Tendring Topics…….on line
The Referendum? I have voted YES!
Many years ago (it was in the days before Rupert Murdoch’s News International got its fingers on The Times) a letter of mine on the subject of electoral reform appeared in its then-august Readers’ Letters page.
It had become very obvious to me that although only a limited number of us had any great enthusiasm for any one of the parliamentary candidates for whom we were invited to vote at general elections, most of us knew perfectly well who we wanted to keep out of parliament. I suggested therefore that we should all have two votes, one positive and one negative. We could use either or both, placing the ‘yes’ vote against the name of any candidate that we preferred, or disliked the least, and the ‘no’ vote against the candidate that we wanted kept out of parliament at all costs. Positive and negative votes would both be counted after the election and the winner would be decided by the net result.
I felt that a winning candidate, learning that he had been elected by a net minus-300 votes compared with his nearest rival’s minus-360 would experience a due sense of humility and feel a real determination to ‘do better next time’.
It wouldn’t have worked. I realize that it would have given an unfair advantage to fringe and maverick parties like, for instance, The Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Few people would vote positively for them but even fewer would dislike them sufficiently to waste their one negative vote on keeping them out.
I think that the current ‘first past the post’ system is seriously flawed. It works best when there are just two serious contenders though, even then, it means that anything up to half the voters in every constituency feel that they have no political representation. It doesn’t work fairly when there are three or more contenders. Then it is quite possible – likely in fact – that the candidate elected will have had more votes cast against him, but shared among his opponents, than for him. This results in ‘tactical voting’ (I have done it myself on occasion) when electors don’t vote for the candidate that they really prefer but for the one they think most likely to defeat the candidate they like the least.
It is also entirely possible, and has happened at least once since World War II, that a General Election can produce a government with a comfortable majority in the House of Commons, despite their opponents having secured most votes in the country overall.
The best solution to this is proportional representation where electors votes are cast for the political parties rather than for individual candidates (though they know, of course, which candidates each party is putting forward) and party representation in the House of Commons is proportional to the votes cast for each. It is surely significant that when it was decided that there should be a Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies, no-one suggested for one moment that they should have ‘first past the post’ electoral systems.
The ‘alternative vote’ system, which the referendum invites us to choose or reject, does not offer proportional representation. If it is adopted we will be asked to number the candidates in order of preference. Where, as would be the case in many constituencies, one candidate is the first choice of more than 50 percent of the votes cast, he or she would be elected without more ado. If however no candidate secured more than 50 percent of the vote, second choices would be taken into account until one of the candidates did have more than fifty percent.
It would mean that no MP would be elected on a minority vote. It would mean that there would be less need for tactical voting and we wouldn’t necessarily feel that a vote for the candidate we really prefer would be wasted. It would be rather less likely that a Government could be formed from a party that secured fewer votes overall than their opponents.
A YES majority vote in the referendum wouldn’t usher in a ‘New Jerusalem’. Neither would it, as the NO vote enthusiasts suggest, lead to the end of democracy as we know it. It would result in rather fairer elections than we have today.
Nowadays I vote by post and have already received my voting papers for the referendum and for the Tendring District Council election well in advance. By the time you read this I will have already registered my YES vote and will have posted it back to the Counting Officer.
NHS Reform.
The breakneck pace of NHS reform seems to have come to a standstill. The tide of opposition from the BMA and the General Council of Nursing has made the government pause and look again at some of its ideas. I was always doubtful, and have said so in this blog, about the idea of handing the responsibilities of Primary Care Trusts to ‘the doctors’. They surely have more important things to do than spend time working out exactly where, how and when their patients will get the specialist diagnosis and treatment that they may need.
Of course they couldn’t be expected to do it. They have formed consortia of several medical practices, employing specialist staff to do much of the administrative and clerical work. It seemed to me that, instead of one bureaucratic organisation doing this work, there would be a dozen or more!
The strongest objections to the government proposals come from health professionals; nurses, paramedics and various therapists, who feel that doctors alone shouldn’t control patients’ futures. Perhaps they should have their representatives in the new consortia – and how about the patients? It is all about them anyway. Shouldn’t they too be represented?
That all sounds like quite a good idea to me. Wouldn’t it though, be merely a revival of the existing Primary Care Trusts, but with rather wider and more representative management bodies?
Money to burn?
For a long time I have felt that the local government service was ‘top heavy’. The salaries, bonuses and expenses entitlements at the top bore little relationship to those further down the line, despite the fact that these included experienced and highly qualified professional men and women performing vital tasks for the community. It is the salaries of the people at the top that have made some people unable to say council official without prefacing the words 'with 'highly paid! Lots of them certainly aren’t.
However District Council bosses remuneration pale into insignificance compared with the salaries and perks of the top people of the Essex Fire Service. Chief Fire Officer David Johnson, who has recently overseen substantial cuts in the service for which he is responsible, enjoys a salary of £148,633 a year. When first appointed, his home was in Nottingham but he maintained ‘a makeshift’ home in Essex.
In 2005 he moved nearer to his place of employment, though not exactly to take up residence ‘above the shop’, or even in the county of Essex. His new home is in picturesque Stoke-by-Clare in Suffolk. The Daily Gazette reveals that he claimed from the Essex Fire Authority (from us Council Tax payers in fact) the sum of £20,000 to cover his removal and redecoration costs. His expenditure included £3,704 for carpets, £3,466 for floor tiles and £324 for curtains for his new Suffolk home. He also claimed £3,877 in estate agent fees, £2,402 in removal costs, and £4,563 for a mortgage redemption penalty.
I remember that when, in the local government service, I relocated my home from Suffolk to Essex, I was able to claim removal expenses only, and those only if I had accepted the lowest estimate of at least two removal firms!
The Gazette also reports that Mr Johnson and six senior colleagues have claimed nearly £46,000 in other expenses since 2008. These, so the Gazette records included ‘billing taxpayers for a trip to South Korea, meals at an exclusive gentlemen’s club and stays in lavish hotels around the world’.
Since 2006 the Fire Service has also spent £276.000 on the purchase of eight luxury cars (six Audis and two BMWs) each costing over £30,000, for its Brigade Managers – the Essex service’s most senior staff
A spokesman for the fire service is reported to have said, ‘The procedure for claiming expenses does not need to be reviewed. The service is confident all officers and fire authority members have acted appropriately’.
Thank goodness no one has acted ‘inappropriately’. Heaven alone knows what that could have cost us! I wonder what the front line firemen and women, who put their lives in peril every time they go out on a major emergency, think of the expenditure of ‘their bosses’?
Events are taking over!
When Britain first decided to intervene in the uprising against Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, imposing a No Fly Zone over the whole country seemed such a simple, obvious and relatively non-violent course of action. We would be saving civilian lives by eliminating the possibility of air attacks. I did say in this blog at the time that I very much feared that, as with our action in Afghanistan, we might be starting something from which we would find it difficult to extricate ourselves. I didn’t really think though that we would find ourselves being dragged ever deeper and deeper into the action.
But it seems that we have been. It was quite soon realized that Colonel Gaddafi could take back his oil-rich desert empire, killing scores of innocent civilians as he did so, without the need for mastery of the skies. Tanks, artillery and rocket fire followed up by well-armed and disciplined infantry attacks could be equally effective and equally deadly. Well, it was argued, our mission wasn’t simply to impose a no fly zone. It was to protect civilians.
An attack on Benghazi was thwarted by French air attacks on advancing armoured columns. The emphasis of the allied campaign changed. All Libyan government military installations and military vehicles became legitimate targets. Inevitably there were friendly fire incidents. Inevitably bombs dropped on military targets killed civilians. The ousting of Gaddafi became our ultimate aim. Surely he would realize that he couldn’t prevail against the might of NATO. Surely those loyal to him would realize the hopelessness of his position and change sides. One or two did – as one or two of Hitler’s henchmen deserted him when World War II was clearly lost.
