Tendring Topics……..on line
Some Revelations
I don’t think that many people would think of the London Evening Standard as being a rabble-raising red rag. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if I were told that our MP, Mr Carswell and other supporters of the Government read it regularly. If they do, they must sometimes get a nasty shock. A week or so ago, for instance, the Standard published some little-known facts about one of our great national institutions Boots the Chemists.
We all know Boots. It’s thoroughly reliable, as British as the Union Jack, and there’s a branch in every High Street – except, of course, in Clacton-on-Sea. We have two Boots branches within a couple of hundred yards of each other in Pier Avenue!
Where do you suppose Boots has its headquarters? In London, or perhaps in the Midlands near England’s geographical centre, so that it may better serve ‘middle England’. Didn’t I once read that Boots originated in Nottingham? The Evening Standard has revealed that Boots HQ isn’t in any one of those obvious places. Boots the Chemists was part of a merger a few years ago and is now the Boots Alliance. Its HQ is no longer in the United Kingdom but in the tiny Alpine town of Zug in Switzerland.
This isn’t because an astute marketing manager has discovered a powerful demand for paracetamol caplets, contraceptives or aftershave in the Swiss Cantons. When the Evening Standard reporter sought ‘The Boots Registered Office’ he found that it was tiny, poorly signed and not even permanently staffed. It isn’t there to sell pharmaceuticals or toilet necessities – its remote location is for no other reason than to avoid UK taxes. Corporation Tax is 15 percent in Switzerland and 25 percent in the UK!
Thus, our Treasury is losing all the tax that this very profitable ‘all British’ enterprise should be paying. What’s more, Boots now competes unfairly with the small group of independent pharmacists who cannot – or prefer not to – follow their example. In cash-strapped Britain, where ‘we’re all in this together, carrying the burden of the nation’s debt’, benefit cheats and ‘tax evaders’ are pursued with vigour. Tax avoiders, like Boots, are of course quite different. They’re commendably following normal business practice in the interests of their shareholders!
Another recent revelation of the Evening Standard relates to Scottish Power which, you may recall, led the recent huge increases in energy prices that affect us all.. Their head has recently doubled his salary to £1m a year. Oh – I was wrong when I wrote above that the increase in energy prices affects us all. It won’t affect the Directors of Scottish Power. The small print of their Annual Report reveals that they are entitled to £1,000 of the company’s services free of charge!
A Greek Tragedy
I don’t pretend to understand the mysteries of international finance. I learn from the tv news bulletins that the Greek Government will almost certainly accept a further round of economy cuts, increased taxation and privatisation in order to obtain financial help from the EU and the IMF. At the same time I see images of tens of thousands of ordinary Greeks making it clear that they will never accept further cuts.
They have, they say, already suffered a year of austerity at the end of which their country’s financial situation is no better but rather worse than before and the number of their unemployed has increased by almost half a million! We are, I think about to discover what happens when an invincible force meets an immoveable object!
Meanwhile a blog reader who sees the situation rather differently from our politicians and most of the news media, has been in touch.
In Greece and Portugal, he says, ‘foreign banks, mainly German and French, loaned ridiculously large sums of money to governments and individuals that, in a shrinking global economy, they cannot afford to repay. The ‘bail out money for Greece’ is a loan and not a gift. It is going straight to the banks, and the Greeks will have to continue paying for this for decades to come, through taxes, cuts to services and so on.
The same was true of Ireland where RBS and Lloyds loaned billions of pounds and the UK Government ‘generously’ loaned Ireland enough to avoid our own banks losing their money. In other words we are still indirectly subsidising the banks with sums of money that make the deficit reduction look like a sideshow.
And, as far as I can see, our Banks have resumed ‘business as usual’ with six figure salaries and enormous bonuses for their top management and a continuing reluctance to help up-and-coming enterprises that need their support.
I am reminded of G.K Chesterton’s poem ‘The Ballad of the Strange Ascetic’ about a Mr Higgins who, among other things:
Drives a weary quill,
To lend the poor that funny cash that makes them poorer still.
There must, I think, be quite a few members of the Higgins family involved in international finance.
‘When will they ever learn?
‘When will they ever learn’, was the refrain of a ‘protest song’ of the 1960s called 'Where have all the flowers gone?’ It was often heard at CND rallies and the like. To refresh my warm but fading memories of those distant days I have just been listening to Joan Baez (remember her?) singing it on U-tube!
It could well have been written as a warning to the eternally optimistic politicians of the current cntury. When, at the beginning of the new millennium, ‘the West’ began its campaign in Afghanistan in retaliation for ‘9/11’ and the Taliban’s support of Al Qaida, how many political and military experts would have imagined for one moment that ten years later there would still be thousands of NATO, mostly American and British, troops there fighting a guerrilla war there to which there seems to be no end? Do you remember the elation when ‘we’ captured Kabul? That was the beginning of the real war, not the end. We shall, no doubt, one day withdraw our troops after negotiating a face-saving deal between the corrupt and incompetent Afghan government that we have been supporting and the ‘moderate Taliban’. My guess is that within months the no-longer-moderate Taliban will be back in power enforcing its own bloodthirsty version of Sharia law on those of their fellow-countrymen and women who had been foolish enough to believe the west’s promises.
Not even the million or so protesters who, throughout Europe, marched in protest against the illegal invasion of Iraq could have imagined that that war would drag on as it did with such an appalling death toll, and prove quite such a potent recruitment incentive for Al Qaida. Do you remember President George W. Bush standing on the bridge of an American aircraft carrier triumphantly announcing that the war had been won? On such occasions there is sardonic laughter in Heaven!
Now we have NATO action in Libya, led by the French and British. It was confidently predicted that the campaign would be over in weeks and would cost no more than tens of millions of pounds (in a time of national austerity that seemed plenty!). In fact, it isn’t over yet and has already cost us £250 million!
Western political leaders considering any form of military intervention should have the following facts of modern warfare thrust in front of them:
It’ll take much longer than their military advisers suggest.
It’ll cost much more than their economic and political advisers calculate.
Many more homes will be destroyed and many more men, woman and children will be killed or maimed than anyone expects.
They’ll be hated more than they think possible.
The final outcome will not be whatever it is that they are hoping for.
When will they ever learn?
Clacton’s International Conference
Hosting a two-day conference on the challenges facing coastal towns Europe-wide, with representatives from Turkey and Russia as well as from the Council of Europe, was certainly something of a coup for Tendring District Council. There is, I think, little doubt that the reason that Clacton was chosen as the conference’s venue was the publicity that had been recently given to the fact that Jaywick’s Brooklands and Grasslands estates are England’s most deprived area.
That being so, it does seem strange – not to say churlish – not to have included Jaywick councillors Nick Brown and Dan Casey among the ten Tendring Council delegates to the Conference, even though Council leader Neil Stock said in explanation, ‘It was not just about Jaywick but was far more wide-reaching’.
Perhaps even more surprising was that our MP, Mr Douglas Carsswell was invited and apparently played a considerable role in the proceedings. He is well-known for his Euro-scepticism and for his conviction that, if global warming is taking place it has nothing to do with human activity. It follows therefore that he believes that endeavours to find and exploit alternative renewable sources of energy are a waste of time, money and effort.
How odd therefore that he should attend a Conference seeking a European solution to a British problem, and one from which the only positive thought to emerge was that the wind farms proliferating round our coasts offer the Tendring District its best opportunities for future economic and employment development. Local press reports of Mr Carswell’s speech suggested that it consisted largely of hardly original waffle about finding inspiration in Peter Bruff, who developed Clacton-on-Sea in the 1870s. It amounted to urging us to pull up our socks, stand on our own two feet and adopt a ‘can do’ attitude.
