Week No 29 26.7.11

Tendring Topics……..on line


‘The Big Society’ - in Uniform

Until now Big Society emphasis has been on local affairs such as finding volunteers to man libraries, pick up litter and weed municipal gardens when those who previously did these jobs had been sacked. Could it perhaps also have a national application?

The government is, as we all know, desperately keen to reduce that deficit! They can’t resort to the obvious solution of reforming the income tax system so that all members of Society contribute towards this aim in proportion to their ability to do so. This measure, however fair and sensible, would alienate some of their most loyal supporters.

They would like to cut defence expenditure. The vastly expensive and eminently dispensable Trident submarine programme is for some inexplicable reason sacrosanct. They have already sold off our sole Aircraft Carrier and have reduced the size of the army. They would like to make further reductions to the fighting forces but that is a little difficult as those forces have been busy for the past twenty years with wars in Iraq (twice!), Afghanistan (a war to which there seems to be no end!) and now in Libya.

Can Mr Cameron’s Big Society come to the rescue? Its whole purpose is to find volunteers who will do the work of professionals - but less expensively. They already have the nucleus of just such a group of volunteers in the Territorial Army! The Territorial Army, ‘weekend soldiers’ as we (yes, I was once one of them!) used to be called, consists of volunteers who are required to do just 27 days full-time training a year, part of which is usually a fortnight’s working camp in some appropriate training area. While undergoing fulltime training they receive the same pay as regular professional soldiers.

Originally intended to defend England while only professionals (regulars) were drafted abroad, that changed in two World Wars. In September 1939 the TA was embodied into the regular army to serve wherever required. That doesn’t happen today but TA members can and do volunteer to serve for a fixed time (usually a year) in the army overseas. Territorial volunteers have been in the fighting, and among the casualties, in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Legislation ensures that their jobs are kept open for their return to ‘civvy street’.

I volunteered early in 1939 and joined a local Territorial Royal Artillery Regiment. I went to only one TA training camp. It was at Roedean (on land in front of the posh girls’ school!) on the outskirts of Brighton, in August. A fortnight after our return to civilian life we were all called up again on the outbreak of World War II. That was the last I saw of civilian life until my discharge nearly seven years later on 23rd April 1946.
August 1939, the 67th Medium Regt. RA (TA) at Roedean, nr. Brighton. The guns are ancient iron tyred 6in howitzers that may well have seen service in the Boer War! The thoroughly unsoldierly way in which we are climbing over them and lounging round them suggests that we, and they, had only just arrived

January 1942 – transformed into real soldiers! No 4 gun of ‘B’ Troop, 231st Battery, 67 Medium Regiment RA, clustered round our (rather more modern) gun on the Egyptian/Libyan border. I am fourth from the right, wearing a woolly hat! We had just taken part in the successful siege and capture of Wadi Halfaya (‘Hellfire Pass’) and Sollum, taking some 4,000 German and Italian prisoners. We little imagined that six months later we ourselves would be PoWs, captured by Rommel’s Afrikakorps at Tobruk


Today’s Territorial Army is ready-made for Mr Cameron’s Big Society. Increase its numbers (there’s a big difference between paying some one for 27 days each year and paying them for 365!) and it should be possible to make big reductions in the number of professional soldiers. Finding volunteers to join the troops in Afghanistan (or wherever the next conflict takes place) for a fixed period, shouldn’t present a major problem. Nobody really thinks that he or she personally is going to be killed or maimed, and being ‘one of our heroes’ in the Middle East can seem an exciting escape from the boredom of an office desk or factory bench

How gratified they will all be at Westminster if the scheme lives up to their hopes. No need to upset wealthy supporters by getting them to help carry the burden of the Nation’s debt. No need to imperil the Trident nuclear weapon programme. Some of those volunteers will undoubtedly ‘make the ultimate sacrifice’. How proud of them all those safe-at-home politicians and retired generals will be!

Those Council Leader Expenses again

I am not surprised that members of Essex County Council are now coming under fire for having failed to report to the Police their suspicions of the validity of Lord Hanningfield’s claims for expenses as Council Leader. I have pointed out before in this blog that he was not alone. Those who condoned and took part in and encouraged his activities share his guilt.