Gaddafi though refused to comply and flaunted his power by driving in an open vehicle round Tripoli amid cheering crowds. It is in the nature of megalomaniacs to believe that they are invincible. In April 1945 it was only when the Soviet Army was within a few hundred yards of his bunker that Hitler accepted that he was beaten – and took his own life. To the end – and even after his suicide – there were Nazi fanatics who fought on!
The latest development in Libya is the deployment, with the insurgents, of military advisers from the UK, France and Italy (I hope they’ll all be singing from the same hymn-sheet!) They are not, as one might have imagined, advising on military matters but are ‘helping with communications and co-ordinating humanitarian aid’. They each have, of course, a small armed force with them to protect them from possible attack.
How long will it be, I wonder, before we enter the next phase of the conflict – and still with no end in sight!
26 April 2011
18 April 2011
Week 16.2011 19.4.2011
Tendring Topics……..on line
‘Thank Christ….for Easter!’
I don’t think that we would be particularly surprised if we saw that message on a Notice Board outside any church or place of worship this week. Yet that message, with the addition of ‘Bank Holiday’ after ‘Easter’ and accompanied by a caricature of a smiling and beckoning Christ, wearing ear phones, outside Tom Peppers pub on Clacton’s Marine Parade has caused outrage among many Christians, including the Bishop of Chelmsford.
Well, I have to confess that when I first saw it, I too felt outraged. Jesus Christ’s name was being used blasphemously and his image was being exploited to encourage irresponsible boozing! Disgraceful. But was it? A chat with friends wiser than I am and with a Christian faith firmer than mine, made me begin to think otherwise.
The poster did at least acknowledge that Jesus Christ had something to do with Easter. The further, admittedly tasteless, advertisement for a vodka drink to bring yourself back to life even suggests that the author of the advert was acquainted with the fact of Christ’s resurrection.
A couple of pages after the report of this ‘outrageous’ poster and the Christian reaction to it, the same Clacton Gazette had nine pages of Easter Extra full of adverts for Easter activities and commercial services. There were advertising features extolling the attractions of Clacton and Holland-on-Sea over the Easter holiday, the beauty of the nearby bluebell woods, and so on (I have written advertising features like that myself in my time!) but not a single word about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Nor was there even a whisper of the possibility that going to church to ‘thank Christ for Easter’ was among the ‘Things to do in Clacton at Easter’.
I reckon that fundamentalist atheists like, for instance, Professor Dawkins, who are always eager to spread their unbelief, would derive far more satisfaction from those nine pages of Easter Extra that studiously avoided any connection between Easter and the Christian Faith, than from the poster that, however crudely, brought the reality and importance of the Easter story to the attention of us all.
An insult to Jesus to suggest that he had anything to do with pubs and the kind of people who use them? Hardly; tradition asserts that he was born in a stable at the back of an inn. He was, so he told us himself, accused of being ‘a glutton and a wine bibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners’. The God whom Jesus revealed to us does not tell his followers to seek out and punish those who insult him. On that first Good Friday Jesus was subjected to far more abuse, insult and wanton cruelty than the rest of us have to endure in a lifetime. His reaction was to pray: ‘Forgive them Father. They don’t realize what they are doing’.
I think that Christians should thank the landlord of ‘Tom Peppers’ for having, however inadvertently, brought the true story of Easter to the front page of a local newspaper that would otherwise have ignored it.
Nursing care?
Some weeks ago I mentioned in this blog my late wife Heather’s brief and unhappy stay in the Kate Grant Ward of Clacton Hospital in 2004. She had fallen, broken a hip and had had it repaired at Colchester General Hospital. She had then been sent to Clacton Hospital for rehabilitation. I had known at about the time her ambulance would arrive there and, when it arrived, I had my introduction to the situation that prevailed there!
The ambulance driver pushed her, in a wheel chair, into the Kate Grant Ward and up to the empty bed prepared for her. There were no nurses there to receive her and get her into the bed. After waiting for about ten minutes the driver said, ‘I’m not supposed to do this, but I can’t leave her sitting in that wheel chair after that long drive. I’m going to get her onto the bed’. And so he did. He was strong and my wife was very light so it was no problem. Eventually of course a couple of nurses did turn up, very kind and helpful, and she was properly admitted.
That summed up all her subsequent treatment. The nurses were kind, hard working and thoroughly professional – but there were not enough of them. With a ward full of more-or-less immobile elderly ladies there was almost always at least one of them needing urgent attention and often more than one. The result was that it took well over an hour to get them settled at night and even longer to get them up, washed, dressed and ready to sit in their bedside chairs, in the morning. Alarm bells often went unanswered and patients were catheterised (and became permanently incontinent as a result) simply because it avoided the need to supply a bottle or bedpan, or to help the patient to the toilet. It was a great relief when I managed to persuade the Ward Sister that I was well able to care for my wife myself at home, and we bade the Kate Grant Ward farewell.
My wife’s experience pales into insignificance compared with that reported of Carol Carr of Dovercourt. She is a sufferer from Multiple Schlerosis and has paralysis down one side of her body. She was admitted to Colchester General Hospital with a persistent urinary tract infection. A report in the local Daily Gazette records that, ‘Her husband Dennis said she was left initially without food and drink for eight hours while waiting in the admissions area. Once properly admitted to hospital, he claims his wife was left lying in her own faeces for more than six hours’.
Mr Carr says, ‘The conditions in that hospital were atrocious. My wife’s carer and myself found ourselves having to do stuff for elderly patients. Bells were going off and being ignored. It’s so infuriating to sit there and watch this going on. To have it happen to a member of your own family is appalling……..there are good people there, good nurses. But they just don’t have sufficient staff’.
Mr and Mrs Carr have made an official complaint that is being looked into as a matter of urgency by the hospital authorities. Whatever the outcome of that enquiry though it is obvious to me though that there is an acute shortage of nurses ‘in the front line’, a shortage that I had noted in Clacton seven years earlier
And now it seems, Government cuts mean that there will be even less of them!
My own ‘Close encounter’ with the NHS
I was sorry to hear of Mrs Carr’s experience of the NHS and of Colchester General Hospital because, almost at the same time perhaps, I was having a wholly different and, for the most part, wholly positive experience of both.
I had been seeing my own doctor about what seemed to be a problem with my digestive system for a week or so. Then I had a very troubled night, perspiring freely and shivering at the same time. In the morning I was still trembling and shaking. Had I not been living alone I might have decided otherwise but I thought that by dialling 999 I would at least get the immediate attention of a paramedic.
And so I did. A pleasant and helpful young man turned up and examined me. He was very concerned to find that my blood pressure which, when taken on one arm was wildly different from one taken on the other. He seemed to think that that was a sign of imminent peril. He phoned for an ambulance and helped me to get dressed, urging me to do everything very, very slowly and carefully.
He must I think, have conveyed his worries about my condition to Colchester General Hospital, because when I got there I was dealt with instantly with no waiting at all. For the next hour my body wasn’t my own. A nurse helped me into one of those awful hospital gowns, I gave blood and urine samples for examination. In a hospital ‘cot’, I was electrocardiographed, my chest and my abdomen were X-rayed separately and, as I was stretched out on an ‘operating’ table, my stomach was prodded and very thoroughly examined by the Registrar.
Back in my ‘cot’, I was pushed into a cubicle to await my fate. After, I suppose, about three quarters of an hour the Registrar (a helpful and friendly young woman) turned up. She told me that those tests had revealed that I had a very severe urinary infection. It could be successfully treated with antibiotics and I could take them as satisfactorily at home as in hospital. I could get dressed and go home.
As I was about to ask her how I was going to get home, the curtain to the cubicle was pulled aside, and in walked my younger son Andy who lives in Enfield. A friendly neighbour had spotted me being carried off in an ambulance and had phoned him. He had driven down right away and had turned up just in time to drive me home in comfort.
