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.
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