County Councillor Julie Young of Colchester makes much the same point in a recent letter to the daily Gazette. ‘Did it not dawn on other councillors that taking all those trips to China, America and other countries might not be the best use of council resources or did they think the money for these trips dropped out of the sky? Did they complain? No, they didn’t, they picked up another bottle of sun tan lotion and packed a bag, on some occasions they even took their wives or husbands too……..I am on record as opposing these trips as reported in the local papers at the time. Did they listen? No, they didn’t, they merrily trotted off enjoying the trips’.

I have no idea what the legal position is, but morally I would have thought that benefiting from the fraudulent use of a debit card was much the same as receiving and using stolen goods.

Excuses, Excuses!

Recent episodes of the ‘Murdoch Empire Saga’ haven’t been wildly exciting.  The interviews of the three leading actors – Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks – with a Commons committee, established that all three had mastered what I think of as the essential skill of any top manager: the ability to accept praise graciously, and to pass blame further down the line. ‘I was too trusting. I was let down by those I had relied upon’; surely an eminently forgivable fault!  Well, it is - provided you're not one of those 'further down the line'

Rupert Murdoch was showing all the signs of old age (and I can certainly recognise them!). It was difficult to believe that this humbled old man was one whom Prime Ministers had had cause to fear. The only person to emerge from the interviews with any credit was surely Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng . She made a spirited attempt to defend her husband from the idiot who tried to push a shaving foam ‘custard pie’ onto his face and she supported him at every stage, with an encouraging – and some times dissuading - hand on his shoulder. I hope that she is appreciated.

Then there was David Cameron’s resolute refusal to answer whether or not in his cosy chats with Rupert Murdoch the proposed News International’s takeover of BskyB had been discussed This, he insisted, was irrelevant, as he had decided to take no part in making the decision on this matter.

Has he really forgotten that he had appointed, and has the power to dismiss from office, whoever was entrusted with that decision. They would be unlikely to take any action that would upset someone who was clearly a great friend of ’the boss’.

A War Memorial


One of the world’s best-known war memorials is the Menin Gate at Ypres – bearing the names of 54,889 British soldiers ‘missing believed dead’ in the Ypres salient in World War One whose graves are unknown. It was the subject of one of the bitterest poems of war hero (he earned the Military Cross) and anti-war poet, Siegfried Sassoon. It begins:

Who will remember, passing through this gate
The unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate -
Those dead, conscripted, unvictorious ones?


and ends:

Well might the dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

I don’t have the memories that made Siegfried Sassoon so bitter – but it is true that the only War Memorials that I can bear to look at twice are those that make it clear that warfare is not about acts of heroism, honour and glory, but about death and mutilation, sorrow and bereavement. I think that this newly created 10ft high memorial to the men of the US Rainbow Division (recruited from every state in the Union) and photographed by my younger son Andy while temporarily on display at the Royal Academy, falls into that category.

It commemorates those of the Rainbow Division who fell at Croix Rouge Farm in an engagement in the Marne/Aisne area of Belgium in July 1918, when World War I was drawing to its close. It is eventually to be placed at the site of the battle.

                                           I think that Siegfried Sassoon might have approved.

Week 28 19.7.2011

Tendring Topics……..on Line


The next instalment!


When I wrote last week that ‘I couldn’t wait’ for the next instalment of the current riveting Decline and Fall (well, not quite that yet!) of the Murdoch Media Empire I had no idea that I wouldn’t have to! Hardly had my blog been posted than we learned that Rupert Murdoch had withdrawn his application for control of the whole of B-Sky-B, because of the strength of the opposition.

I take just a little pride in the fact that – some time before it became fashionable to criticise the News International Empire and its ruler – I had formed a tiny part of that opposition by sending an email to the proper authority. I knew nothing then of the hacking of the mobile phones of the bereaved or the bribery of the Police. I just thought it wrong that a rootless cosmopolitan, who owed Britain no loyalty and whose home was not in this country, should be in control of news media capable of swaying the results of British elections. That surely was reason enough for opposing the takeover.

It was not an empty boast when Murdoch’s Sun announced ‘It was us wot done it’ after a Thatcher election victory. The same could have been said after Tony Blair had betrayed the principles of his predecessors and swung New Labour far enough to the right to gain Rupert Murdoch’s approval. Many tabloid readers, whose interest rarely strays beyond the headlines (except of course in pursuit of the salacious detail of the latest celebrity scandal) actually believe what those big black headlines say and vote as they indicate.

