comet Store on the Waterglade retail park off Old Road, the furniture store on the corner of West Avenue and Agate Road, ‘Eyewear’, the opticians on the corner of High Street and Beach Road who had dealt with my optical needs for many years, and Woolworth, fronting onto both Pier Avenue and West Avenue, a national as well as a local institution. There were smaller businesses; the video hire shop almost opposite the former St Osyth Road Infants’ school which I passed by in my mobility scooter almost every day. I could go on.

Some of those gaps have been refilled. Woolworth’s site is now being used by the 99p Store; a business new to the town that never seems to be short of customers. The Co-op Departmental Store was taken over by Vergo. They seemed promising but went into liquidation after only a few months. The Black Bull pub in St Osyth Road was demolished to make way for a Tesco Express.

Other more recent developments have already produced a welcome 60 new jobs with the possibility of more on the way. The carpet shop in West Avenue has been redeveloped as Baldwin’s Department Store. The Proprietor, Kevin Baldwin from Harwich had been the Manager of Vergo and has taken on some of Vergo’s redundant staff. On the Waterglade retail park the former Comet Store is now a branch of NEXT a well-known clothing and homeware chain.

In Jackson Road a branch of Coffee Republic is opening up in April next to the Travelodge Hotel, while on the other side of the road Rock-a-bye Baby, a baby clothes shop has just opened.

Will the young and newly born enterprises adequately replace those that have disappeared? One day perhaps – but not yet I am afraid. The 99p Store, popular as it is, hardly takes the place of Woolworth’s. I haven’t yet had a chance to look in at NEXT, in Waterglade Business Park, but I have been into Baldwin’s Department Store.


Welcoming as the staff were, I didn't feel that it in any way compared with either the Co-op Store or the Vergo Store that replaced it. Still, these new businesses provided some badly needed jobs and the Clacton Gazette, ever optimistic, sees them as the first green shoots of recovery. Perhaps they are. If so, I hope that they are not strangled by rising inflation, rising unemployment and the VAT increase, before they have a chance to develop.

And some more good news – well, sort of!

The redevelopment of the seaward stretch of Pier Avenue has at long last been completed. Pavements have been widened and the carriageway narrowed to make it strictly ‘a single carriageway’. It was work that was supposed to have been finished before Christmas but the appalling weather in December put it back, to the consternation of the very traders whom the improvement was supposed to benefit. They complained that they had lost custom because of the long-winded building work and the reduction of access to their businesses that had resulted.

Here is the result. It was a section of Pier Avenue on which the dust had hardly settled since the previous reconstruction that had been carried out with the same purpose! I suppose that it is an improvement but surely, in a time of austerity, it was hardly worth the time, the money, the energy and the disruption that went into it.

The money, and the workmen’s time, would have been better spent seeking out (they’re not hard to find!) and repairing the potholes in Clacton’s roads and the broken, uneven and dangerous pavements away from the town centre. It wouldn’t have been a glamorous or headline-making enterprise but, I think, one of much more real value to we Clactonians.

‘Labour isn’t working!’

Remember that message on a pre-election hoarding long ago? It was illustrated by a dole queue disappearing into the distance. Then, I think, the number of unemployed was more than a million. Nowadays there are two and a half million unemployed, and the number is rising. The Private Sector has failed to absorb the job losses resulting from cuts in the Public Sector. The ‘experts’ were surprised and disappointed. I wasn’t.

It had been obvious to me that, as I have pointed out repeatedly in this blog, there had never been a chance that it would. Successive governments have compelled local and Health Authorities to get rid of their direct labour forces and put their services out to private contractors. One consequence has been that hospitals no longer employ their own cleaners who were known to the other hospital staff and the long-term patients, and who took a real pride in keeping their wards spotlessly clean. They now have to use the employees of contractors, to whom cleaning a hospital ward is ‘just another job’ for which they get as much as they can for as little effort as they can get away with. That’s the way of today’s world.

Another consequence has been to make it impossible to force economies on the public sector without similarly affecting the private. When, for instance, a local authority decides to save money by switching from a weekly refuse collection to a fortnightly one, it is the private firm actually undertaking the collection that suffers. Building maintenance firms, providers of meals-on-wheels, Hospital caterers, cleaners, a wide range of consultants (all part of the Private Sector) and many others, stand to suffer. Their problems may not arrive immediately. Contracts have to run their course. However, come they inevitably will.