Government Minister Bob Neill, who once lived in Manningtree, was similarly inspiring! He told the conference that local authorities were best placed to tackle their own issues. Putting power into the hands of local communities ‘was at the heart of the Government’s agenda’.
Is that so? Tell it to the residents of Northamptonshire where the determination of local communities expressed through parish councils, district councils and the county council not to have a land-fill nuclear waste site in their area, has recently been over-ruled by the ‘Nanny knows best dear’ central government!
28 June 2011
21 June 2011
Week 24 2011 14.6.11
Tendring Topics………on Line
The Future of Education?
Two hundred primary schools, that have consistently failed to bring their pupils to a satisfactory educational level, particularly in English and Mathematics, are to be abolished and merged with successfully performing schools in their areas, to form new academies. This will sever their connection with and reliance upon their current Education Authority (usually the County Council). Head teachers will have autonomous powers to hire and fire teachers, to adjust the curriculum and even to alter school hours where they consider it desirable.
All of this, Education Minister Mr Michael Gove told us in a tv news bulletin, was to free head teachers from the control of the ‘pen-pushers of the Education Authority’ (his phrase not mine!) and give them the independence that they need to bring our primary schools up to the standard of our European partners.
I wholly applaud the idea of bringing our schools up to European standards, I warmed to Mr Gove’s obvious enthusiasm for the project and I hope it will be successful.
I do question though its compatibility with the Government’s avowed intention of ‘power to the people’, of taking power away from central government and handing it to local communities. State primary schools are currently under the control of County Councils. They are not exactly ‘local’ and I would have thought that a move towards ‘localisation’ would have been to transfer them to district and borough councils most of whose members would then at least know where they are! Local people, the electorate, would have had an opportunity of expressing their opinion as to whether or not they are well run at local elections.
But no, they are to be handed over to Head Teachers, professionally qualified and no doubt, in most cases, well able to run them efficiently. They are not in any way answerable to local people though. They will not be entirely unrestrained. They have been given autonomy and central government funding in order to bring their pupils up to the required standard. If they fail to do that they will soon find that he who pays the piper calls the tune. They will have been freed from the control of the pen-pushers of the Education Authority only to find themselves controlled by the even more remote pen-pushers of central government.
Education on the Continent
Mr Vole’s suggestion that education on the European mainland is better than it is in Britain may well have infuriated supporters of UKIP and readers of the Daily Express! Readers of this blog may gain a taste of the standrad of continental education from the extracts below from an essay written by Jenny, an Austrian girl of 13. She visited England (and Clacton!) for the first time last November, with her godmother Ingrid, a good friend of mine,
Her English is by no means perfect and there are a few factual errors. The restaurant where we lunched was, in fact, the Kingscliff Hotel at Holland-on-Sea. Jenny clearly misheard Harrods as ‘Herod’s’ and imagined that ‘seagulls’ was an abbreviation of ‘Sea eagles’. Her home is hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean and it was probably the first time she had encountered those large and always hungry birds. Pete, Arlene and Nick, whom Jenny met on the last day of her visit, are of course my elder son, daughter-in-law and younger grandson. Nick isn’t ‘studying’ in Brussels. He lives and works there.
Despite the errors, I understood exactly what she meant and, at the end of each paragraph I was eager to read the next one. That is surely the test of good writing. How many British thirteen year olds could do as well – in a foreign language? I think that some would find difficulty in writing such a narrative in their native tongue.
My journey to England
(Saturday)
Phew, I’m tired …
It was 3 am o’ clock and I had to get up. We took grandpa’s car, because it is driven very rarely and my dad thought the ride to the airport is a good opportunity.
We had to pick up Ingrid in Bayreuth, when we arrived in Bayreuth I realized, I had forgotten my passport. It was terrible, because it was my fault. We had to drive to Immenreuth to pick up my passport. I was afraid, we won’t catch our flight. I ran into the house and took my passport. We droved to Nürnberg, but the time were short and we had grandpa’s car so we can’t drive so fast because my dad didn’t know the car very well . . .
But we were lucky, we came to the airport in the last minute.
We sat in the plane to Zürich, it was a good flight………..
……………………………
…. when we arrived in London we had problems, because of the ‘check out’ the man ask in witch ratio Ingrid had to me, Ingrid said that I’m her goddaughter. The man said that Ingrid isn’t allowed to travel with me and he wanted to see a letter from my parents that I can travel with Ingrid. We hadn’t a letter so he said ‘give me the number of your mother so I can call her to be sure that you can travel with your godmother’.
We gave him the number but Ingrid said that my mom can’t speak English very well. . .
The man said ‘ I see you two are close together so you can go but the next time you travel together you have a letter from your parents IN ENGLISH’…………………
………………..We went by train to Ray, it was evening when we arrived in Ipswich. I was very tired because of the strenuous day.
(Sunday)
We could sleep as long as we wanted and then we had such a good English breakfast, it was wonderful……………
(On the Tuesday Ingrid took Jenny to meet friends of hers in Oxford)
………………….On Tuesday morning we went to Ursula Kneissel and on the way we saw a very funny house with a fish in the roof, it was really impressive.
Ursula Kneissel was a very nice person who told some very interesting things about her live especially about her childhood. In the afternoon we went to a church in Oxford with a big bell. After that we visit the Oxford University and the Library. But than we had to take a bus to London and we went to a big shopping street in witch we couldn’t stay long, unfortunately. Ingrid and I went to a big building ‘HERODS’ it was a big shopping paradise but so expensive ... a jacked for nearly 1200 pound it was unbelievable. We went to the station and drove to Ipswich.
(On the Thursday)
We went to Clacton on sea to visit Ernest Hall. He collects us at the station with his ‘iron horse’ and we visit the Clacton Pier to drink a coffee. After the coffee we fed the seaeagles. Then we walked to Ernest’s house, on the way we went past some houses and in one house there were some very cute cats and two dogs.
![]()
Jenny took this photo of Ingrid and I at the Kingscliff Hotel
Ernest called a taxi and we drove to a very fine restaurant called ‘ Holland on sea’ we had a very nice lunch and after that we drove with the taxi to Ernest’s house again, we were even at his house a little bit and then Ernest called a taxi and we were taken to the station………………………..
(On the Saturday)
The last day . . . I was sad because it was such a great journey. Ray drove with us to London. We crossed the tower bride. It is a fantastic bridge I like it so much. We drove to the London eye and we got a very good parking maybe one hundred meters away from the London eye……………. we had a breath breaking view out of the London eye. After that we drove to Pete and Arlene. Nick was there too, he’s studying in Brussels. We had lunch in a little cafe behind a shop. My salad was very delicious!
But then we had to drive to Heathrow and we had to say good bye.
When we checked in I termed that I haven’t a souvenir for my best friend Sonja... so I bought some overpriced cookies and a nice magnet.
Then we flew to Zürich and then to Nürmberg………….Maria collects us at the station in Bayreuth. At 12 o’clock I was in the bed.
Finally I want to say THANK YOU to everybody especially Ray and Ingrid.
It was an unforgettable journey and I met some nice people.
That was about half the actual essay. I have left the less-than-perfect grammar and spelling exactly as Jenny wrote it. What did you think of it?
The Future of Education?