In the heady atmosphere of last week’s denunciations of News International and all its works it is difficult to remember that it wasn’t all that long ago that Lib.Dem. Government Minister Vince Cable was stripped of some of his authority for saying; in what he had thought was a private conversation, that he had ‘declared war on Rupert Murdoch’ (you may recall that in this blog I remarked that it was time someone did!) His successor had proved his suitability by his public declaration of admiration for News International and its boss!

Luckily there are news stories and video clips to remind us of the not-very-distant past. I learned, for instance, that David Cameron and family spent some happy hours with Rebekah Brooks and her millionaire husband last Christmas. Then again, I have watched video clips of both Tony Blair and David Cameron (though not at the same time!) bestowing platonic kisses on the expectant cheek of the auburn-haired beauty who was News International’s Chief Executive at the time but is so no longer.

It is true, of course, that members of the upper classes bestow kisses upon their friends rather more freely than do we common folk. I feel though that the Christmas get-together and those tokens of affection suggest a rather greater degree of mutual regard than Ed Miliband’s appreciation of Rupert Murdoch’s canapés at a recent reception, an indiscretion of which the Labour Leader has been accused by an opponent!

Now Mrs Brooks (who resigned – a little belatedly – from the post of Chief Executive on 15th July) and father and son Rupert and James Murdoch have been invited to the House of Commons next Tuesday 19th July to answer MPs questions and, if they wish, to tell their side of the story. Mrs Brooks accepted the invitation at once. The two Murdochs at first demurred (James would have liked to attend but had a prior engagement!) but after they had had summonses served on them they both agreed to turn up. As I write these words (Thursday 14th July) there are still five days to go. Anything can – and probably will – happen in that time. However, at the moment I am looking forward to hearing what, if anything, they have to say next Tuesday!

Meanwhile questions are being asked in the USA (some by right-wing Republicans, Rupert Murdoch’s natural allies), and the FBI are said to be on the warpath. Both in Rupert Murdoch’s adopted American homeland and in Australia land of his birth, there is concern about the conduct of his newspapers and their staff. Could it be that we really are seeing the beginning of the end of an evil Media Empire?

‘Those who sup with the devil need a long spoon’……


………….is a little piece of folk wisdom that both policemen and politicians would be well-advised to heed. I am writing these words on Monday 18th July and hope to post them as a blog tomorrow. If there is a briber it follows that there must also be someone who accepted a bribe. The spotlight has widened to include the Police. Perhaps it is destined to widen further!

A great deal has happened. Rebekah Brooks has been arrested, interrogated for about twelve hours, and released on bail. Sir Paul Stephenson, head of the London Metropolitan Police Force has resigned. I hope that the timing of Mrs Brooks’ arrest wasn’t prompted by a desire of the Police to limit the questions that she will be prepared to answer when she faces the Parliamentary Committee tomorrow afternoon.

Britain’s most senior Police Officer has told us that he considered that his only possible honourable course of action, after he had taken on a former Deputy Editor of the News of the World as a freelance consultant, was resignation. What, one may well ask, would be the appropriate honourable course of action for a Prime Minister who, despite having been warned, took on a former Editor of that same newspaper as his Head of Communications – and, of course, was on very friendly terms with yet another former Editor of the News of the World who had subsequently been promoted to Chief Executive of the Media Group that owned it?

Would you credit it?


Lord Hanningfield (or Paul White as he was before being ennobled on Mrs Thatcher’s recommendation) is now serving a nine months prison sentence for fraudulently claiming expenses to which he was not entitled, in connection with his membership of the House of Lords.. The Police are currently investigating the expenses that he claimed as Leader of the Essex County Council and it has emerged that concerns were expressed as far back as 2007 about his use of a taxpayer-funded credit card on which he was spending about £5,200 a month for what he claimed – and self-certified! – were legitimate expenses for his work as council leader.

These, according to a report in the local daily Gazette, included entertainment and subsistence expenses, as well as dining, and House of Lords bar bills. ‘First class rail tickets, flights and hotel bills were also put on the card, although some were paid directly by the council!’


The current leader of the county council, Mr Peter Martin, who says that he has never used his own corporate credit card, told the Gazette ‘There were concerns over expenses in 2008 and 2009. Officers had talks with Lord Hanningfield and meetings about receipts. But when the Crown Prosecution Service indicated in July 2009 that it was investigating Lord Hanningfield, we were advised by our legal team and police that we should not take any action which could prejudice the case’.

County councillors and top officials alike must have received that advice with a collective sigh of relief!