No negative experiences at all? Well, just one. It sounds pretty trivial now – but it didn’t at the time. While waiting in the cubicle I developed an urge to visit the toilet. There seemed to be no way of summoning a nurse so, in desperation, I told someone passing outside the cubicle of my need and asked them if they could ask a nurse to give me urgent attention. I had hoped, I suppose, that the nurse would let down the side of my ‘cot’ so that I could get out, and direct me to the nearest toilet. With my stick I would have been well able to get there on my own.
What actually happened was that, after another seemingly interminable wait, a nurse walked in with one of those (paper maché ?) hospital urine bottles, thrust it over the part of my anatomy that needed it, and walked out again. It was, I suppose, an adequate response, but hardly the one for which I had hoped. However, I came to no harm and it did confirm my conviction that many more nurses are needed ‘on the front line!’
The World’s Best! – and it’s all free?
Politicians, of all political persuasions, constantly assure us that they are determined that our Health Service should remain ‘the best in the world’ and will continue to be ‘free at the point of delivery’. If they say it often enough without thinking about it, they’ll probably believe it themselves!
It certainly isn’t free at the point of delivery – unless you consider that dentistry, optical services and actually obtaining the drugs that the doctor prescribes are not part of the Health Service. I don’t have to pay for prescribed medicines because of my age. Many others are also exempt for one reason or another but for those who have to pay (as I did before I reached retirement age) the charge is now over £7.00 per item!
Is our Health Service ‘the best in the world’? I had always imagined that it was at least among the top half dozen. Lately though I have begun to wonder. My grandson, who lives and works in Brussels (The rule that gives all EU citizens the right to live and work anywhere with the EU doesn’t just benefit those who want to come to England!) is very enthusiastic about the service that he enjoys in Belgium.
And why do so many people needing hip replacement and similar surgery opt to go to France or elsewhere to have it done?
Infant mortality, including the incidence of stillbirths, is generally reckoned to be a pretty good indicator of the general health of a community. I was shocked to learn that Britain has more stillbirths per every one-thousand births than practically any other developed country in the world.
There can be few situations more heart-rending than the birth of a stillborn child. The birth has been anticipated for months – pram, cot, baby clothes have all been lovingly prepared. Messages of congratulation have been arriving – and the baby dies before birth. I am sure that only those who have had the experience can imagine the disappointment, despair and desolation of the bereaved mum and dad. If there were only one, per million live births, it would be one too many.
I don’t know why we have more stillbirths than almost every other developed country but, if I were a betting man, I would be prepared to wager that those countries with a lower stillbirth rate than us, have:
(a) A much narrower gap between the incomes of their poorest and wealthiest citizens than we have.
(b) Many more trained, qualified and working nurses and midwives per head of the population than we have.
‘Thank Christ….for Easter!’
I don’t think that we would be particularly surprised if we saw that message on a Notice Board outside any church or place of worship this week. Yet that message, with the addition of ‘Bank Holiday’ after ‘Easter’ and accompanied by a caricature of a smiling and beckoning Christ, wearing ear phones, outside Tom Peppers pub on Clacton’s Marine Parade has caused outrage among many Christians, including the Bishop of Chelmsford.
Well, I have to confess that when I first saw it, I too felt outraged. Jesus Christ’s name was being used blasphemously and his image was being exploited to encourage irresponsible boozing! Disgraceful. But was it? A chat with friends wiser than I am and with a Christian faith firmer than mine, made me begin to think otherwise.
The poster did at least acknowledge that Jesus Christ had something to do with Easter. The further, admittedly tasteless, advertisement for a vodka drink to bring yourself back to life even suggests that the author of the advert was acquainted with the fact of Christ’s resurrection.
A couple of pages after the report of this ‘outrageous’ poster and the Christian reaction to it, the same Clacton Gazette had nine pages of Easter Extra full of adverts for Easter activities and commercial services. There were advertising features extolling the attractions of Clacton and Holland-on-Sea over the Easter holiday, the beauty of the nearby bluebell woods, and so on (I have written advertising features like that myself in my time!) but not a single word about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Nor was there even a whisper of the possibility that going to church to ‘thank Christ for Easter’ was among the ‘Things to do in Clacton at Easter’.
I reckon that fundamentalist atheists like, for instance, Professor Dawkins, who are always eager to spread their unbelief, would derive far more satisfaction from those nine pages of Easter Extra that studiously avoided any connection between Easter and the Christian Faith, than from the poster that, however crudely, brought the reality and importance of the Easter story to the attention of us all.
An insult to Jesus to suggest that he had anything to do with pubs and the kind of people who use them? Hardly; tradition asserts that he was born in a stable at the back of an inn. He was, so he told us himself, accused of being ‘a glutton and a wine bibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners’. The God whom Jesus revealed to us does not tell his followers to seek out and punish those who insult him. On that first Good Friday Jesus was subjected to far more abuse, insult and wanton cruelty than the rest of us have to endure in a lifetime. His reaction was to pray: ‘Forgive them Father. They don’t realize what they are doing’.
I think that Christians should thank the landlord of ‘Tom Peppers’ for having, however inadvertently, brought the true story of Easter to the front page of a local newspaper that would otherwise have ignored it.
Nursing care?
Some weeks ago I mentioned in this blog my late wife Heather’s brief and unhappy stay in the Kate Grant Ward of Clacton Hospital in 2004. She had fallen, broken a hip and had had it repaired at Colchester General Hospital. She had then been sent to Clacton Hospital for rehabilitation. I had known at about the time her ambulance would arrive there and, when it arrived, I had my introduction to the situation that prevailed there!
The ambulance driver pushed her, in a wheel chair, into the Kate Grant Ward and up to the empty bed prepared for her. There were no nurses there to receive her and get her into the bed. After waiting for about ten minutes the driver said, ‘I’m not supposed to do this, but I can’t leave her sitting in that wheel chair after that long drive. I’m going to get her onto the bed’. And so he did. He was strong and my wife was very light so it was no problem. Eventually of course a couple of nurses did turn up, very kind and helpful, and she was properly admitted.
That summed up all her subsequent treatment. The nurses were kind, hard working and thoroughly professional – but there were not enough of them. With a ward full of more-or-less immobile elderly ladies there was almost always at least one of them needing urgent attention and often more than one. The result was that it took well over an hour to get them settled at night and even longer to get them up, washed, dressed and ready to sit in their bedside chairs, in the morning. Alarm bells often went unanswered and patients were catheterised (and became permanently incontinent as a result) simply because it avoided the need to supply a bottle or bedpan, or to help the patient to the toilet. It was a great relief when I managed to persuade the Ward Sister that I was well able to care for my wife myself at home, and we bade the Kate Grant Ward farewell.
My wife’s experience pales into insignificance compared with that reported of Carol Carr of Dovercourt. She is a sufferer from Multiple Schlerosis and has paralysis down one side of her body. She was admitted to Colchester General Hospital with a persistent urinary tract infection. A report in the local Daily Gazette records that, ‘Her husband Dennis said she was left initially without food and drink for eight hours while waiting in the admissions area. Once properly admitted to hospital, he claims his wife was left lying in her own faeces for more than six hours’.
Mr Carr says, ‘The conditions in that hospital were atrocious. My wife’s carer and myself found ourselves having to do stuff for elderly patients. Bells were going off and being ignored. It’s so infuriating to sit there and watch this going on. To have it happen to a member of your own family is appalling……..there are good people there, good nurses. But they just don’t have sufficient staff’.
Mr and Mrs Carr have made an official complaint that is being looked into as a matter of urgency by the hospital authorities. Whatever the outcome of that enquiry though it is obvious to me though that there is an acute shortage of nurses ‘in the front line’, a shortage that I had noted in Clacton seven years earlier
And now it seems, Government cuts mean that there will be even less of them!
My own ‘Close encounter’ with the NHS
I was sorry to hear of Mrs Carr’s experience of the NHS and of Colchester General Hospital because, almost at the same time perhaps, I was having a wholly different and, for the most part, wholly positive experience of both.