Two hundred primary schools, that have consistently failed to bring their pupils to a satisfactory educational level, particularly in English and Mathematics, are to be abolished and merged with successfully performing schools in their areas, to form new academies. This will sever their connection with and reliance upon their current Education Authority (usually the County Council). Head teachers will have autonomous powers to hire and fire teachers, to adjust the curriculum and even to alter school hours where they consider it desirable.
Academy status has previously been given only to secondary schools but primary schools are now to be included in the programme.
All of this, Education Minister Mr Michael Gove told us in a tv news bulletin, was to free head teachers from the control of the ‘pen-pushers of the Education Authority’ (his phrase not mine!) and give them the independence that they need to bring our primary schools up to the standard of our European partners.
They also have to strive to change the attitude of teachers, pupils and pupils’ parents to make them appreciate the value of education and to feel pride in their school and in the educational progress of its pupils. New academies are given extra funds to further those objectives. When in Clacton,. two existing comprehensive schools were merged to form the new Coastal Academy, every child in both schools was provided with a smart new and distinctive school uniform and sports gear. The school also had sufficient funding to enable the giving of awards (incentives? bribes?) to pupils who attended school regularly and behaved themselves when they got there.
I wholly applaud the idea of bringing our schools up to European standards, I warmed to Mr Gove’s obvious enthusiasm for the project and I hope it will be successful.
I do question though its compatibility with the Government’s avowed intention of ‘power to the people’, of taking power away from central government and handing it to local communities. State primary schools are currently under the control of County Councils. They are not exactly ‘local’ and I would have thought that a move towards ‘localisation’ would have been to transfer them to district and borough councils most of whose members would then at least know where they are! Local people, the electorate, would have had an opportunity of expressing their opinion as to whether or not they are well run at local elections.
But no, they are to be handed over to Head Teachers, professionally qualified and no doubt, in most cases, well able to run them efficiently. They are not in any way answerable to local people though. They will not be entirely unrestrained. They have been given autonomy and central government funding in order to bring their pupils up to the required standard. If they fail to do that they will soon find that he who pays the piper calls the tune. They will have been freed from the control of the pen-pushers of the Education Authority only to find themselves controlled by the even more remote pen-pushers of central government.
 |
| Ingrid with 13 year old Jenny |
Mr Vole’s suggestion that education on the European mainland is better than it is in Britain may well have infuriated supporters of UKIP and readers of the Daily Express! Readers of this blog may gain a taste of the standrad of continental education from the extracts below from an essay written by Jenny, an Austrian girl of 13. She visited England (and Clacton!) for the first time last November, with her godmother Ingrid, a good friend of mine,
Her English is by no means perfect and there are a few factual errors. The restaurant where we lunched was, in fact, the Kingscliff Hotel at Holland-on-Sea. Jenny clearly misheard Harrods as ‘Herod’s’ and imagined that ‘seagulls’ was an abbreviation of ‘Sea eagles’. Her home is hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean and it was probably the first time she had encountered those large and always hungry birds. Pete, Arlene and Nick, whom Jenny met on the last day of her visit, are of course my elder son, daughter-in-law and younger grandson. Nick isn’t ‘studying’ in Brussels. He lives and works there.
Despite the errors, I understood exactly what she meant and, at the end of each paragraph I was eager to read the next one. That is surely the test of good writing. How many British thirteen year olds could do as well – in a foreign language? I think that some would find difficulty in writing such a narrative in their native tongue.
My journey to England
(Saturday)
Phew, I’m tired …
It was 3 am o’ clock and I had to get up. We took grandpa’s car, because it is driven very rarely and my dad thought the ride to the airport is a good opportunity.
We had to pick up Ingrid in Bayreuth, when we arrived in Bayreuth I realized, I had forgotten my passport. It was terrible, because it was my fault. We had to drive to Immenreuth to pick up my passport. I was afraid, we won’t catch our flight. I ran into the house and took my passport. We droved to Nürnberg, but the time were short and we had grandpa’s car so we can’t drive so fast because my dad didn’t know the car very well . . .
But we were lucky, we came to the airport in the last minute.
We sat in the plane to Zürich, it was a good flight………..
……………………………
…. when we arrived in London we had problems, because of the ‘check out’ the man ask in witch ratio Ingrid had to me, Ingrid said that I’m her goddaughter. The man said that Ingrid isn’t allowed to travel with me and he wanted to see a letter from my parents that I can travel with Ingrid. We hadn’t a letter so he said ‘give me the number of your mother so I can call her to be sure that you can travel with your godmother’.
We gave him the number but Ingrid said that my mom can’t speak English very well. . .
The man said ‘ I see you two are close together so you can go but the next time you travel together you have a letter from your parents IN ENGLISH’…………………
………………..We went by train to Ray, it was evening when we arrived in Ipswich. I was very tired because of the strenuous day.
(Sunday)
We could sleep as long as we wanted and then we had such a good English breakfast, it was wonderful……………
(On the Tuesday Ingrid took Jenny to meet friends of hers in Oxford)
………………….On Tuesday morning we went to Ursula Kneissel and on the way we saw a very funny house with a fish in the roof, it was really impressive.
Ursula Kneissel was a very nice person who told some very interesting things about her live especially about her childhood. In the afternoon we went to a church in Oxford with a big bell. After that we visit the Oxford University and the Library. But than we had to take a bus to London and we went to a big shopping street in witch we couldn’t stay long, unfortunately. Ingrid and I went to a big building ‘HERODS’ it was a big shopping paradise but so expensive ... a jacked for nearly 1200 pound it was unbelievable. We went to the station and drove to Ipswich.
(On the Thursday)
We went to Clacton on sea to visit Ernest Hall. He collects us at the station with his ‘iron horse’ and we visit the Clacton Pier to drink a coffee. After the coffee we fed the seaeagles. Then we walked to Ernest’s house, on the way we went past some houses and in one house there were some very cute cats and two dogs.
Jenny took this photo of Ingrid and I at the Kingscliff Hotel
Ernest called a taxi and we drove to a very fine restaurant called ‘ Holland on sea’ we had a very nice lunch and after that we drove with the taxi to Ernest’s house again, we were even at his house a little bit and then Ernest called a taxi and we were taken to the station………………………..
(On the Saturday)
The last day . . . I was sad because it was such a great journey. Ray drove with us to London. We crossed the tower bride. It is a fantastic bridge I like it so much. We drove to the London eye and we got a very good parking maybe one hundred meters away from the London eye……………. we had a breath breaking view out of the London eye. After that we drove to Pete and Arlene. Nick was there too, he’s studying in Brussels. We had lunch in a little cafe behind a shop. My salad was very delicious!
But then we had to drive to Heathrow and we had to say good bye.
When we checked in I termed that I haven’t a souvenir for my best friend Sonja... so I bought some overpriced cookies and a nice magnet.
Then we flew to Zürich and then to Nürmberg………….Maria collects us at the station in Bayreuth. At 12 o’clock I was in the bed.
Finally I want to say THANK YOU to everybody especially Ray and Ingrid.
It was an unforgettable journey and I met some nice people.
That was about half the actual essay. I have left the less-than-perfect grammar and spelling exactly as Jenny wrote it. What did you think of it?
14 June 2011
Week 23 2011 14.6.2011
Tendring Topics……..on line
Phrase, Fable…..and Faith
A couple of years ago I changed my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) for a later model. The representative from the mobility firm, a very bright and knowledgeable your man, explained to me how the controls worked. There’s a hand throttle that can be set at the beginning of a journey that determines maximum speed obtainable ‘When the arrow on the control knob is as far to the left as you can get it’, he said, ‘You’ve got the lowest speed. There’s a tortoise on the dial at that point to remind you’. He went on, ‘When the arrow is as far as it will go to the right, you’re on maximum speed – and you’ll see that there is a rabbit on the dial there to remind you’.