Until last week Lord Hanningfield was still receiving his ‘members allowance’ of £11,500, because he has not resigned his membership of the Essex County Council, and is appealing against his conviction,. Under pressure from Bob Russell, Colchester’s outspoken Lib.Dem. MP, this allowance has now been stopped. It had been pointed out to the council that they have power to suspend payment when a councillor is not able to perform his or her duties.

In a leading article the Gazette points out that an office worker at County Hall who had stolen £50 cash would have been swiftly dealt with ‘but no-one, it appears, wanted to tackle the Council Leader…………surely at least one of Essex’s highly paid officials should have mustered the courage to question him’.


Perhaps so – but Lord Hanningfield had an overwhelming personality and was reputed to be something of a bully. It would need absolute certainty of the facts, and more-than-average determination and courage, to tackle the man who could have destroyed the accuser’s whole future career. Chiding even the most senior official for hesitating to confront him would have been a bit like telling the ill-fated Anne Boleyn in 1536 that she really should have been firmer with her husband!

Childbirth – best ‘at home’ or ‘away’

Let’s think about something a little less sordid! The current debate about whether home births, hospital births or midwife-run ‘birthing centre births’ are best, has brought back vivid memories to me.

In the autumn of 1948 when we had been married for just two years, my wife Heather was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary and laryngeal TB. She spent the next two years in what was then Nayland British Legion Sanatorium, punctuated by six weeks in Papworth Hospital where she underwent major surgery, the removal of eight ribs on the left side to collapse the left lung permanently and give it a chance to heal. It worked – though the operation weakened her and limited her activities for the rest of her life. She was discharged as ‘cured’ in time for Christmas 1950.

We had never intended to be a childless couple but it was to be two more years before our doctor felt that Heather was strong enough to bear a baby. By January of 1953 we knew that one was on the way. It was an anxious time for me (I’m an incurable worrier!) but Heather was supremely confident that all would be well. She was also quite determined that she would breast-feed her baby.

We decided that the baby would best be born in a Maternity Home and began to make arrangements. When Heather recounted her medical history the nurse taking the details said, reassuringly. ‘Well, under your circumstances you certainly won’t be expected to bother with this breast-feeding business. Directly baby is born we’ll get it thoroughly used to a bottle for you’. ‘Really’, said Heather, who could be very determined when she chose to be, ‘in that case I won’t need your services. I’ll be having my baby at home’.


And so she did. Home births were a lot more common in the early 1950s than they became in later years and luckily both the local midwife and our ‘family doctor’ supported Heather’s decision. We were living at the time in a bungalow just off the Norwich Road at Barham, two or three miles to the northwest of Ipswich. Our doctor, Dr Louise Hyder, lived on ‘the other side’ of the town – near where Ipswich Hospital is now situated. I was able to take Heather to see her regularly during her pregnancy and, despite the distance, the doctor managed to be present at the birth. Just as well – because there were complications that were dealt with promptly and efficiently.



A Joyful Heather - and son!

 Heather had a son – whom she did breast-feed. Two and a half years later, when our second child was expected, we didn’t even consider the possibility of a hospital birth. Heather had another fine son, born at home, whom she fed in the same way. I remember that I wrote and sold to Better Health (a health education monthly) a photographically illustrated article entitled Why bother with a bottle, about proceeding from breast to glass or cup, without an intervening feeding bottle!

That was our experience. It was fine for us but, quite obviously, it wouldn’t be right for everybody. I do think though that all women should have the option and not be bullied or made to feel guilty wherever they may prefer to give birth.


Two fine sons



Week 27.2011 12.7.2011

Tendring Topics………on Line


The End of the World? Not quite; just its bad ‘News’!


The only thing that surprises me about the phone-hacking scandal that led to the closure of the News of the World are the depths to which this revolting publication appears to have sunk. Could they really have hacked into the mobile phone of an abducted and (as we now know) murdered child, read the texts on it and then deleted some of them, leaving space for more? Surely even they must have realized that they were raising false hopes that the child was still alive and capable of using her phone. They were also, of course, confusing the Police and hindering their investigation. Perhaps they were well aware of this, but confident that they’d never be found out, just didn’t care.

As the days passed we learned of ever more outrages committed by Mr Rupert Murdoch’s news-vultures, as they rummaged for tasty morsels among the entrails of other people’s grief. This didn’t surprise me. The News of the World has for many years been prepared to go to any lengths (perhaps I should have said ‘any depths’) to get a sensational and scurrilous news story. I became aware of this personally in the late 1970s. The News of the World had been an early acquisition of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and had been under his control for a decade.