I had been seeing my own doctor about what seemed to be a problem with my digestive system for a week or so. Then I had a very troubled night, perspiring freely and shivering at the same time. In the morning I was still trembling and shaking. Had I not been living alone I might have decided otherwise but I thought that by dialling 999 I would at least get the immediate attention of a paramedic.
And so I did. A pleasant and helpful young man turned up and examined me. He was very concerned to find that my blood pressure which, when taken on one arm was wildly different from one taken on the other. He seemed to think that that was a sign of imminent peril. He phoned for an ambulance and helped me to get dressed, urging me to do everything very, very slowly and carefully.
He must I think, have conveyed his worries about my condition to Colchester General Hospital, because when I got there I was dealt with instantly with no waiting at all. For the next hour my body wasn’t my own. A nurse helped me into one of those awful hospital gowns, I gave blood and urine samples for examination. In a hospital ‘cot’, I was electrocardiographed, my chest and my abdomen were X-rayed separately and, as I was stretched out on an ‘operating’ table, my stomach was prodded and very thoroughly examined by the Registrar.
Back in my ‘cot’, I was pushed into a cubicle to await my fate. After, I suppose, about three quarters of an hour the Registrar (a helpful and friendly young woman) turned up. She told me that those tests had revealed that I had a very severe urinary infection. It could be successfully treated with antibiotics and I could take them as satisfactorily at home as in hospital. I could get dressed and go home.
As I was about to ask her how I was going to get home, the curtain to the cubicle was pulled aside, and in walked my younger son Andy who lives in Enfield. A friendly neighbour had spotted me being carried off in an ambulance and had phoned him. He had driven down right away and had turned up just in time to drive me home in comfort.
No negative experiences at all? Well, just one. It sounds pretty trivial now – but it didn’t at the time. While waiting in the cubicle I developed an urge to visit the toilet. There seemed to be no way of summoning a nurse so, in desperation, I told someone passing outside the cubicle of my need and asked them if they could ask a nurse to give me urgent attention. I had hoped, I suppose, that the nurse would let down the side of my ‘cot’ so that I could get out, and direct me to the nearest toilet. With my stick I would have been well able to get there on my own.
What actually happened was that, after another seemingly interminable wait, a nurse walked in with one of those (paper maché ?) hospital urine bottles, thrust it over the part of my anatomy that needed it, and walked out again. It was, I suppose, an adequate response, but hardly the one for which I had hoped. However, I came to no harm and it did confirm my conviction that many more nurses are needed ‘on the front line!’
The World’s Best! – and it’s all free?
Politicians, of all political persuasions, constantly assure us that they are determined that our Health Service should remain ‘the best in the world’ and will continue to be ‘free at the point of delivery’. If they say it often enough without thinking about it, they’ll probably believe it themselves!
It certainly isn’t free at the point of delivery – unless you consider that dentistry, optical services and actually obtaining the drugs that the doctor prescribes are not part of the Health Service. I don’t have to pay for prescribed medicines because of my age. Many others are also exempt for one reason or another but for those who have to pay (as I did before I reached retirement age) the charge is now over £7.00 per item!
Is our Health Service ‘the best in the world’? I had always imagined that it was at least among the top half dozen. Lately though I have begun to wonder. My grandson, who lives and works in Brussels (The rule that gives all EU citizens the right to live and work anywhere with the EU doesn’t just benefit those who want to come to England!) is very enthusiastic about the service that he enjoys in Belgium.
And why do so many people needing hip replacement and similar surgery opt to go to France or elsewhere to have it done?
Infant mortality, including the incidence of stillbirths, is generally reckoned to be a pretty good indicator of the general health of a community. I was shocked to learn that Britain has more stillbirths per every one-thousand births than practically any other developed country in the world.
There can be few situations more heart-rending than the birth of a stillborn child. The birth has been anticipated for months – pram, cot, baby clothes have all been lovingly prepared. Messages of congratulation have been arriving – and the baby dies before birth. I am sure that only those who have had the experience can imagine the disappointment, despair and desolation of the bereaved mum and dad. If there were only one, per million live births, it would be one too many.
I don’t know why we have more stillbirths than almost every other developed country but, if I were a betting man, I would be prepared to wager that those countries with a lower stillbirth rate than us, have:
(a) A much narrower gap between the incomes of their poorest and wealthiest citizens than we have.
(b) Many more trained, qualified and working nurses and midwives per head of the population than we have.
11 April 2011
Week 15. 2011 12.4.2011
Tendring Topics…….on Line
Crime on our Doorsteps
The latest national crime maps, now published on the Internet, make interesting viewing. The number of violent crimes in Clacton, for instance, rose from 54 incidents in January to 70 in February but the total number of criminal incidents fell from 470 to under 440 and incidents of antisocial behaviour from 188 to 150.
Most of the violent occurrences, indeed most incidents of every kind of crime, took place in Clacton’s town centre or near the sea front. On a very personal level, I was delighted to see that Clacton’s Dudley Road was crime free during February except for three reported acts of antisocial behaviour. More serious crimes (though not many of them) were reported nearby, but those acts of antisocial behaviour were all that was recorded for ‘my’ road. I don’t think that the thought of those incidents will keep my neighbours and I awake at night!
One big surprise was the startling increase in crime in Frinton and Walton. From just 45 incidents in December it more than doubled to nearly 100 in February. Possibly, of course, the appalling weather in December hindered criminal activities as much as it did lawful ones. Antisocial behaviour and violent crime rose and vehicle crime increased from nil in January to over 20! Mind you, the 20 incidents of vehicle crime are said to have related to acts of vandalism committed, possibly on one night, by just one antisocial individual. Thus can ‘facts and figures’ give a totally false impression!
It will though be interesting to see in future months what effect, if any, the government’s savage cuts on the Police as well as on all other public services, will have on the crime figures.
See the maps for yourself. It takes a little effort to discover how to navigate through them, but is well worth the effort. I typed Crime maps of England into the Google Chrome and then clicked on the first reply that came up – from ‘Police UK’ . Typing in your postal address or your postcode will produce a crime map of the whole area. This can be concentrated to immediate neighbourhoods and individual streets.
Friendly Fire!
A few minutes ago (at 6.30 pm on Thursday 7th April) I was listening to a tv report of yet another catastrophic example of a ‘friendly fire’ incident in Libya – the third at least that has occurred since we began to support the rebels with our air power, and the one that has had the most disastrous effect – so far.
It seems that a rebel tank column (I had no idea that the rebels had any tanks – and it appears that the NATO commander had no idea either!), was travelling along a desert highway west of Benghazi and was attacked by a NATO warplane. Several insurgents were killed and others injured. Nor was that all. The Libyan Army command took advantage of the crisis and confusion among their opponents, and counter-attacked. We saw pictures on tv of the rebels withdrawing (it looked more like a rout than a disciplined withdrawal!) to Benghazi, the final stronghold.
I could have told them (in fact I did, but I don’t suppose for a moment that anyone important reads this blog!), and so could any other old sweat with memories of the desert war of 1941/’42, that that would happen. Many years later I read, and have included in the autobiography that I have recently completed for my grandchildren, a comment on the subject by General Carver, a well-known military historian. Here it is:
“We were confused – but then so was everyone else! General Michael Carver, in his book ‘Tobruk’ (Pan Books – British Battles Series), described in detail the battles in the vicinity of the Egyptian/Libyan frontier as 1941 was drawing towards its close. He wrote; ‘At every level the distinguishing characteristic of these battles was a bewilderment about what was going on, the greatest difficulty in telling friend from foe, and in sifting accurate and timely information from wildly inaccurate and out-of-date reports. Judgements and decisions were made therefor often on a totally false picture of the situation. When both sides suffered hallucinations and acted accordingly, it is little wonder that battles almost ceased to have a pattern at all, and to those taking part it all seemed a hopeless muddle’”
And that was in a conflict between two disciplined and trained modern armies with distinctive tanks and other armoured vehicles, and distinctive uniforms – though after a couple of days of sweat and sand storms they did look very similar! Imagine how difficult it must be to distinguish between friend and foe when all the military equipment had originally belonged to the Libyan Army, and those who are wearing a uniform at all are wearing that of the Libyan army!