A rabbit? surely not. It must be a hare. And so of course it was. It was then that it dawned on me that this by no -means-ignorant young man had never heard of the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise – something that I imagined everyone knew from infancy. I certainly was never taught it at school. I must have just picked it up somewhere along the way – but where? Then I realized. We didn’t learn Aesop’s fables at school, nor did we learn the Greek myths. But by the time we left school we were pretty familiar with both – and with a huge swathe of stories from the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments.
We had never learned those fables and those myths, but we had learned to read, and had continually practised reading out loud. In our infant years we had read Aesop’s fables and traditional ‘nursery’ stories such as the Babes in the Wood, Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the three Bears and so on. As we grew older we graduated to the Greek myths and the plots of some of Shakespeare’s plays.. I can even remember the books from which we read them. They were Nathaniel Hawthorn’s ‘Tanglewood Tales’ and Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Thus I learned all about Pandora and her box, Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the Argonauts, The Trojan Horse, and the voyage home from Troy of Odyseus (I also remember learning that his wife’s name wasn’t pronounced Penny-lope as I had fondly imagined!). When, a few years later we started ‘doing’ Shakespeare’s plays, the plots of at least some of them were familiar to us. As we read aloud to the class we also learned how to speak ‘proper’ English – though we may still have preferred our own Suffolk dialect at home and in the playground!
As for the Bible, in those days it was felt that one religion and one moral code were as much as any child could be expected to cope with. We didn’t have RE. We had Scripture lessons and we studied both the Old and the New Testaments. We also, of course, had a School Assembly every day at which a passage from the Scriptures was read and a hymn, usually with a Biblical theme, was sung. Roman Catholic children, whose parents objected to our non-denominational lessons and assemblies, were excused them – but they had their own religious instruction elsewhere. I never met anyone who wasn’t at least nominally a Christian until years later when I was in the Army. Nobody left school without at least some acquaintance with the main themes of the Old and New Testaments
Nowadays all of that sounds antediluvian! I am sure that today, instead of ancient fables, myths and folk tales, they read (if they read aloud at all) something more ‘relevant’ to today’s world. Britain is a determinedly secular society, but one in which all children are taught something of the beliefs and practices of the world’s major religious faiths. The hope is, I suppose, that children will leave school with a feeling that there is a measure of truth in all religions. I think it much more likely that most will depart the education system convinced that all are equally delusional.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The ‘proles’ in George Orwell’s 1984 could fulfil their task of creating wealth for others without any acquaintance whatsoever with, for instance, ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’, ‘the Boy who cried Wolf’, ‘the Trojan Horse’, ‘the Labours of Hercules’, ‘the Judas kiss’, ‘the Labourers in the Vineyard’, ‘the Widow’s mite’, ‘the Prodigal Son’, ‘Feeding the Five Thousand’, ‘Casting pearls before swine’.
Twenty-first century ‘proles’ (they’re nowadays more likely to be regarded as Human Resource Units) can do the same. Cultural ignorance won’t stop the wheels of industry from turning, or bankers collecting their bonuses. Politicians will still complain, and tabloid headlines mock, when ‘turbulent priests’ denounce policies which leave coming generations with no interests beyond computer games, professional football and the hope of ‘coming up on the lottery’.
Britain may, for all I know, become the most materially prosperous nation on earth but we will (if I may use an almost-forgotten metaphor) like Esau, have ‘exchanged our cultural birthright for a mess of pottage’!
A sub-culture of illiteracy?
Perhaps we ought not to worry too much about what children read and be thankful for the fact that, in our area at least, most children can read.
A week or so ago the London Evening Standard ran a series of news stories about the appalling standard of literacy among young people in London, and the effect that this has on their employment prospects. The newspaper claimed that 30 percent of children grew up in homes with no books. I find little consolation in the fact that 85 percent had access to a computer games machine!
Old people like me tend to go on and on about how different – and how much better – things were in the days when we were young. I try hard not to do that because I know perfectly well that I certainly wouldn’t want to be living again in mid-twentieth century England. In many ways life is infinitely better today than it was then.
I think though that school leavers were more literate in the 1930s than they appear to be today. Most children left school at 14 able to read and write. Their grammar and spelling may have left a lot to be desired, but they weren’t illiterate. Most of us, for example, read one or more boys’ magazines every week. They weren’t just ‘comics’. Full of exciting adventure stories, they were illustrated with line drawings but were by no means simply cartoons with captions. We read them from cover to cover and swapped them with our mates. There was the ‘Hotspur’, the ‘Rover’, the ‘Magnet’, ‘the Skipper’, the ‘Bullseye’ (this specialised in horror stories and incurred parental disapproval!) and others. They catered for boys between about the ages of 10 and 16. There were others for younger children and yet more for girls. Don’t forget that there was no tv in those days, only crackly ‘wireless sets’. Reading ‘tuppenny bloods’ as we called them (because they were full of blood and thunder?) was a major home leisure activity – a means by which we could escape into a world of Cowboys and Indians, of pirates and smugglers, of cannibals on tropical islands, ‘lost tribes’ in central Africa and - a theme that always fascinated us working class kids - posh English public schools!
I was in the army from 1939 till 1946, always in the barrack room (never the officers’ or even the sergeants’ mess). I lived with farm labourers, shop assistants, factory hands, fishermen – most of them manual workers. I knew only one man who was unable to read the typed ‘Battery Orders’ displayed daily and who was unable to write home to his family, his wife or his girlfriend. He was neither unintelligent nor lazy and I have little doubt that today he would be diagnosed as dyslexic and given special support. This was, you’ll realize, during World War II when illiteracy would not have been a barrier to recruitment!
In prisoner of war camps it was writing and receiving letters to and from home that gave us hope and kept us sane. Some received ‘Dear John’ letters announcing that a girlfriend (occasionally a wife) had found her ‘true love’ and was saying goodbye. I was not one of those!
Nowadays I can no longer write with any confidence with a pen in my hand, but I can, thank God, still use a keyboard. Emails have made it possible for me to keep in touch with my scattered family and friends in a way that posted letters could never hope to do. Nor can I nowadays find the concentration needed to settle down with a book. This, I think, is partly failing eyesight and partly inability to remember what had happened on the previous page!
The Evening Standard is much better able than I am to discuss the effect that illiteracy has on job prospects. I do know though, from the experience of many years, how much pleasure the illiterate miss as a result their inability to enter the world of books – even if they never progressed beyond ‘who dunnits’ and ‘sex ‘n violence’ thrillers.
Finding employment for the disabled – and losing it for others!
The Government has begun its big initiative to help back into the job market disabled folk who are considered to be capable of work.. Firms who take them on as employees will have financial help when and for as long as they do so. I hope that the scheme will prove to be successful
I would have been more impressed if, at the same time, that same government’s policies were not ‘exporting overseas’ jobs that could, and should, have been performed by able-bodied workers here in Britain. Just last week came the news story that to meet the demands of the cuts to local authorities finances, Birmingham City Council is saving money by outsourcing IT work to India. This work can be done more cheaply in India because of the lower wages, and cheaper (and nastier!) housing, transport and other services that exist there.
Loss of jobs in this way is inevitable for as long as there is unrestricted movement world-wide of goods and capital, and values that rate the reduction of prices for the consumer and the maximising of profits for multi-national retailing empires, above the retention of jobs in the United Kingdom.