My wife Heather and I had always tried to instil a social conscience and what we thought of as ‘Quaker values’ into our two sons. We were, I think, successful in this - even though we didn’t manage to turn them into regular ‘go-to-Meeting’ Quakers! Thus it was that one of them, living and working in a London suburb, volunteered to give some of his time (and much of his sleep!) as a volunteer at Centrepoint, the Central London Shelter for homeless young people. He told us some heart-rending but uplifting stories of 16 to 21 year olds who had made their way there, had been given emergency shelter and helped to find a more permanent home and begin a new life. It was a charity that subsequently attracted the interest of Princess Diana and her two sons, Princes William and Harry.

While our son was helping there, a News of the World snooper (I suppose that he would have called himself an investigative journalist!) pretended that he was homeless and was welcomed; thereby taking a place that could have helped a truly homeless young person! He discovered that circumstances sometimes made it necessary for homeless boys and girls to sleep in the same room, though obviously in separate bunks. His sensational story, suggesting that Centrepoint was little more than a Charity-run brothel, discouraged and disheartened volunteers and donors – and probably resulted in some homeless young people preferring to take their chance in shop doorways and bus shelters! I am glad to say that Centrepoint recovered from the scandal and went on from strength to strength.

I am equally glad that the News of the World hasn’t make a similar recovery from the scandal that engulfed it, even though I suspect that it has been sacrificed in the greater interests of the Murdoch Empire, and that it will before long re-appear with a different title, but much the same ethics. I only hope that no-one suggests that its closure means that ‘a line has been drawn under the matter’. On the contrary, the public enquiries already set in place should be pursued with increased rigour. They should be conducted by a judge, and witnesses required to give evidence under oath, so that those who lie can be prosecuted for perjury. Serious consideration should also be given to the ownership of newspapers and radio and tv stations that can sway public opinion and win or lose British elections.

I have found degrading in the extreme, the spectacle of British Prime Ministers (Mrs Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron – they’ve all done it) humbly seeking the favourable attention of a foreign newspaper proprietor!

I abhor petty nationalism and I hope that no one would accuse me of being xenophobic. I do feel very strongly though that British news media should always be under widely distributed British ownership and control. Popular newspapers or tv stations, controlled by those who do not share our history, and our cultural and moral values, can do far more harm to the British ethos than many thousands of the immigrant Poles, Slovaks and other East Europeans that UKIP and BNP supporters and their like worry so much about.

Mrs Rebekah Brooks


Mrs Rebekah Brooks is a colourful figure at the very centre of the scandal that led to the demise of the News of the World. A friend of the Cameron family (yes, our Prime Minister and his family) and promoted to Chief Executive of News International, she was that scurrilous Sunday newspaper’s editor at the time that the alleged phone hacking and bribery of police officers was taking place. The editor of any newspaper or magazine is ultimately responsible for the publication’s content and for the behaviour of its reporters, journalists and other staff. It is with the editor that, as they say in Mr Rupert Murdoch’s adopted homeland, ‘the buck stops’.

That being so, it is surely extraordinary that she has made no admission of guilt or responsibility, has no intention of resigning her office and doesn’t expect News International’s ‘emperor’ to require her to do so. In this, she is clearly correct. Mr Murdoch has initiated a stringent internal enquiry into what has been going wrong with the News of the World - under the leadership of Mrs. Brooks.

This is surely rather as though Hitler having heard, for the first time, disquieting rumours about what was going on in Auschwitz, were to have put Heinrich Himmler in charge of a thorough investigation there! Why, I wonder, is Mrs Brooks so confident of her position? Why is Mr Murdoch so supportive of a senior member of his staff from whom he might have been expected to wish to dissociate himself. Could it be that she is, in some way beyond my knowledge or understanding, a keystone of News International and in a position to bring that mighty Empire tumbling in ruins about our ears?

An on-going story!

It was just before the weekend that I wrote the above – yet already the story has changed. The News of the World is no longer. Another journalist has been arrested. Rupert Murdoch has flown over from the USA to exert personal control. Mrs Brooks is no longer heading an internal investigation but is to be interviewed by the police. She is, so we are assured, not being interviewed as a suspect but as a witness.