Nowadays radio communication is infinitely better than it was in 1942* and should make things easier. But how many Libyan insurgents speak English (or any other European language) – and how many NATO pilots speak Arabic?
*The radio communication that existed in those days was not always used to best advantage. In a POW camp after my capture at Tobruk a former radio operator told me that he had been serving with a small unit cut off in the desert that was about to be overwhelmed by a vastly superior enemy force. Having managed to get through to his HQ to let them know that there were German tanks in strength many miles east of their last known position, he was asked his rank. When he replied he was told, ‘I can only take information of that kind from an officer. Please put me on to one’. The signalman’s final signal, before smashing his set to prevent its falling into enemy hands was. ‘The only officer within reach is a German one. I don’t suppose that he would do!’
Delusions of Grandeur?
It seems to me that, as local authorities have lost the freedom of action that they once enjoyed, and become more and more the instruments of central government, they have become more and more pretentious. Town Clerks have become highly paid ‘Chief Executives’. Personnel Managers have become ‘Directors of Human Resources’ (thereby reducing human beings to the status of baked beans and packets of cereal), and so on. The Council Chairman, largely a ceremonial office nowadays, is overshadowed by a political Council Leader, usually the leader of the ruling political party, who presides over a selected Cabinet of Portfolio Holders (they haven’t yet got round to calling themselves ‘Ministers’)
We have a ‘Leader of the opposition, three line whips – and all the ridiculous jargon of parliamentary government (at least at Westminster it has the merit of having evolved slowly over decades)
I don’t know whether being consulted by a Parliamentary Subcommittee about the nature of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ has gone to their heads, but Tendring Council seems to have gone further than simply emulating our Westminster Government. They are now looking across the Atlantic for their model and are introducing aspects of Presidential Government borrowed from the White House!
Under a headline, ‘Council Leader judges the state of Tendring, US-style’, the Clacton Gazette reports that Mr Neil Stock, Tendring’s Council Leader gave his ‘State of Tendring speech at a full Council Meeting, an annual event similar to the US President’s State of the Union address’.
Like a State of the Union speech Mr Stock’s address was clearly one with an eye on the next Council election. The Gazette reports that,
‘As well as highlighting some of the successes of the Council over the past year, Mr Stock reiterated the financial challenges facing the local authority……….there are tough decisions to be made over the coming two years……….It is now an official statistic that we have in Tendring a handful of small pockets of deprivation.
This cannot be acceptable to any of us and it must rightly be the greatest challenge facing this council and all our partners, right up to and including central government in Westminster
Well, perhaps, but I think that Central Government in Westminster may have one or two challenges to deal with even greater than the one posed by Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate. There was also a word or two of hope for the future:
I believe that there is a real window of opportunity in Harwich and the success will have a fantastic knock-on effect for all of our district.
Mr Stock concludes by saying that it had been an honour to lead the council for two years and that he was looking forward to the coming elections on May 5. So am I – and so no doubt are the rest of the minority who, despite the fact that local councils are nowadays little more than agents for central government, still think it worth while to vote in local elections.
It was quite an important speech and it must have been something of a disappointment that it was much abbreviated and relegated to page 19 of the Clacton Gazette. The front page and the leading article related to the recently published Police Crime Map, and there was also a feature on the front page about a fatal accident on the A12. It doesn’t seem that Mr Stock’s annual report on ‘The State of Tendring’ was one of The Gazette’s major interests
The New Levellers
A month or so ago I wrote in this blog of my conviction that many of our country’s problems arise from the inequalities in wealth distribution in this country. One of the government’s priorities should be to narrow the yawning gap between the wealthy and the poor – something that ten years of New Labour rule failed to do. I was very pleased therefore to see in last week’s Friend (a national Quaker weekly) a feature article ‘We’re not all in this together….’ by Barbara Forbes making exactly the same point.
Britain, she said, was one of the most unequal societies in the world. This inequality affected all aspects of our lives: ‘life expectancy, literacy and numeracy, infant mortality, murder rates, teenage pregnancy, obesity, mental illness and trust between individuals. An unequal society is bad for everyone, and the people who are at the very bottom of the pile suffer the most severely.
In London the wealth divide is 273:1. The top one percent have an annual income of above £930,000 while the bottom ten percent have below £3,500. The top 1,000 individuals in the UK have a combined wealth of £335,500,000,000!
Commenting on the recent Budget, Barbara Forbes says that, ‘It is clear that we are not “all in this together”. When a government contains eighteen millionaires (I certainly didn’t know that!) it is hardly likely that they will be able to understand that people in society need support and a functioning infrastructure that is not left to the vagaries of the market’.
She commends the work of the Equality Trust founded by Quakers Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, authors of The Spirit Level (that I drew to the attention of Bog readers some months ago). The Trust is about to launch a Wage Ratio Campaign proposing a ratio of 10:1 between the highest and the lowest paid employee. Remembering the outrage that met the suggestion that private firms, as well as public authorities, should observe a ration of 20:1, I can imagine the reaction that this suggestion will produce from the CBI!
The article concludes with an appeal to Quakers to support the campaign. ‘We should urge local councils to adopt a Wage Ratio Kite Mark for companies with which they do business. We can write letters and sign petitions – do all the things that we are good at doing. If Friends feel passionate about the increasing inequality in our country, together we can make a change’.
I certainly support the Equality Trust’s campaign but I fear that my days of writing letters and organising petitions are past.
.
.
Crime on our Doorsteps
The latest national crime maps, now published on the Internet, make interesting viewing. The number of violent crimes in Clacton, for instance, rose from 54 incidents in January to 70 in February but the total number of criminal incidents fell from 470 to under 440 and incidents of antisocial behaviour from 188 to 150.
Most of the violent occurrences, indeed most incidents of every kind of crime, took place in Clacton’s town centre or near the sea front. On a very personal level, I was delighted to see that Clacton’s Dudley Road was crime free during February except for three reported acts of antisocial behaviour. More serious crimes (though not many of them) were reported nearby, but those acts of antisocial behaviour were all that was recorded for ‘my’ road. I don’t think that the thought of those incidents will keep my neighbours and I awake at night!
One big surprise was the startling increase in crime in Frinton and Walton. From just 45 incidents in December it more than doubled to nearly 100 in February. Possibly, of course, the appalling weather in December hindered criminal activities as much as it did lawful ones. Antisocial behaviour and violent crime rose and vehicle crime increased from nil in January to over 20! Mind you, the 20 incidents of vehicle crime are said to have related to acts of vandalism committed, possibly on one night, by just one antisocial individual. Thus can ‘facts and figures’ give a totally false impression!
It will though be interesting to see in future months what effect, if any, the government’s savage cuts on the Police as well as on all other public services, will have on the crime figures.
See the maps for yourself. It takes a little effort to discover how to navigate through them, but is well worth the effort. I typed Crime maps of England into the Google Chrome and then clicked on the first reply that came up – from ‘Police UK’ . Typing in your postal address or your postcode will produce a crime map of the whole area. This can be concentrated to immediate neighbourhoods and individual streets.
Friendly Fire!
A few minutes ago (at 6.30 pm on Thursday 7th April) I was listening to a tv report of yet another catastrophic example of a ‘friendly fire’ incident in Libya – the third at least that has occurred since we began to support the rebels with our air power, and the one that has had the most disastrous effect – so far.
It seems that a rebel tank column (I had no idea that the rebels had any tanks – and it appears that the NATO commander had no idea either!), was travelling along a desert highway west of Benghazi and was attacked by a NATO warplane. Several insurgents were killed and others injured. Nor was that all. The Libyan Army command took advantage of the crisis and confusion among their opponents, and counter-attacked. We saw pictures on tv of the rebels withdrawing (it looked more like a rout than a disciplined withdrawal!) to Benghazi, the final stronghold.