Cut into our public services even more deeply, increase the number of unemployed and reduce their benefit payments (there’s nothing like the incentive of starvation to encourage the unemployed to seek work!), widen still further the gap between the richest and poorest of our nation – and who knows, perhaps we too could become a source of cheap labour for wealthier nations! Is that a thought that cheers you up?
Lieben und geliebt zu werden ist das höchste Glück auf Erden
‘To love and to be loved in return is the greatest good fortune on earth’
Regular readers of this blog will know that I quoted the above words, culled from a German calendar in 1944, at the partnership ceremony (same-sex wedding) of my granddaughter Jo and her partner Siobhan on 23rd April this year. I said that, in 60 years of marriage Jo’s Grandma and I had discovered their truth. I hoped that Jo and Siobhan would do the same.
How delighted I was three weeks later when, on my 90th birthday, Jo presented me with photos of her Grandma and I, and of herself and Siobhan, Siobhan holding their partnership certificate! The photos were displayed within a frame bearing the quotation from the German poet and philosopher Goethe! It was a deeply appreciated birthday present - and one that proved that my words on 23rd April had fallen on receptive ears!
Jo and Siobhan (Jo is on the right) on their ‘wedding day’, and Heather and I taken, I think in the 1990s, when we had been married for about 50 years.
Phrase, Fable…..and Faith
A couple of years ago I changed my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) for a later model. The representative from the mobility firm, a very bright and knowledgeable your man, explained to me how the controls worked. There’s a hand throttle that can be set at the beginning of a journey that determines maximum speed obtainable ‘When the arrow on the control knob is as far to the left as you can get it’, he said, ‘You’ve got the lowest speed. There’s a tortoise on the dial at that point to remind you’. He went on, ‘When the arrow is as far as it will go to the right, you’re on maximum speed – and you’ll see that there is a rabbit on the dial there to remind you’.
A rabbit? surely not. It must be a hare. And so of course it was. It was then that it dawned on me that this by no -means-ignorant young man had never heard of the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise – something that I imagined everyone knew from infancy. I certainly was never taught it at school. I must have just picked it up somewhere along the way – but where? Then I realized. We didn’t learn Aesop’s fables at school, nor did we learn the Greek myths. But by the time we left school we were pretty familiar with both – and with a huge swathe of stories from the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments.
We had never learned those fables and those myths, but we had learned to read, and had continually practised reading out loud. In our infant years we had read Aesop’s fables and traditional ‘nursery’ stories such as the Babes in the Wood, Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the three Bears and so on. As we grew older we graduated to the Greek myths and the plots of some of Shakespeare’s plays.. I can even remember the books from which we read them. They were Nathaniel Hawthorn’s ‘Tanglewood Tales’ and Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Thus I learned all about Pandora and her box, Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the Argonauts, The Trojan Horse, and the voyage home from Troy of Odyseus (I also remember learning that his wife’s name wasn’t pronounced Penny-lope as I had fondly imagined!). When, a few years later we started ‘doing’ Shakespeare’s plays, the plots of at least some of them were familiar to us. As we read aloud to the class we also learned how to speak ‘proper’ English – though we may still have preferred our own Suffolk dialect at home and in the playground!
As for the Bible, in those days it was felt that one religion and one moral code were as much as any child could be expected to cope with. We didn’t have RE. We had Scripture lessons and we studied both the Old and the New Testaments. We also, of course, had a School Assembly every day at which a passage from the Scriptures was read and a hymn, usually with a Biblical theme, was sung. Roman Catholic children, whose parents objected to our non-denominational lessons and assemblies, were excused them – but they had their own religious instruction elsewhere. I never met anyone who wasn’t at least nominally a Christian until years later when I was in the Army. Nobody left school without at least some acquaintance with the main themes of the Old and New Testaments
Nowadays all of that sounds antediluvian! I am sure that today, instead of ancient fables, myths and folk tales, they read (if they read aloud at all) something more ‘relevant’ to today’s world. Britain is a determinedly secular society, but one in which all children are taught something of the beliefs and practices of the world’s major religious faiths. The hope is, I suppose, that children will leave school with a feeling that there is a measure of truth in all religions. I think it much more likely that most will depart the education system convinced that all are equally delusional.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The ‘proles’ in George Orwell’s 1984 could fulfil their task of creating wealth for others without any acquaintance whatsoever with, for instance, ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’, ‘the Boy who cried Wolf’, ‘the Trojan Horse’, ‘the Labours of Hercules’, ‘the Judas kiss’, ‘the Labourers in the Vineyard’, ‘the Widow’s mite’, ‘the Prodigal Son’, ‘Feeding the Five Thousand’, ‘Casting pearls before swine’.
Twenty-first century ‘proles’ (they’re nowadays more likely to be regarded as Human Resource Units) can do the same. Cultural ignorance won’t stop the wheels of industry from turning, or bankers collecting their bonuses. Politicians will still complain, and tabloid headlines mock, when ‘turbulent priests’ denounce policies which leave coming generations with no interests beyond computer games, professional football and the hope of ‘coming up on the lottery’.
Britain may, for all I know, become the most materially prosperous nation on earth but we will (if I may use an almost-forgotten metaphor) like Esau, have ‘exchanged our cultural birthright for a mess of pottage’!
A sub-culture of illiteracy?
Perhaps we ought not to worry too much about what children read and be thankful for the fact that, in our area at least, most children can read.
A week or so ago the London Evening Standard ran a series of news stories about the appalling standard of literacy among young people in London, and the effect that this has on their employment prospects. The newspaper claimed that 30 percent of children grew up in homes with no books. I find little consolation in the fact that 85 percent had access to a computer games machine!
Old people like me tend to go on and on about how different – and how much better – things were in the days when we were young. I try hard not to do that because I know perfectly well that I certainly wouldn’t want to be living again in mid-twentieth century England. In many ways life is infinitely better today than it was then.
I think though that school leavers were more literate in the 1930s than they appear to be today. Most children left school at 14 able to read and write. Their grammar and spelling may have left a lot to be desired, but they weren’t illiterate. Most of us, for example, read one or more boys’ magazines every week. They weren’t just ‘comics’. Full of exciting adventure stories, they were illustrated with line drawings but were by no means simply cartoons with captions. We read them from cover to cover and swapped them with our mates. There was the ‘Hotspur’, the ‘Rover’, the ‘Magnet’, ‘the Skipper’, the ‘Bullseye’ (this specialised in horror stories and incurred parental disapproval!) and others. They catered for boys between about the ages of 10 and 16. There were others for younger children and yet more for girls. Don’t forget that there was no tv in those days, only crackly ‘wireless sets’. Reading ‘tuppenny bloods’ as we called them (because they were full of blood and thunder?) was a major home leisure activity – a means by which we could escape into a world of Cowboys and Indians, of pirates and smugglers, of cannibals on tropical islands, ‘lost tribes’ in central Africa and - a theme that always fascinated us working class kids - posh English public schools!
I was in the army from 1939 till 1946, always in the barrack room (never the officers’ or even the sergeants’ mess). I lived with farm labourers, shop assistants, factory hands, fishermen – most of them manual workers. I knew only one man who was unable to read the typed ‘Battery Orders’ displayed daily and who was unable to write home to his family, his wife or his girlfriend. He was neither unintelligent nor lazy and I have little doubt that today he would be diagnosed as dyslexic and given special support. This was, you’ll realize, during World War II when illiteracy would not have been a barrier to recruitment!
In prisoner of war camps it was writing and receiving letters to and from home that gave us hope and kept us sane. Some received ‘Dear John’ letters announcing that a girlfriend (occasionally a wife) had found her ‘true love’ and was saying goodbye. I was not one of those!