I fear that unemployment has not yet peaked.

Prophecies of doom and gloom!

I don’t know how many times I have published my thoughts on the probable course of future events in this blog and have added that I hoped most profoundly that I was wrong. Cassandra probably felt the same way when she predicted the destruction of Troy! She was right, and all too often I have been right too.

I have been proved right in believing that the Private Sector couldn’t possibly find employment for those rendered redundant by Public Service Cuts. It seems that I was right too in my belief that students financing their years of study with government loans would face a lifetime of intolerable debt. It now appears that the better-paid graduates’ careers become, the more likely it is that throughout their working lives (the time in which they are likely to marry, have and bring up children, repay a mortgage on their homes, buy and run a car, and so on) they will be paying off that debt from their undergraduate days. Those who complete the repayment and clear their debt will find that by that time they have repaid twice as much as they originally borrowed!

I have always believed that nuclear energy production is fraught with unacceptable risks. My particular concern was that it had a particularly dangerous waste product that remained lethal for hundreds of years – and for which no-one had so far produced a safe and satisfactory means of disposal. The experience of Three Mile Island, Windscale, Chernobyl – and now Japan, indicates that operating nuclear plant can produce more immediate perils. No-one can tell when and how the present crisis in Japan will end.

Clacton, and the greater part of the Tendring peninsula lie well within the danger zone of Bradwell Nuclear power station, which may well be brought back into
use in the next few years. Sizewell, in Suffolk and just a few miles up the coast, isn’t very far way.

Bradwell is most unlikely to experience either an earthquake or a tsunami, though it should be remembered that the most damaging English earthquake recorded in at least the past 500 years took place in the Colchester area in 1884! Over 1,000 buildings were damaged, in Colchester, Wivenhoe (the epicentre, where every house was damaged!) and other settlements between Colchester and Ipswich.

I think though that Bradwell’s chief danger is its vulnerability to terrorist attack, perhaps as a commando style raid using inflatable craft launched from an apparently harmless fishing boat moored a mile or two out-to-sea.

I very much hope that I am never in a position to say, ‘I told you so!’

A Prophecy that failed – or did it?

A week or two ago I said that my best guess about the unfolding crisis in Libya was that the United Nations would ultimately sanction a ‘No-fly’ zone over Libya but that this decision would come too late to prevent the slaughter of scores of innocent men and women when Gaddafi’s troops captured the remaining insurgent strongholds. I was wrong. In the end the Security Council acted swiftly. As, despite the promise of an immediate ceasefire, Gaddafi’s forces launched an attack on Benghazi, French and British planes began bombing military targets and the American navy, using Cruise Missiles has joined in.

I am left with a feeling of profound sadness. It is easy enough to start a war but, as we are finding in Afghanistan, far more difficult to end it. Perhaps this one will be the exception. Perjhaps Gaddafi’s forces will decline to fight a war that they must surely lose in the end, and will oust their leader. Perhaps, but both in August 1914 and in September 1939 there were those who insisted that ‘The war will be over by Christmas!’ When Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941 he was sure that a few victorious battles would swiftly bring about the collapse of the Soviet regime.

As with the blitz in England, air attacks are just as likely to unite the country in anger and thirst for retaliation as to induce despair. Western intervention will inevitably bring accusations, however unjustified, that this is another ‘crusade’ aimed at destroying Islam. Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan it will bring joy to the hearts of those who are grooming young Muslims for recruitment into terrorist organisations. The probability of terrorist attacks in Europe and the USA will increase.

A war in the Libyan Desert will inevitably bring a very serious risk of casualties from ‘friendly fire’ among both civilians and combatants. Both sides discovered that in the war in which I was engaged in 1941/’42. There were no defined front lines and a surprise attack could come from any direction. Both sides were making use of captured vehicles, and the desert uniforms of the opposing armies were not readily distinguishable. On many occasions army vehicles, lost in the desert (in a dust storm perhaps) would spot an army convoy that they fondly imagined was ‘one of ours’ and discover too late it was, in fact, one of the enemy’s. This encourages nervous soldiers to ‘fire first and identify the bodies later!’ In the present conflict all military vehicles and heavy weapons used by the insurgents will have been captured from the Libyan Army.