I could have told them (in fact I did, but I don’t suppose for a moment that anyone important reads this blog!), and so could any other old sweat with memories of the desert war of 1941/’42, that that would happen. Many years later I read, and have included in the autobiography that I have recently completed for my grandchildren, a comment on the subject by General Carver, a well-known military historian. Here it is:
“We were confused – but then so was everyone else! General Michael Carver, in his book ‘Tobruk’ (Pan Books – British Battles Series), described in detail the battles in the vicinity of the Egyptian/Libyan frontier as 1941 was drawing towards its close. He wrote; ‘At every level the distinguishing characteristic of these battles was a bewilderment about what was going on, the greatest difficulty in telling friend from foe, and in sifting accurate and timely information from wildly inaccurate and out-of-date reports. Judgements and decisions were made therefor often on a totally false picture of the situation. When both sides suffered hallucinations and acted accordingly, it is little wonder that battles almost ceased to have a pattern at all, and to those taking part it all seemed a hopeless muddle’”
And that was in a conflict between two disciplined and trained modern armies with distinctive tanks and other armoured vehicles, and distinctive uniforms – though after a couple of days of sweat and sand storms they did look very similar! Imagine how difficult it must be to distinguish between friend and foe when all the military equipment had originally belonged to the Libyan Army, and those who are wearing a uniform at all are wearing that of the Libyan army!
Nowadays radio communication is infinitely better than it was in 1942* and should make things easier. But how many Libyan insurgents speak English (or any other European language) – and how many NATO pilots speak Arabic?
*The radio communication that existed in those days was not always used to best advantage. In a POW camp after my capture at Tobruk a former radio operator told me that he had been serving with a small unit cut off in the desert that was about to be overwhelmed by a vastly superior enemy force. Having managed to get through to his HQ to let them know that there were German tanks in strength many miles east of their last known position, he was asked his rank. When he replied he was told, ‘I can only take information of that kind from an officer. Please put me on to one’. The signalman’s final signal, before smashing his set to prevent its falling into enemy hands was. ‘The only officer within reach is a German one. I don’t suppose that he would do!’
Delusions of Grandeur?
It seems to me that, as local authorities have lost the freedom of action that they once enjoyed, and become more and more the instruments of central government, they have become more and more pretentious. Town Clerks have become highly paid ‘Chief Executives’. Personnel Managers have become ‘Directors of Human Resources’ (thereby reducing human beings to the status of baked beans and packets of cereal), and so on. The Council Chairman, largely a ceremonial office nowadays, is overshadowed by a political Council Leader, usually the leader of the ruling political party, who presides over a selected Cabinet of Portfolio Holders (they haven’t yet got round to calling themselves ‘Ministers’)
We have a ‘Leader of the opposition, three line whips – and all the ridiculous jargon of parliamentary government (at least at Westminster it has the merit of having evolved slowly over decades)
I don’t know whether being consulted by a Parliamentary Subcommittee about the nature of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ has gone to their heads, but Tendring Council seems to have gone further than simply emulating our Westminster Government. They are now looking across the Atlantic for their model and are introducing aspects of Presidential Government borrowed from the White House!
Under a headline, ‘Council Leader judges the state of Tendring, US-style’, the Clacton Gazette reports that Mr Neil Stock, Tendring’s Council Leader gave his ‘State of Tendring speech at a full Council Meeting, an annual event similar to the US President’s State of the Union address’.
Like a State of the Union speech Mr Stock’s address was clearly one with an eye on the next Council election. The Gazette reports that,
‘As well as highlighting some of the successes of the Council over the past year, Mr Stock reiterated the financial challenges facing the local authority……….there are tough decisions to be made over the coming two years……….It is now an official statistic that we have in Tendring a handful of small pockets of deprivation.
This cannot be acceptable to any of us and it must rightly be the greatest challenge facing this council and all our partners, right up to and including central government in Westminster
Well, perhaps, but I think that Central Government in Westminster may have one or two challenges to deal with even greater than the one posed by Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate. There was also a word or two of hope for the future:
I believe that there is a real window of opportunity in Harwich and the success will have a fantastic knock-on effect for all of our district.
Mr Stock concludes by saying that it had been an honour to lead the council for two years and that he was looking forward to the coming elections on May 5. So am I – and so no doubt are the rest of the minority who, despite the fact that local councils are nowadays little more than agents for central government, still think it worth while to vote in local elections.
It was quite an important speech and it must have been something of a disappointment that it was much abbreviated and relegated to page 19 of the Clacton Gazette. The front page and the leading article related to the recently published Police Crime Map, and there was also a feature on the front page about a fatal accident on the A12. It doesn’t seem that Mr Stock’s annual report on ‘The State of Tendring’ was one of The Gazette’s major interests
The New Levellers
A month or so ago I wrote in this blog of my conviction that many of our country’s problems arise from the inequalities in wealth distribution in this country. One of the government’s priorities should be to narrow the yawning gap between the wealthy and the poor – something that ten years of New Labour rule failed to do. I was very pleased therefore to see in last week’s Friend (a national Quaker weekly) a feature article ‘We’re not all in this together….’ by Barbara Forbes making exactly the same point.
Britain, she said, was one of the most unequal societies in the world. This inequality affected all aspects of our lives: ‘life expectancy, literacy and numeracy, infant mortality, murder rates, teenage pregnancy, obesity, mental illness and trust between individuals. An unequal society is bad for everyone, and the people who are at the very bottom of the pile suffer the most severely.
In London the wealth divide is 273:1. The top one percent have an annual income of above £930,000 while the bottom ten percent have below £3,500. The top 1,000 individuals in the UK have a combined wealth of £335,500,000,000!
Commenting on the recent Budget, Barbara Forbes says that, ‘It is clear that we are not “all in this together”. When a government contains eighteen millionaires (I certainly didn’t know that!) it is hardly likely that they will be able to understand that people in society need support and a functioning infrastructure that is not left to the vagaries of the market’.
She commends the work of the Equality Trust founded by Quakers Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, authors of The Spirit Level (that I drew to the attention of Bog readers some months ago). The Trust is about to launch a Wage Ratio Campaign proposing a ratio of 10:1 between the highest and the lowest paid employee. Remembering the outrage that met the suggestion that private firms, as well as public authorities, should observe a ration of 20:1, I can imagine the reaction that this suggestion will produce from the CBI!
The article concludes with an appeal to Quakers to support the campaign. ‘We should urge local councils to adopt a Wage Ratio Kite Mark for companies with which they do business. We can write letters and sign petitions – do all the things that we are good at doing. If Friends feel passionate about the increasing inequality in our country, together we can make a change’.
I certainly support the Equality Trust’s campaign but I fear that my days of writing letters and organising petitions are past.
.
.
04 April 2011
Week 14 5th April 2011
Tendring Topics…..on Line
The Problem of Jaywick
The Problem of Jaywick
For some years Jaywick has been listed as the third most deprived area in England. Now it has been promoted (or should it be 'demoted') to ‘the most’. When ‘Jaywick’ is spoken of in this context it is usually not the whole of Jaywick that is meant, but the Brooklands Estate. There is certainly no air of deprivation about the roads and avenues on Grasslands, the Tudor Estate and the large area of Jaywick before one reaches Brooklands. Brooklands itself on the other hand, has narrow streets (all named after cars!) with broken surfaces and an uncared-for look.
They are uncared for because they are ‘unadopted’ roads, never having been taken over by the County Council as Highway Authority. The maintenance of such roads is legally the responsibility of the owners of the properties on each side of it. When they bring such a road up to a reasonable standard, the Highway Authority will usually adopt it and thus become responsible for future maintenance. A glance down any of the Brooklands roads will make it obvious that the property owners there have no hope of ever of bringing them up to standard.