Nowadays I can no longer write with any confidence with a pen in my hand, but I can, thank God, still use a keyboard. Emails have made it possible for me to keep in touch with my scattered family and friends in a way that posted letters could never hope to do. Nor can I nowadays find the concentration needed to settle down with a book. This, I think, is partly failing eyesight and partly inability to remember what had happened on the previous page!
The Evening Standard is much better able than I am to discuss the effect that illiteracy has on job prospects. I do know though, from the experience of many years, how much pleasure the illiterate miss as a result their inability to enter the world of books – even if they never progressed beyond ‘who dunnits’ and ‘sex ‘n violence’ thrillers.
Finding employment for the disabled – and losing it for others!
The Government has begun its big initiative to help back into the job market disabled folk who are considered to be capable of work.. Firms who take them on as employees will have financial help when and for as long as they do so. I hope that the scheme will prove to be successful
I would have been more impressed if, at the same time, that same government’s policies were not ‘exporting overseas’ jobs that could, and should, have been performed by able-bodied workers here in Britain. Just last week came the news story that to meet the demands of the cuts to local authorities finances, Birmingham City Council is saving money by outsourcing IT work to India. This work can be done more cheaply in India because of the lower wages, and cheaper (and nastier!) housing, transport and other services that exist there.
Loss of jobs in this way is inevitable for as long as there is unrestricted movement world-wide of goods and capital, and values that rate the reduction of prices for the consumer and the maximising of profits for multi-national retailing empires, above the retention of jobs in the United Kingdom.
Cut into our public services even more deeply, increase the number of unemployed and reduce their benefit payments (there’s nothing like the incentive of starvation to encourage the unemployed to seek work!), widen still further the gap between the richest and poorest of our nation – and who knows, perhaps we too could become a source of cheap labour for wealthier nations! Is that a thought that cheers you up?
Lieben und geliebt zu werden ist das höchste Glück auf Erden
‘To love and to be loved in return is the greatest good fortune on earth’
Regular readers of this blog will know that I quoted the above words, culled from a German calendar in 1944, at the partnership ceremony (same-sex wedding) of my granddaughter Jo and her partner Siobhan on 23rd April this year. I said that, in 60 years of marriage Jo’s Grandma and I had discovered their truth. I hoped that Jo and Siobhan would do the same.
How delighted I was three weeks later when, on my 90th birthday, Jo presented me with photos of her Grandma and I, and of herself and Siobhan, Siobhan holding their partnership certificate! The photos were displayed within a frame bearing the quotation from the German poet and philosopher Goethe! It was a deeply appreciated birthday present - and one that proved that my words on 23rd April had fallen on receptive ears!
Jo and Siobhan (Jo is on the right) on their ‘wedding day’, and Heather and I taken, I think in the 1990s, when we had been married for about 50 years.
07 June 2011
Week 22.2011 7.6.2011
Tendring Topics………on Line
‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
He hath put down the mighty from their seats’
These words from St. Luke's Gospel, part of the Magnificat as printed in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer came to my mind as I read in the local press the story of the trial and conviction of Lord Hanningfield.
Regular blog readers will recall that Lord Hanningfield, then leader of Essex County Council, had been the subject of criticism in this blog long before there had been any question of his facing a criminal trial. I saw him as bombastic, arrogant, publicity seeking and dictatorial, always ready with a news conference or a photo opportunity when there was any credit to be gained from it, or when he had one of his ‘ground-breaking new initiatives’ to announce, but quite prepared to leave the spotlight to someone else when (as for instance with their record in the field of child care) the County Council was found to be failing.
He was going to ‘Save the Naze’, ‘Regenerate Jaywick (by wholesale demolition!), ‘Take over failing Post Offices’, ‘Establish an Essex Bank where Essex entrepreneurs could obtain the finance they needed’ (few applied to it and those who did found that it was less helpful than ordinary commercial banks!), establish an Essex County Council Branch in mainland China to boost the county’s exporters (whatever happened to that ground-breaking initiative, I wonder?)
He led a campaign ‘To give Essex jobs to Essex men and women’, castigating other public authorities that sometimes gave contracts to firms in Suffolk or other nearby counties. He then, ‘saved taxpayers millions of pounds’ by contracting the County Council’s IT services out to a giant international corporation with its HQ in the USA – not just ‘not in Essex’ but not even in Europe. Oh yes, of course it did mean that a few dozen Essex men and women employed at the County Hall in Chelmsford lost their jobs. You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs!
While the County Council, under his leadership, was embarking on all these exciting activities they were, at the same time, selling off all their old people’s homes and failing their child care responsibilities. Lord Hanningfield wasn’t solely to blame. Almost equally culpable were his colleagues on the County Council, applauding and blindly following his lead.
It didn’t occur to me at that time that he might be criminally dishonest. I knew nothing about his claim for expenses as a member of the House of Lords. I did know though that he engaged in a great many very expensive activities for the County Council. There were, for instance, his globe-trotting trips – usually with top officials or favoured councillors – to China (the Olympics), India, the USA, and elsewhere, always, of course, on county council business! Were his official County Council car and driver sometimes to be seen at the House of Lords, as Colchester’s MP Bob Russell suggests? I don’t know, but I am very pleased that the Police are now examining very carefully his County Council expenses claims. The Council’s own internal audit may well have thought that it would be unwise to look too closely at the expenses claims of quite such a powerful and influential member.
Lord Hanningfield has yet to be sentenced. A lady with whom I was in conversation in my doctor’s waiting room last week, remarked, somewhat venomously, that she hoped he would be sent to jail. She was one of his Lordship’s victims – a county council employee made redundant from her job of supporting the sick and disabled. I would be satisfied if he were prepared to admit his guilt, refund the money he has obtained by fraud, and apologise. Not a bit of it though. After being found guilty Lord Hanningfield told reporters, ‘I’m devastated, but I have no regrets’. I am sure that he genuinely believes that he was too important to be expected to fill in claim forms properly, like other lesser folk. He had thought, as we know, that he was too important to be tried in an ordinary criminal court. He considered that he should have been tried, if at all, by his equals (his peers) in the House of Lords! The supreme court decided otherwise.
Before being ennobled on the recommendation of Mrs Thatcher and with the approval of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, Lord Hanningfield had been Paul White, a successful Essex pig farmer. He is a bit old to take that up again – but I expect that he has managed to put a bit aside for his old age. I hope so. He surely wouldn’t want to live on the state pension, plus whatever means-tested benefit his reduced circumstances might entitle him to claim.
NB. Lord Hanningfield’s defence included the plea that members of the House of Lords receive no salary for their services. Quite so – but they do get a tax-free ‘attendance allowance’ of £300 a day for every day that they put in an appearance there, even if they only stay for ten minutes. I reckon that that is the kind of ‘no salary’ for which many people would be happy to swap their paid employment.
Meanwhile………
I was absent from Clacton (and England) for less than a week but, quite apart from Lord Hanningfeld’s nemesis, an awful lot seems to have happened world-wide while I had my finger temporarily ‘off the pulse’.
In Libya we are being drawn inexorably towards full active participation in a civil war. Allied bombing raids are effectively preventing pro-Gaddafi forces from defeating the insurgents, but the ill-disciplined, untrained and ill-equipped forces ranged against them are equally incapable of advancing to victory.