When Andy Coulson left Lewisham Police Station after he had been helping the police with their enquiries, his remark that ‘there is a lot I would like to say, but cannot right now’, may well have sent a shiver down several well-heeled spines! In ‘Midsomer County’ it would have presaged the early departure of the speaker from this world, and yet another case for Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby!

Come to think of it, the present situation has all the ingredients of a first class tv drama – a sleazy newspaper, a cosmopolitan news media billionaire, corrupt coppers and an utterly ruthless but glamorous redhead with a fatal charm that gains her entrée to the highest circles. You really couldn’t have made it up!

I can’t wait for the next instalment!

Some News from Suffolk

Despite having lived in Essex for well over half my life, I still think of myself as being essentially ‘a Suffolk Swedebasher’. I have been interested therefore in the saga of Mrs. Andrea Hill, Suffolk County Council’s Chief Executive and one of the highest paid local government officers in the country - and that is saying quite a lot!

Appointed in 2008 on a salary of £218,000 a year, many of her colleagues had disliked what was claimed to have been her ‘domineering management style’. An Independent Enquiry into allegations of bullying, harassment and irregular expenses claims, was launched after the body of David White, the County Council’s Head of Legal Services had been found hanging in Butley Woods near Ipswich. She has been on extended leave with full pay since Easter, while this Enquiry took place.

The result has now been made known. A statement from the county council says that it is satisfied that ‘there was no evidence to support claims of bullying or harassment, or that Mrs Hill was in any way responsible for Mr White’s death. With regard to the expenses claims it had been concluded that there had been no dishonesty but that, ‘some of her claims might not have represented the best use of public money’

It was agreed that Mrs White would resign her post forthwith, with the ‘golden handshake’ of a year’s pay - £218,000. No doubt that was dictated by the terms of her contract on appointment. It isn’t too difficult though to imagine the reaction of former Suffolk County Council employees who will have received a pittance on being made redundant during her period of office.

I learn from the local Gazette that Colchester as well as Suffolk had had the benefit of Mrs Hill’s services. From 2001 until 2004 she had headed Colchester Borough Council’s Management Team, on a salary in the region of £80,000 a year, before departing ‘to fresh fields and pastures new’. In this position she is said to have initiated Colchester’s ‘Firstsite Art Gallery Project’, a frequent inspiration of angry and indignant letters in the local press. It is three years behind schedule and, says the daily Gazette, likely to end up costing £28 million!

Colchester’s outspoken Lib.Dem MP Bob Russell is quoted as saying, ‘I considered her tenure at Colchester Council to have been a disaster. Council taxpayers of Colchester will be paying for decades to come’.


A ‘Family Friendly’ Government?

That’s what they say – but the facts contradict this claim.. All the evidence suggests that the second decade of the 21st Century is a distinctly unpropitious time to be raising a family – except of course for those who, like most of the friends and relatives of our top politicians, are seriously wealthy. For them the purchase of food and other items on which most of us have to spend a large part of our total income, will only form a small fraction of their expenditure.

A report in the Church of England newspaper ‘The Church Times’ reveals that a survey for the Quaker founded Joseph Rowntree Foundation (it is circumstances like this that make me doubly happy about my dual membership!) has found that ‘Families need to earn 20 percent more this year than last year if they are to maintain an acceptable standard of living’. What is an ‘acceptable standard of living’? The Church Times says, ‘Since 2008 the JRF has gathered information about focus groups to set a benchmark for what it considers to be ‘an acceptable standard of living’. The benchmark is set at a level that rules out extravagances but allows for such items as a mobile phone and a self-catering holiday in the UK once a year. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

The JRF found that parents with two children needed to earn £18,400 each to reach that standard – a total of £36,800, both parents working full time. This compares with £28,727 a year ago. Families with just one earner need gross earnings of £31,200 and a lone parent would need to be earning £18.200 to meet the minimum acceptable standard of living. The worst hit are those claiming credits for child care, who need to meet a 24 percent shortfall to maintain their standard of living. The official cost of living rose by 4.5 percent in the year to April but the price of ‘essential items’ rose from between 4.7 and 5.7 percent in the same period because of a sharp increase in the price of food during the past year.

Author of the report, Donald Hirsch from Loughborough University says, ‘In practice, earnings have risen by less than inflation, meaning that people on low incomes are finding it substantially harder to make ends meet than a year ago.

‘The squeeze in living standards, caused by the combination of rising prices and stagnant incomes, is hitting people on low incomes hard……in particular the reduction in support for child care has made many low-earning families worse off, it has substantially reduced the incentive to work for relatively low pay, for families who need to use child care in order to do so'.