The housing consists for the most part of cheaply built structures intended in the first instance, for short-term holiday accommodation, not permanent homes. When I first came to Clacton in 1956 there were neither taps nor wcs in most of these homes. Water supply was from an outside stand-tap (as a public health inspector I had to take samples of water from these taps from time to time to test the water’s purity) and there was a ‘nightsoil’ collection service to empty the latrine buckets from each home. Appalling? But those homes were originally meant for holiday accommodation for a week or a fortnight for people from the towns who wanted an economic seaside holiday. For many it was a fairly comfortable alternative to camping. And, although these services would be considered unacceptable even on a camp site today, in the late 1930s they would have been thought to be perfectly acceptable for temporary use during the holiday season.
Now they are nearly all used for all-year habitation. A study of the houses for sale in the local newspaper will reveal that they exchange hands for what, for most properties, would seem an absurdly low price. They can be a last refuge for families facing homelessness since (thanks to the iniquitous ‘right to buy’ legislation) there is a woefully inadequate amount of ‘social housing’. Some of these homes are dilapidated ruins. Some have been demolished and their sites have become depositaries for rubbish! Some though have been extended and modernised by their owners who understandably are fiercely protective of homes that they have created, often with their own hands.
What’s to be done about it? The former Clacton Urban District decided to try to solve the Brooklands problem in the final years of their existence by declaring it to be a ‘Clearance Area’ under the Housing Acts. Had this been confirmed, house owners would have been paid compensation up to the value (determined independently) of their houses, the Council would have found accommodation for those who needed it (this was in the olden days when councils could build their own houses where they were needed!;) and the whole area would then have been flattened and redeveloped. What a valuable development it would have been too, immediately behind one of the best beaches in eastern England!
It didn’t happen. There was fierce opposition from the house owners, particularly of course, those who had bought their own homes, and had turned them into very pleasant villas beside the sea. There was a public enquiry and the council was defeated. I reckon that the same thing would happen if a similar attempt were to be made today.
Nobody yet has found a satisfactory answer to the Jaywick problem. The residents seem to think that bringing the roads up to standard, providing proper street lighting and ‘investing in the area’ (but on what?) would solve their problems. I doubt it. I think that a great many of those ‘holiday homes’ need to be demolished to make way for new development. Large-scale redevelopment is likely to be strongly resisted, not by irresponsible residents who are content to live in a slum and whose life-style makes it even slummier, but by worthy and responsible people; those who do whatever they can to improve the local environment and who have made their seaside homes ‘desirable residences’. They don’t want to see them demolished to make room for a new development however beneficial it might be. Who can blame them?
Mr Douglas Carswell, Clacton’s MP says that ‘Jaywick is very wealthy in terms of Civic pride and community spirit’. Sadly that isn’t a kind of wealth that can be put in a bank. He claims that the area has been ‘impoverished by poor decision making, by remote officials and statutory bodies for years. We need to remove many of the obstacles that have trapped Jaywick in a downward spiral’. I take it that ‘the obstacles’ to which Mr Carswell is referring are the planning laws which the present government would to like to see scrapped ‘to free enterprise from strangling red tape’. It is strange if he does think that, because it is obvious to me that if the planning laws had been stronger and/or more rigorously enforced, a colony of holiday homes intended only for short-term summer use, would never have been permitted to develop into cheap residential accommodation used all the year round. Today’s Jaywick problem simply wouldn’t have arisen.
National politicians and the popular press seem to imagine that if only Tendring Council were to adopt a Can do! attitude they would solve the Jaywick problem with no trouble at all. The fact is that restrictions on local authorities’ freedom of action imposed by governments of both main parties over the years, have made sure that regenerating Jaywick is a strictly Can’t-do task. Possibly Mr Carswell, as well as telling us how the Jaywick situation arose (the phrase about teaching your grandmother how to suck eggs comes to mind!) can offer one or two practical, and legal, ideas about how to solve the problem of its redemption. I am quite sure that the Council would be prepared to listen to him.
They are uncared for because they are ‘unadopted’ roads, never having been taken over by the County Council as Highway Authority. The maintenance of such roads is legally the responsibility of the owners of the properties on each side of it. When they bring such a road up to a reasonable standard, the Highway Authority will usually adopt it and thus become responsible for future maintenance. A glance down any of the Brooklands roads will make it obvious that the property owners there have no hope of ever of bringing them up to standard.
The housing consists for the most part of cheaply built structures intended in the first instance, for short-term holiday accommodation, not permanent homes. When I first came to Clacton in 1956 there were neither taps nor wcs in most of these homes. Water supply was from an outside stand-tap (as a public health inspector I had to take samples of water from these taps from time to time to test the water’s purity) and there was a ‘nightsoil’ collection service to empty the latrine buckets from each home. Appalling? But those homes were originally meant for holiday accommodation for a week or a fortnight for people from the towns who wanted an economic seaside holiday. For many it was a fairly comfortable alternative to camping. And, although these services would be considered unacceptable even on a camp site today, in the late 1930s they would have been thought to be perfectly acceptable for temporary use during the holiday season.
Now they are nearly all used for all-year habitation. A study of the houses for sale in the local newspaper will reveal that they exchange hands for what, for most properties, would seem an absurdly low price. They can be a last refuge for families facing homelessness since (thanks to the iniquitous ‘right to buy’ legislation) there is a woefully inadequate amount of ‘social housing’. Some of these homes are dilapidated ruins. Some have been demolished and their sites have become depositaries for rubbish! Some though have been extended and modernised by their owners who understandably are fiercely protective of homes that they have created, often with their own hands.
What’s to be done about it? The former Clacton Urban District decided to try to solve the Brooklands problem in the final years of their existence by declaring it to be a ‘Clearance Area’ under the Housing Acts. Had this been confirmed, house owners would have been paid compensation up to the value (determined independently) of their houses, the Council would have found accommodation for those who needed it (this was in the olden days when councils could build their own houses where they were needed!;) and the whole area would then have been flattened and redeveloped. What a valuable development it would have been too, immediately behind one of the best beaches in eastern England!
It didn’t happen. There was fierce opposition from the house owners, particularly of course, those who had bought their own homes, and had turned them into very pleasant villas beside the sea. There was a public enquiry and the council was defeated. I reckon that the same thing would happen if a similar attempt were to be made today.
Nobody yet has found a satisfactory answer to the Jaywick problem. The residents seem to think that bringing the roads up to standard, providing proper street lighting and ‘investing in the area’ (but on what?) would solve their problems. I doubt it. I think that a great many of those ‘holiday homes’ need to be demolished to make way for new development. Large-scale redevelopment is likely to be strongly resisted, not by irresponsible residents who are content to live in a slum and whose life-style makes it even slummier, but by worthy and responsible people; those who do whatever they can to improve the local environment and who have made their seaside homes ‘desirable residences’. They don’t want to see them demolished to make room for a new development however beneficial it might be. Who can blame them?
Mr Douglas Carswell, Clacton’s MP says that ‘Jaywick is very wealthy in terms of Civic pride and community spirit’. Sadly that isn’t a kind of wealth that can be put in a bank. He claims that the area has been ‘impoverished by poor decision making, by remote officials and statutory bodies for years. We need to remove many of the obstacles that have trapped Jaywick in a downward spiral’. I take it that ‘the obstacles’ to which Mr Carswell is referring are the planning laws which the present government would to like to see scrapped ‘to free enterprise from strangling red tape’. It is strange if he does think that, because it is obvious to me that if the planning laws had been stronger and/or more rigorously enforced, a colony of holiday homes intended only for short-term summer use, would never have been permitted to develop into cheap residential accommodation used all the year round. Today’s Jaywick problem simply wouldn’t have arisen.
National politicians and the popular press seem to imagine that if only Tendring Council were to adopt a Can do! attitude they would solve the Jaywick problem with no trouble at all. The fact is that restrictions on local authorities’ freedom of action imposed by governments of both main parties over the years, have made sure that regenerating Jaywick is a strictly Can’t-do task. Possibly Mr Carswell, as well as telling us how the Jaywick situation arose (the phrase about teaching your grandmother how to suck eggs comes to mind!) can offer one or two practical, and legal, ideas about how to solve the problem of its redemption. I am quite sure that the Council would be prepared to listen to him.