Britain is now using Apache helicopters to give close support to ground forces opposing the Gaddafi regime. These are capable of attacking individual armoured vehicles or gun positions. The French are using their own helicopter gunships for the same purpose. In being able to engage the enemy more closely, low flying and relatively slow helicopters are themselves much more vulnerable to attack from small arms or ground-to-air missiles than are missile projectors or high altitude bombers. We must expect losses – and casualties.
On 1st June the Daily Mirror revealed that there are now experienced British mercenaries, former SAS men, financed by our government, strengthening the insurgent forces. The government has not denied this and it therefore seems very likely that the report is correct. How long will it be, I wonder, before David Cameron and his associates will decide that in order to fulfil the United Nations’ mandate to ‘protect civilians' and to protect our own helicopter crews, there is regrettably no alternative to putting troops on the ground?
There is no sign of an end to the conflict in Afghanistan where the regular toll of British lives continues almost daily. The NATO general in command there says that it will be at least another year before we can think of beginning to withdraw troops. He’ll probably say exactly the same in twelve months time! It seems such a short while ago that Barak Obama’s generals were assuring him that they just needed another 30,000 men to secure a victory. Agreeing to that request was a decision that he may well live to regret. Of course, if the Taliban were foolish enough to engage in battle with the NATO forces they would be heavily defeated. But it isn’t that kind of a war. It is a war of ambush, of opportunist sniper attack, of booby traps, land mines, and of enemy activists infiltrating both the civilian population and the forces ranged against them. It is a war that can go on forever. It is a war that we may never completely lose – but that we can never win.
Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan when their government realized that – and a bloodbath of Soviet collaborators followed. Sooner or later our governments will realize it too. If I were an Afghan supporter of the country’s present government (or an Afghan woman enjoying a measure of freedom and independence under the current regime) I would be making plans to get out of that benighted country before it is too late!
Waiting for a Miracle?
I mentioned Holland-on-Sea’s missing beaches in this blog a few weeks ago. They are still missing and Tendring District Council seems to be viewing their loss remarkably philosophically; fatalistically in fact. The official attitude seems to be that freak weather conditions led to the sand being washed away and, in the fullness of time – Weeks? Months? Years? – weather conditions will replace the lost sand. It is, I suppose, always easy to be philosophical over other people’s problems.
In fact the weather conditions leading up to the disappearance of the sand were not particularly freakish. There had been several days of onshore winds but I have known stronger winds, and ones that blew for a longer period. I think that the explanation, offered by Mr Richard Powis’ one of the beach hut owners affected, and cogently argued in the Letters Page of the Clacton Gazette, is at least equally likely. He points out that never in living memory has the sand been so comprehensively swept away from any of our beaches (it has certainly never happened in the fifty-six years that I have lived here). In recent years though the neglect of groynes and breakwaters at right angles to the water line has allowed the existing sand to be washed away, and the construction of sea defences at Holland Haven has prevented the natural replenishment of the beach from the crumbling cliffs
I would have thought that the Council should have urgently been considering bringing in loads of sand to rebuild those sandy beaches that are among our district’s major attractions. It is a task that has been undertaken elsewhere and has proved effective.
In the meantime, and until the sand has been replaced, natural justice surely demands that hut owners should receive a rebate on the fees that they pay to the Council. As beach hut owners point out, they pay the council for the use of beach hut and if there is no beach the Council could be considered to be failing to fulfil its part of the contract.
‘Labour Rabble Rousers’
That was how Tendring Council Leader Neil Stock dismissed a lobby of about thirty people, including members of the Tendring Pensioners’ Actions Group, who were urging councillors not to support a plan to give newly appointed Chief Executive, Ian Davidson, sweeping powers which could put the jobs of as many as one third of the Council’s workforce, some two hundred employees, at risk.
I wonder if he would have been quite as contemptuous of the distinguished group of financial experts, some of whom had been recently employed by the government, who have warned David Cameron and his colleagues that their policy of cuts, and yet more cuts, is proving counter-productive. It is killing any possibility of growth in the economy, ensuring that tax revenues don’t go up and payments to the unemployed don’t go down. Probably because of a stalled economy in the USA and austerity measures in Europe, manufacturing isn’t steaming ahead as hoped, despite what amounts to a twenty-five percent devaluation of the pound.
A successful businessman and regular reader of this blog has reminded me of his forecast that this would happen. He says gloomily, ‘However I am pretty sure there won’t be a U-turn, too much political capital tied up in this, and a fundamental belief that, even if it doesn’t turn the economy round, the public sector needs to be cut down to size’, adding – even more gloomily – ‘Not that I think that Ed Milliband would have a clue what to do if he ever gets elected’.
It is not a very cheering prospect. Locally the protest lobby was in vain. In the final vote 33 councillors voted to give the Chief Executive the powers for which he had asked, 12 voted against, 4 abstained and one was absent.
Mr Davidson now has the power to agree voluntary redundancies and impose compulsory redundancies as long as he delivers the same service. He must also refer to councillors any ‘significant change’ in the way the services are delivered. These extra powers are expected to deliver £4.4 million savings over the next four years.
The proviso ‘as long as he delivers the same service’ may seem by some to be an adequate safeguard of Council services. It is hardly that. Redundancies have immediate effect. A gradually reduced or deteriorating service may not attract serious attention for days, weeks, perhaps months. And by then it will be too late.
Perhaps Mr Davidson can work miracles – but I think that it would be unwise to count on it!
‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
He hath put down the mighty from their seats’
These words from St. Luke's Gospel, part of the Magnificat as printed in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer came to my mind as I read in the local press the story of the trial and conviction of Lord Hanningfield.
Regular blog readers will recall that Lord Hanningfield, then leader of Essex County Council, had been the subject of criticism in this blog long before there had been any question of his facing a criminal trial. I saw him as bombastic, arrogant, publicity seeking and dictatorial, always ready with a news conference or a photo opportunity when there was any credit to be gained from it, or when he had one of his ‘ground-breaking new initiatives’ to announce, but quite prepared to leave the spotlight to someone else when (as for instance with their record in the field of child care) the County Council was found to be failing.
He was going to ‘Save the Naze’, ‘Regenerate Jaywick (by wholesale demolition!), ‘Take over failing Post Offices’, ‘Establish an Essex Bank where Essex entrepreneurs could obtain the finance they needed’ (few applied to it and those who did found that it was less helpful than ordinary commercial banks!), establish an Essex County Council Branch in mainland China to boost the county’s exporters (whatever happened to that ground-breaking initiative, I wonder?)
He led a campaign ‘To give Essex jobs to Essex men and women’, castigating other public authorities that sometimes gave contracts to firms in Suffolk or other nearby counties. He then, ‘saved taxpayers millions of pounds’ by contracting the County Council’s IT services out to a giant international corporation with its HQ in the USA – not just ‘not in Essex’ but not even in Europe. Oh yes, of course it did mean that a few dozen Essex men and women employed at the County Hall in Chelmsford lost their jobs. You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs!
While the County Council, under his leadership, was embarking on all these exciting activities they were, at the same time, selling off all their old people’s homes and failing their child care responsibilities. Lord Hanningfield wasn’t solely to blame. Almost equally culpable were his colleagues on the County Council, applauding and blindly following his lead.
It didn’t occur to me at that time that he might be criminally dishonest. I knew nothing about his claim for expenses as a member of the House of Lords. I did know though that he engaged in a great many very expensive activities for the County Council. There were, for instance, his globe-trotting trips – usually with top officials or favoured councillors – to China (the Olympics), India, the USA, and elsewhere, always, of course, on county council business! Were his official County Council car and driver sometimes to be seen at the House of Lords, as Colchester’s MP Bob Russell suggests? I don’t know, but I am very pleased that the Police are now examining very carefully his County Council expenses claims. The Council’s own internal audit may well have thought that it would be unwise to look too closely at the expenses claims of quite such a powerful and influential member.