One such friendly fire incident has already occurred. On the very day that the Security Council made its fateful decision, the defenders of Benghazi were jubilant at having shot down in flames a Libyan Air Force plane. Sadly it was, in fact, a plane whose pilot had defected to the insurgency.

The support of western intervention by the Arab League is said to have been an important factor in the Security Council’s decision. It has certainly landed us with some very strange allies in the struggle against Gaddafi! Members of the Arab League include Bahrain, whose ruler has brought in foreign troops to brutalise the peaceful but determined majority who oppose his rule. These foreign troops came from Saudi Arabia, a leading member of the League and a land where the practice of religion other than Islam is strictly prohibited, public floggings and beheadings are part of the criminal law, and women are treated in a way that we in the west would regard as intolerable. Then there is Yemen where we have learned that pro-government snipers have shot and killed a number of peaceful protesters congregating after Friday prayers in a public square.

Those countries are certainly not the first that come to mind as enthusiastic supporters of a campaign to bring freedom and democracy to the benighted land of Libya! They do, of course, have one thing in common. Their autocratic rulers have remained in power for as long as they have with the generous support of Britain and the USA.

I hope and pray, though without a great deal of conviction, that this conflict will swiftly end, and that Libya, together with newly self-liberated Egypt and Tunisia, will prove that Arab and Islamic states can develop into liberal and tolerant democracies.

Week 11. 2011 15.3.11

TENDRING TOPICS…….on line

‘Well bungled Sir!’

Was there ever such an SAS venture quite as inept as the recent one carried out ‘in friendly territory’ in Libya? ‘Like thieves in the night’, a party of SAS men, armed to the teeth, arrived by air and landed ‘somewhere in the desert’ in the vicinity of Benghazi, where they were met by unnamed British agents. It was fortunate perhaps that they were arrested before they had been able to do further harm to Britain’s reputation! What on earth was their purpose? Had they landed in the vicinity of Tripoli, in a government controlled area, it might have been understandable. They could have been on a top-secret death-or-glory mission to kidnap Gaddafi and bring him to justice.

If, as it is suggested, they were there to further the cause of the freedom and liberty, then why not ring the front door bell and seek admission as friends, rather than metaphorically creep round the back and try to break in at a window? I don’t understand it, and neither did the Libyan insurgents. Why on earth should the Libyans have instantly accepted Britons as their friends? We have, until recently, been supplying weaponry to Colonel Gaddafi’s government and to similar governments in the region. Even while the insurgency was taking place and gathering momentum, our Prime Minister, with an entourage including arms dealers, was paying friendly calls on autocratic Middle Eastern regimes with rulers not unlike those that were being toppled by people-power in North Africa. These included Saudi Arabia, arguably neck and neck with North Korea as the country in the world with the least regard for what we regard as inalienable human rights. Characteristically (and without a word of disapproval from ‘the west’) Saudi Arabia’s ruler has threatened to put down even the most peaceful protest against his regime with utmost force.

In view of our Governments’ (both the present one and New-Labour) record of supporting oppressive regimes in the Middle East, I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised that since the beginning of the current insurgency, Britain’s words and actions have been distinguished by muddle, uncertainty and indecisiveness. Remember, in the early days of the Libyan uprising, William Hague our Foreign Minister suggesting that Colonel Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela to seek shelter with ‘his friend’, President Chavez? Wherever did he get that idea? Perhaps Gaddafi and Chavez were friends – but I recall seeing pictures of our former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, embracing Colonel Gaddafi in a way that suggested they were the very closest of good pals!

Then there were the bungled and delayed early attempts to rescue Brits stranded in strife-torn Libya. Remember how the first plane (there was just one!) belatedly chartered by the government, failed to start? How useful the now-scrapped Ark Royal, or any similar large aircraft carrier, could have been in that situation! Those enormously expensive but sacrosanct, nuclear submarines weren’t much use in that – or any other likely – emergency.

