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!
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