Speed does kill!
Do you remember the elation of a vociferous part of the ‘motoring lobby’ when last year several Highway Authorities switched off all their speed cameras in an attempt to save money. ‘It’s not speed that kills!’ they insisted. Those cameras were simply another way in which Councils extracted money from the pockets of ‘persecuted motorists’. They did nothing for road safety. They probably caused accidents as drivers were looking for speed cameras rather than keeping their eyes on the road ahead.
Well, that's what those opposed to speed cameras said.
It seems though that removing those cameras may well have saved money – but has cost lives! Oxfordshire and East Midlands are two highways authorities that are replacing and reactivating their speed cameras because they had found that, since they were switched off, there has been a substantial increase in the number of road deaths. That is surely what common sense would have told us was the likely outcome of removing the cameras.
Well, that's what those opposed to speed cameras said.
It seems though that removing those cameras may well have saved money – but has cost lives! Oxfordshire and East Midlands are two highways authorities that are replacing and reactivating their speed cameras because they had found that, since they were switched off, there has been a substantial increase in the number of road deaths. That is surely what common sense would have told us was the likely outcome of removing the cameras.
Right and Wrong
One item of national news that caught my eye last week appalled me. The ‘morning after’ contraceptive pill will now be dispensed free of charge from Welsh pharmacies to girls below the age of sixteen, provided they can persuade the pharmacist that they know exactly what they are doing!
I am well aware that a very different standard of behaviour was expected in the mid twentieth century (in which I spent my childhood and youth) from that of the early 21st century. I have no wish to lead, or join, ‘a back to the ‘50s!’ campaign. Goodness knows, there were plenty of things wrong with the mid-ywentieth century! Surely though, the fact that a child of fourteen or fifteen needs a ‘morning after’ pill is strong evidence that a criminal offence has taken place – or is having sexual intercourse with a child under the ‘age of consent’ no longer a criminal offence? Ought it not to be reported to the Police? Nowadays it seems, we don’t teach children at school that promiscuity, and sexual activity before physical and mental maturity, are foolish, irresponsible, dangerous, and anti-social. We do teach them how to avoid some of the consequences, by explaining and demonstrating modern contraceptives and telling them that the penultimate line of defence is the ‘morning after’ pill! Penultimate? of course - there's still termination (somehow that doesn't sound quite so bleak as abortion)
In the 1930s there was a George Formby film in which the hero was always getting into trouble because he couldn’t tell right from left. He had a little song (accompanied by his banjo) about this inability that contained the lines:
I may not know my left from right, But I do know right from wrong.
Now that is precisely what young people, and quite a few older ones, don’t know these days. I suppose that to teach them would be considered to be bigoted, judgemental and sectarian and would, without doubt, infringe their ‘human rights’. There’s a rather stark Spanish proverb that comes to my mind.
‘Take what you want’, says God, ‘Take it – and pay for it’.
We imagine that with our antibiotics, our contraceptives, our ‘morning after’ pill, and abortion more-or-less on demand, we have escaped the need for that payment. I wonder?
The continuing Libyan saga
The Libyan situation changes almost daily but it gives me no satisfaction whatsoever to see my gloomiest predictions being fulfilled.
A disorganised and undisciplined rebel army, however numerous and however enthusiastic, can never hope to defeat a disciplined modern army equipped with heavy weapons and a clear command structure.
On the other hand the rebels cannot be finally defeated while they have the support of allied air power.
Support for Gaddafi may be crumbling - but it hasn't yet crumbled! Those cheering crowds in Tripoli shown on tv seem genuine enough. They probably believe that Gaddafi is the last bastion against thieving western infidels who want to steal their oil!
Like Iraq and Afghanistan Libya is proving to be a conflict in which it was easy enough to become involved but from which it will prove very difficult to withdraw. Give the rebels weapons? Not really much use unless you also train them to use those weapons - and that would involve having troops on the ground, specifically forbidden by the UN resolution.
From my own memories of conflict in the Libyan desert. I warned of the danger of casualties from 'friendly fire' because of difficulties of identification in a barren desert terrain. It has already happened, with NATO planes bombing and straffing a rebel convoy including Red Cross vehicles. I had forgotten the practice of wasting valuable ammunition by firing small arms uselessly into the air - in celebration? It happened in Afghanistan and it is happening in Libya. You can hardly blame the crews of allied aircraft flying overhead, from imagining that that small arms fire is aimed at them - and taking retaliatory action.
There was, I believe, far more justification for our involvement in Libya than there had been for invading Iraq but it is proving even less popular with the public and the electorate!
It is costing us thousands, perhaps millions of pounds at a time when most of us are suffering financial hardship. It may well cost David Cameron an election!
I am well aware that a very different standard of behaviour was expected in the mid twentieth century (in which I spent my childhood and youth) from that of the early 21st century. I have no wish to lead, or join, ‘a back to the ‘50s!’ campaign. Goodness knows, there were plenty of things wrong with the mid-ywentieth century! Surely though, the fact that a child of fourteen or fifteen needs a ‘morning after’ pill is strong evidence that a criminal offence has taken place – or is having sexual intercourse with a child under the ‘age of consent’ no longer a criminal offence? Ought it not to be reported to the Police? Nowadays it seems, we don’t teach children at school that promiscuity, and sexual activity before physical and mental maturity, are foolish, irresponsible, dangerous, and anti-social. We do teach them how to avoid some of the consequences, by explaining and demonstrating modern contraceptives and telling them that the penultimate line of defence is the ‘morning after’ pill! Penultimate? of course - there's still termination (somehow that doesn't sound quite so bleak as abortion)
In the 1930s there was a George Formby film in which the hero was always getting into trouble because he couldn’t tell right from left. He had a little song (accompanied by his banjo) about this inability that contained the lines:
I may not know my left from right, But I do know right from wrong.
Now that is precisely what young people, and quite a few older ones, don’t know these days. I suppose that to teach them would be considered to be bigoted, judgemental and sectarian and would, without doubt, infringe their ‘human rights’. There’s a rather stark Spanish proverb that comes to my mind.
‘Take what you want’, says God, ‘Take it – and pay for it’.
We imagine that with our antibiotics, our contraceptives, our ‘morning after’ pill, and abortion more-or-less on demand, we have escaped the need for that payment. I wonder?
The continuing Libyan saga
The Libyan situation changes almost daily but it gives me no satisfaction whatsoever to see my gloomiest predictions being fulfilled.
A disorganised and undisciplined rebel army, however numerous and however enthusiastic, can never hope to defeat a disciplined modern army equipped with heavy weapons and a clear command structure.
On the other hand the rebels cannot be finally defeated while they have the support of allied air power.
Support for Gaddafi may be crumbling - but it hasn't yet crumbled! Those cheering crowds in Tripoli shown on tv seem genuine enough. They probably believe that Gaddafi is the last bastion against thieving western infidels who want to steal their oil!
Like Iraq and Afghanistan Libya is proving to be a conflict in which it was easy enough to become involved but from which it will prove very difficult to withdraw. Give the rebels weapons? Not really much use unless you also train them to use those weapons - and that would involve having troops on the ground, specifically forbidden by the UN resolution.
From my own memories of conflict in the Libyan desert. I warned of the danger of casualties from 'friendly fire' because of difficulties of identification in a barren desert terrain. It has already happened, with NATO planes bombing and straffing a rebel convoy including Red Cross vehicles. I had forgotten the practice of wasting valuable ammunition by firing small arms uselessly into the air - in celebration? It happened in Afghanistan and it is happening in Libya. You can hardly blame the crews of allied aircraft flying overhead, from imagining that that small arms fire is aimed at them - and taking retaliatory action.
There was, I believe, far more justification for our involvement in Libya than there had been for invading Iraq but it is proving even less popular with the public and the electorate!
It is costing us thousands, perhaps millions of pounds at a time when most of us are suffering financial hardship. It may well cost David Cameron an election!
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