There has also been dithering over whether or not we should support the idea of establishing and enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya – blowing hot one day, and cold the next. It is a pity there wasn’t similar hesitation, and the same insistence upon international agreement, before embarking on the illegal invasion of Iraq! My guess is that there will be a no-fly zone but that it will be imposed only after hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent Libyan lives have been lost. We shall, very cleverly, succeed in getting the worst of two worlds!

We often hear how this, that or the other politician was ‘the best Prime Minister that we never had’. I reckon that William Hague, our Foreign Minister, could well be the worst Prime Minister from whom we luckily escaped!

Late news

As I prepare to post this blog on the internet it seems that my worst fears about Libya’s future are likely to be realized. An undisciplined, untrained force equipped only with small arms and a few captured light anti-aircraft guns could never hope to stand up against a disciplined army with tanks, heavy artillery and aircraft at their disposal, no matter how numerous and enthusiastic the rebels might be. The insurgents never had a chance unless complete units of the government’s army defected, with their arms and equipment (including armoured vehicles and artillery), to swell their ranks, or they had substantial overseas aid before they were overwhelmed.

This just hasn’t happened. There were too few defectors and overseas support has, so far, been limited to hot air. Soon, I fear, the insurgency will be over and the secret police and killing squads will move in to exact a bloody retribution.

While NATO, the UNITED NATIONS and the EU wring their hands and argue about what to do next; to prevent similar future fiascos it might be worth enquiring about the source of Colonel Gaddafi’s tanks, armoured cars and heavy artillery, his fighter and bomber aircraft. It would surprise me if many – if any in fact – have ‘made in Libya’, stamped or engraved upon them. They have been manufactured and supplied by us; by the Americans and the Europeans (including we Brits) who are now so outraged and horrified. It was surely obvious that Gaddafi wasn’t going to waste the money that Libya’s oil had brought him on hospitals, schools and old people’s homes! He wanted his war toys – and now he is playing with them!

When will the world learn that the Arms Trade is every bit as immoral, and does every bit as much harm to mankind, as the Slave Trade? Let’s stamp it out!

‘Got a fag mate?’

That question, which translates into polite English as, ‘Could you spare me a cigarette friend?’ would have been clearly understood by anyone – certainly any adult male – in the late 1930s. The chances are that it would have been answered positively. The penniless and proud, who would never have dreamed of begging for money, had no hesitation in asking complete strangers for a cigarette. And even those who had little enough themselves, would usually find a battered packet of Woodbines in their pocket, and offer one of those precious, tobacco filled paper cylinders to whoever asked.

Tobacco was regarded as an essential of human life! Top people usually smoked cigars, the professional and middle classes puffed on their pipes, while members of the working class had their ‘packets of fags’! During World War I, one of the best loved army padres was the Rev. Studdert Kennedy, Anglican priest and popular poet, who was affectionately known as ‘Woodbine Willy’ because of the generosity with which he distributed Woodbines to common soldiers in the trenches and to the wounded in military hospitals.

PoWs in Italy and Germany during World War II were regularly sent supplies of British cigarettes by the British Red Cross. We were the envy of our guards and of the prisoners of war and the conscripted civilian ‘slave workers’ of our allies with whom we worked. A Russian phrase that has stuck in my memory for the nearly seventy years that have elapsed since that time is ‘Davai s’cooreet Tovarisch?’ which, very loosely translated, is ‘Got a fag mate?’ Why, I wonder, have I remembered that phrase from 1944, while nowadays I regularly forget the names of people I have known for years!

Even our captors recognised tobacco as being one of life’s essentials. The Italians very occasionally gave us some of their Nazionali cigarettes. They were awful – but not quite so dreadful as the captured Russian Mahorkas that the Germans occasionally handed out. They were paper cylinders, about an inch long, filled with black tobacco ‘dust’, mounted on the end of a cardboard cylinder perhaps just over two inches long. Put the end of the cardboard cylinder in your mouth, light the end of the paper cylinder and puff away – but not too enthusiastically. Inhale too vigorously and you would find yourself breathing smouldering tobacco dust! Still, to those of us who were hooked on tobacco they were better than nothing.

All of which illustrates the fact that smoking is among the many things to which official and, to a somewhat less extent, public attitudes have changed dramatically during the past fifty or sixty years. No one, other perhaps than athletes, then thought of tobacco as being anything but beneficial. ‘A woman’s only a woman’, wrote Rudyard Kipling in a verse for which he would probably be lynched today, ‘but a good cigar’s a smoke!’ ‘For your throat’s sake – smoke Craven A’, urged the manufacturers of one popular brand of cigarette.