Lord Hanningfield has yet to be sentenced. A lady with whom I was in conversation in my doctor’s waiting room last week, remarked, somewhat venomously, that she hoped he would be sent to jail. She was one of his Lordship’s victims – a county council employee made redundant from her job of supporting the sick and disabled. I would be satisfied if he were prepared to admit his guilt, refund the money he has obtained by fraud, and apologise. Not a bit of it though. After being found guilty Lord Hanningfield told reporters, ‘I’m devastated, but I have no regrets’. I am sure that he genuinely believes that he was too important to be expected to fill in claim forms properly, like other lesser folk. He had thought, as we know, that he was too important to be tried in an ordinary criminal court. He considered that he should have been tried, if at all, by his equals (his peers) in the House of Lords! The supreme court decided otherwise.
Before being ennobled on the recommendation of Mrs Thatcher and with the approval of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, Lord Hanningfield had been Paul White, a successful Essex pig farmer. He is a bit old to take that up again – but I expect that he has managed to put a bit aside for his old age. I hope so. He surely wouldn’t want to live on the state pension, plus whatever means-tested benefit his reduced circumstances might entitle him to claim.
NB. Lord Hanningfield’s defence included the plea that members of the House of Lords receive no salary for their services. Quite so – but they do get a tax-free ‘attendance allowance’ of £300 a day for every day that they put in an appearance there, even if they only stay for ten minutes. I reckon that that is the kind of ‘no salary’ for which many people would be happy to swap their paid employment.
Meanwhile………
I was absent from Clacton (and England) for less than a week but, quite apart from Lord Hanningfeld’s nemesis, an awful lot seems to have happened world-wide while I had my finger temporarily ‘off the pulse’.
In Libya we are being drawn inexorably towards full active participation in a civil war. Allied bombing raids are effectively preventing pro-Gaddafi forces from defeating the insurgents, but the ill-disciplined, untrained and ill-equipped forces ranged against them are equally incapable of advancing to victory.
Britain is now using Apache helicopters to give close support to ground forces opposing the Gaddafi regime. These are capable of attacking individual armoured vehicles or gun positions. The French are using their own helicopter gunships for the same purpose. In being able to engage the enemy more closely, low flying and relatively slow helicopters are themselves much more vulnerable to attack from small arms or ground-to-air missiles than are missile projectors or high altitude bombers. We must expect losses – and casualties.
On 1st June the Daily Mirror revealed that there are now experienced British mercenaries, former SAS men, financed by our government, strengthening the insurgent forces. The government has not denied this and it therefore seems very likely that the report is correct. How long will it be, I wonder, before David Cameron and his associates will decide that in order to fulfil the United Nations’ mandate to ‘protect civilians' and to protect our own helicopter crews, there is regrettably no alternative to putting troops on the ground?
There is no sign of an end to the conflict in Afghanistan where the regular toll of British lives continues almost daily. The NATO general in command there says that it will be at least another year before we can think of beginning to withdraw troops. He’ll probably say exactly the same in twelve months time! It seems such a short while ago that Barak Obama’s generals were assuring him that they just needed another 30,000 men to secure a victory. Agreeing to that request was a decision that he may well live to regret. Of course, if the Taliban were foolish enough to engage in battle with the NATO forces they would be heavily defeated. But it isn’t that kind of a war. It is a war of ambush, of opportunist sniper attack, of booby traps, land mines, and of enemy activists infiltrating both the civilian population and the forces ranged against them. It is a war that can go on forever. It is a war that we may never completely lose – but that we can never win.
Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan when their government realized that – and a bloodbath of Soviet collaborators followed. Sooner or later our governments will realize it too. If I were an Afghan supporter of the country’s present government (or an Afghan woman enjoying a measure of freedom and independence under the current regime) I would be making plans to get out of that benighted country before it is too late!
Waiting for a Miracle?
I mentioned Holland-on-Sea’s missing beaches in this blog a few weeks ago. They are still missing and Tendring District Council seems to be viewing their loss remarkably philosophically; fatalistically in fact. The official attitude seems to be that freak weather conditions led to the sand being washed away and, in the fullness of time – Weeks? Months? Years? – weather conditions will replace the lost sand. It is, I suppose, always easy to be philosophical over other people’s problems.
In fact the weather conditions leading up to the disappearance of the sand were not particularly freakish. There had been several days of onshore winds but I have known stronger winds, and ones that blew for a longer period. I think that the explanation, offered by Mr Richard Powis’ one of the beach hut owners affected, and cogently argued in the Letters Page of the Clacton Gazette, is at least equally likely. He points out that never in living memory has the sand been so comprehensively swept away from any of our beaches (it has certainly never happened in the fifty-six years that I have lived here). In recent years though the neglect of groynes and breakwaters at right angles to the water line has allowed the existing sand to be washed away, and the construction of sea defences at Holland Haven has prevented the natural replenishment of the beach from the crumbling cliffs
I would have thought that the Council should have urgently been considering bringing in loads of sand to rebuild those sandy beaches that are among our district’s major attractions. It is a task that has been undertaken elsewhere and has proved effective.
In the meantime, and until the sand has been replaced, natural justice surely demands that hut owners should receive a rebate on the fees that they pay to the Council. As beach hut owners point out, they pay the council for the use of beach hut and if there is no beach the Council could be considered to be failing to fulfil its part of the contract.
‘Labour Rabble Rousers’
That was how Tendring Council Leader Neil Stock dismissed a lobby of about thirty people, including members of the Tendring Pensioners’ Actions Group, who were urging councillors not to support a plan to give newly appointed Chief Executive, Ian Davidson, sweeping powers which could put the jobs of as many as one third of the Council’s workforce, some two hundred employees, at risk.
I wonder if he would have been quite as contemptuous of the distinguished group of financial experts, some of whom had been recently employed by the government, who have warned David Cameron and his colleagues that their policy of cuts, and yet more cuts, is proving counter-productive. It is killing any possibility of growth in the economy, ensuring that tax revenues don’t go up and payments to the unemployed don’t go down. Probably because of a stalled economy in the USA and austerity measures in Europe, manufacturing isn’t steaming ahead as hoped, despite what amounts to a twenty-five percent devaluation of the pound.
A successful businessman and regular reader of this blog has reminded me of his forecast that this would happen. He says gloomily, ‘However I am pretty sure there won’t be a U-turn, too much political capital tied up in this, and a fundamental belief that, even if it doesn’t turn the economy round, the public sector needs to be cut down to size’, adding – even more gloomily – ‘Not that I think that Ed Milliband would have a clue what to do if he ever gets elected’.
It is not a very cheering prospect. Locally the protest lobby was in vain. In the final vote 33 councillors voted to give the Chief Executive the powers for which he had asked, 12 voted against, 4 abstained and one was absent.
Mr Davidson now has the power to agree voluntary redundancies and impose compulsory redundancies as long as he delivers the same service. He must also refer to councillors any ‘significant change’ in the way the services are delivered. These extra powers are expected to deliver £4.4 million savings over the next four years.
The proviso ‘as long as he delivers the same service’ may seem by some to be an adequate safeguard of Council services. It is hardly that. Redundancies have immediate effect. A gradually reduced or deteriorating service may not attract serious attention for days, weeks, perhaps months. And by then it will be too late.
Perhaps Mr Davidson can work miracles – but I think that it would be unwise to count on it!
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