week 17 11 26.4.11

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!