By the ‘60s it became generally accepted that smoking caused lung cancer. Gradually other human ills were laid at its door; asthma, heart disease, chromic bronchitis and so on. Most of us heavy smokers simply carried on. We all knew folk who had smoked like chimneys and lived till they were ninety. It was other people, not us, who got lung cancer – and some people who didn’t smoke got it too. Who better than the tobacco manufacturers to lay smoke screens round the subject? There were, in those days, still to be found a few medical authorities questioning whether smoking was harmful. Now this is universally accepted. Remaining debate is about the extent the state should interfere to prevent its citizens from harming themselves.

Smoking tobacco is addictive and very difficult to give up, as any ex-smoker will confirm. I gave up smoking in the mid-‘60s, when I was about forty-five. I didn’t lose the craving ‘for a fag’ though. I used sometimes to dream that I was smoking again! Ten years later, when I had become Clacton’s Housing Manager, someone offered me a cigarette in a moment of stress – and I accepted it. Within five minutes I was right back to where I had been a decade earlier!

As the years passed I made attempt after attempt to give up, failing every time – usually after about three weeks! I was over 65 (25 years ago!) before I finally succeeded. I haven’t touched a cigarette, cigar or a pipe since. I had tried the lot! I doubt very much if I would have reached my present age had I continued to puff away!

I welcome every initiative by the present government and its predecessors to reduce the number of smokers. I was pleased when smoking was banned in offices and other work places (when I had been Tendring’s Public Relations Officer people had approached me through a haze of cigar smoke!) on public transport and in pubs ancd restaurants. I never dreamed that any government would have the courage to ban smoking in pubs, but New-Labour did (and I must unwontedly praise them for that!). What’s more, the law was enforced. Pubs are now smoke-free.

I welcome the present government’s ideas of requiring cigarettes to be sold in plain packets and kept out of sight. They wouldn’t prevent the sales of cigarettes but they would reduce them, and reduce the chances of young people buying and becoming addicted. As Tesco, a major purveyor of tobacco products, claims in quite a different context, ‘Every Little Helps!’

I look forward to the day when smokers are regarded by the general public as being sufferers from a dangerous addiction leading to self-inflicted illness and disability; weak-willed folk who should be pitied and helped rather than blamed.

Yes, I am well aware that I was once myself a ‘fully paid up member’ of the Smoking Brigade!

The Japanese Catastrophe!

It is difficult to find words with which to comment on the disaster – the earthquake and the consequent Tsunami – that struck Japan just a few days ago. I don’t believe that in my lifetime of now nearly 90 years, that there has been a comparable natural catastrophe. Whole communities were swept away, acre after acre rendered barren and lifeless, littered with shattered cars, tree trunks and other deposited debris. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of dead, and as I write, the possibility of a natural disaster being made even worse by the effects of the quake and tsunami on at least three nuclear power plant. How puny are humankind’s powers – even our powers of destruction – compared with those of nature!

For God’s sake – and I mean that prayerfully not blasphemously – let us start
working together to prevent where we can, and mitigate where we can’t, the effects of the natural disasters with which, during this past year in particular, humanity has been plagued! Why can't Mutually Assured Co-operation replace the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD!) of nuclear ‘defence’?

Week 10 11 8th March 2011

Tendring Topics……on line



The Big Society is us!



It seems that as far as David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ is concerned, our own Tendring District is at the very centre of things. Harwich and North Essex MP Bernard Jenkins is chairing a House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee which wants to separate the government’s programme of cuts in public services, from the idea of The Big Society. Perhaps I have misread the Clacton Gazette’s report but it seems that Mr Jenkins and the Committee he is chairing are not too sure themselves what The Big Society is all about. And it is to us – well to Mr Neil Stock, leader of our district council – that they are turning for enlightenment.

The Gazette reports that Mr Stock, ‘has responded to a call from MP Bernard Jenkins for an inquiry into what the concept (of the Big Society) means’. Mr Stock was, of course, pleased to oblige. He says modestly that, ‘While we don’t claim to have all the answers, I do believe that ‘we get it’ and I would welcome the opportunity to talk to the Select Committee. We in Tendring are well ahead of the game in respect of understanding the potential of how ‘Big Society – Small Government’ can improve the quality of life of our residents. It could well help the committee with its inquiry and I look forward to speaking with them’.

Mr Jenkin announced the setting up of the inquiry during Prime Minister’s Questions where it was welcomed by David Cameron (the Big Society was David Cameron’s idea. Surely he knows what it is all about!) Mr Jenkins clearly doesn’t. He told the House of Commons that, ‘It would be helpful for us to discuss the issue with a Council which has already stepped forward to embrace the Big Society in such a positive way.

One of Mr Neil Stock’s close colleagues on Tendring Council, Councillor Peter Halliday, seems to have no doubt of the Big Society’s purpose; it is to get free of charge services to the public that the Council has previously had to pay for, eventually (though I doubt if he thinks that far ahead) making the Council itself redundant.

A picture in the Clacton Gazette shows Mr Halliday congratulating public spirited Mrs Margaret Henderson of William Drive, Clacton on collecting litter from the Martello Beach three times a week, a task that she has been carrying out since her retirement three years ago. She sorts out what she collects and disposes it in the recycling bins by the Hastings Avenue Lifeboat Station.

Mrs Henderson, who is in her early seventies, is beginning to find bending over to pick up litter a bit too much for her. Veolia, the council’s cleansing contractors, have already given her a pair of protective gloves and the council have now given her a ‘litter picker’, one of those gadgets (I’ve got one myself) that can be used to pick up objects without bending right over. It is very good of them both, though it is of course, their job to keep the beach clean, not just to help someone who is doing their job for them.

I think that Mrs Henderson deserves everybody’s thanks. If more people behaved as she has, the world would be a happier – and much cleaner! – place. Sadly most people either can’t or won’t. That is why we elect district councils and pay our taxes for them to do these jobs for us. They should keep our beaches clean and prosecute those who litter them, not appeal for volunteers to do the work for them for nothing.

Councillor Halliday was also recently reported in the Clacton Gazette as urging stores and pubs to open their loos to the public – thereby reducing, and perhaps ultimately eliminating, the need for the Council to provide and maintain public conveniences. I have a great deal of sympathy with Ms. Eileen Murphy of Jaywick Lane who has written to the Gazette urging Mr Halliday to ‘stop and think for a change. Publicans and restaurant owners have these facilities for their patrons only. They pay staff to keep them clean and up-to-date. Is the council going to pay towards this facility, or do they expect the service for free? She adds, ‘a woman on her own would not go into a pub toilet. How awful that would that feel!’

I think that Ms. Murphy has made a couple of very valid points. Someone has to pay for the provision and maintenance of those pub and restaurant toilets. If the council wants them to be available to the public then the council should contribute. I quite agree too that no woman, unaccompanied, would want to enter a strange pub, ask for directions to the ladies’ toilet and then make her way there, possibly through a crowd of drinkers!

When my wife and I were on camping holidays we would occasionally use pub toilet facilities. Always though, we went in together. And we would never dream of using those facilities without my ordering at least a fruit juice for my wife (a life-long teetotaller) and half a pint of something a little stronger for myself.

I reckon that if and when Councillor Neil Stock faces Mr Jenkin’s Westminster Committee, he won’t be far wrong if he says that, in Tendring at least, the Big Society is an attempt to get services for free that they have previously always had to pay for. Perhaps they’ll succeed – and will demonstrate that such pieces of folk wisdom as, 'there is no such a thing as a free lunch' or, as they say in Suffolk, ‘Yew doant git nawth’n f’r nawth’n – and not-a-lot f’r a tanner*’ simply aren’t true!

*a tanner – slang expression for sixpence (old coinage). In today’s terms 2.5p.

Unanswered questions

There are aspects of the current financial crisis that puzzle me: The Government insists, and it is obvious from readers’ letters in the popular press that many people accept it as self-evident, that the current economic situation can be blamed on the profligacy and incompetence of Mr Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister. How then is it that the Irish Republic, the USA and a number of mainland European countries are in much the same, or an even worse, situation? Surely, it isn’t suggested that Mr Brown was the leader of an international conspiracy to undermine the world’s monetary system?

When the Governor of the Bank of England, who might have been thought to be the man in England most familiar with the situation, addressed the Trades Union Conference a few months ago, he didn’t blame Mr Brown. He put the blame fairly and squarely on ‘the bankers’, people like himself. He made the point again, even more strongly, just a few days ago. But, of course, ‘the bankers’ are among the largest contributors to the funds of the major partner in the coalition government. It might be wiser not to make too much fuss about their role in the creaton of the current situation!

Come to think of it, the profligacy of Mr Brown’s government can hardly have even approached that of the wartime government between 1939 and 1945. That was a time of desperate emergency when every pound that we possessed, or could borrow, was spent on guns, tanks, ammunition, aircraft, warships and on the pay and equipment of servicemen and women. No one grudged a penny of it. That was expenditure to which we owe our national survival – but it was also negative expenditure on a previously unheard of scale. Compared with that, the prodigality of the New-Labour Government must surely have been just ‘petty cash’.

The immediate post-war years were a time of austerity (I lived through them which is more than many – if any – members of the House of Commons can claim!) There was still wartime rationing and there were still shortages of consumer goods. Thousands had been bombed out of homes, which could only then, with the war over, begin to be replaced.

Those years were also though, as I well remember, a time of hope for the future, a time of rebuilding, reconstruction and regeneration. Many of Britain’s major cities, flattened by air raids, were rebuilt as were ruined infrastructures. Factories that had been devoted to the manufacture of weapons of war, were converted back to peacetime use. Jobs, in the construction industries and in the run-down public services, were found for the thousands of returning servicemen and women. Homes, temporary (remember the prefabs, people were glad enough to have them at the time!) and permanent, were found for the tens of thousands of the homeless and badly housed. By 1951, with much remaining to be done, we felt sufficiently confident to celebrate our achievements in The Festival of Britain!

Autumn, 1945. Heather and I, planning our wedding, are caught on camera strolling along Charing Cross Road.

I don’t remember those years as being a time of increasing austerity and cuts in public services, blamed by the politicians of that time on the previous coalition government. Nowadays the Spirit of the Blitz is regularly invoked (though rarely by people who actually remember the Blitz!) as an example that we should try to emulate. I’d rather we recovered something of the Spirit of post-war Britain, when many of us (Heather and I among them) really believed that we were on our way to building in Britain, and as an example to the world, a true commonwealth (common wealth!) of liberty, fraternity and equality – the new ‘Jerusalem’ of William Blake’s poem, (now the anthem of the Women’s Institute).

Bring me my bow of burning gold.
Bring me my arrows of desire.
Bring me my sword, O clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I shall not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till I have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

Over sixty years later, we’re further away from that goal than we have ever been!

Prudent Tendring Council could save a half-million pounds!

Perhaps! The thought was evoked by a report in the Clacton Gazette about the hesitation of a local charity to apply for help from the Council’s much-vaunted £500,000 Big Society fund. Andrew Mowle, Chairman of the Green Team (a very small local charity that looks after Jaywick’s community gardens and organises an annual ‘front gardens’ competition there) says: ‘We would have to make a case that we are saving the council money by doing what we do. But they don’t spend any money on the gardens so how can we make a case? I don’t think David Cameron had this in mind’.

Who knows what David Cameron had in mind? It is very clear to me though that this criterion would render almost every local charity ineligible for a grant. How much money, for example, does the Council currently spend on practical help for the elderly and disabled, as do Family Support Groups throughout the district, or on providing respite-care for carers as does Cross Roads based in Thorpe-le-Soken, or on taking vulnerable people out weekly for a meal as does St. Osyth’s Dumont Lunch Club, or providing a little extra care and comfort to the sick and dying as do Hospital and Hospice local support groups?

The whole purpose and reason for existence of a local charity is to provide a service to members of the public that the Council either cannot or will not provide.

If the Council adheres strictly to the criterion that charity grant seekers must prove that their activities save the council money, they stand to save their £500,000. If, of course, they do find charities that will save them money (is there perhaps a Support for Hard-up Councillors charity?) they’ll recover it! It is a ‘heads we win, tails you lose’ situation for the Council – though not, I fear, for the community they are supposed to be serving.