Meanwhile fuel prices have gone up yet again. Many – particularly the poorest of us – are going to face a stark choice this coming winter: Heat or Eat? They’ll be hard put to it to manage both.

 Family Friendly? I don’t think so.

Week 26.2011 5 July 2011

Tendring Topics – on line


‘The rest of us…………..’

A regular blog reader has written to point out how cleverly, and how easily, the government and much of the national press have managed to stir up resentment against large minorities of the population by telling ‘the rest of us’ (the right-thinking, hardworking, tax-paying readers of The Mail, the Express and the Sun) that they are having to pay for ‘those others’ to live lives of idleness and luxury.

Have you noticed, he asks, how often this government (and the press) have tried to turn the perceived majority (who feel hard done by) against the minority (who they suggest are pampered and undeserving)? They are doing it with public sector pensions; claiming that these "gold plated" pensions are being paid for by the vast majority of "us" who don't enjoy the same pensions themselves. The same was true of hard working families paying for the Benefits of others who are claiming more than the "average wage". What’s more, we were all paying for the education of idle and dissolute students and paying the rent of people "choosing" to live in high rent property at "our expense". It's an easy sell.


It occurred to me that there are many other situations in which the same argument could be used.


What about the minority of kids staying on in 6th form while their hard working classmates who leave school at 15 have to work hard on building sites and shopping malls, paying taxes to keep them at school?


Then there are all these people who indulge in dangerous sports - sky diving, rock climbing and yachting for instance. They expect us to pay for their rescue and medical care when they break their necks or have to be plucked from peril in expensive helicopters when their boats capsize or they get lost on a glacier. All of this has to be paid for by the rest of us who are content with a package holiday and sky television. We can't afford yachts, private aircraft or trips to the Himalayas!


. Then there are the young offenders. They expect us to pay for their board and lodging when they are locked up; in effect hotel accommodation which most of us couldn’t afford. Maybe if parents of delinquents had to pay for it they would exercise more control over their wayward kids. And we mustn’t forget the ‘on the fiddle’ MPs whom we all love to hate. Those who have been caught out could well afford to pay board and lodging for their 18 months, or whatever, sentence. As for the rest of convicted criminals, perhaps they could pay for their board and lodging with something like a student loan, to be paid off in instalments on their release!


Maybe your blog readers could think of more crass examples!


Maybe – but I can think of an example that really isn’t particularly crass. How about the directors of the FOOTSE 100 businesses, Britain’s one hundred most profitable enterprises. According to a news report last week their retirement package (I’m sure they don’t have the nerve to call it ‘a pension’) averages £160,000 a year. Why should we pay to keep them in luxury when our provision for retirement (even if we have a public service pension!) isn’t as much as a tiny fraction of that sum?

You didn’t think that we did pay them? Well, we certainly don’t support them as we do public officials. The latter are paid out of taxation and, through our elected representatives, we can have at least some control over the size of their pay cheques.

The Private Sector directors’ wealth doesn’t simply drop straight from Heaven. It comes from our already-half-empty pockets and our depleted bank balances. Every time we put petrol into our fuel tanks, or spend our devalued pounds on food, clothing, electronic gadgetry or virtually anything else, we are adding to the wealth of those leading ‘captains of commerce’. The only way that they can be induced to make their fair contribution to the reduction of the nation’s debt is by a drastic reform of the income tax system – something that no government has had the courage and resolution to attempt.

A Town full of Layabouts?


That must surely have been the first thought in readers’ minds when they read the shock/horror headline in the daily Gazette on 28th June. 22,600 in town say they do not want a job. Colchester, so it seems, has 27,700 residents classed as ‘economically inactive’ and only 5,100 of them want a job and are looking for work.

Needless to say it has attracted its fair share of comment from readers who didn’t read beyond the headline. ‘I too, would like to lie in bed all day and live on benefit – but (unlike those wasters!) I’ve got a social conscience’ was a common theme..

I reckon though, that if a similar tally had been taken in the late ‘40s or ‘50s, an even higher proportion of the capable-of-work population would have been similarly ’economically inactive’. Those 22,600 will include folk who have taken early retirement and are, in fact, supplementing their private pensions with small part-time or freelance jobs. I ‘retired’ from the Council’s service just before I was 59 – but it was to be a freelance writer, which is what I had always wanted. The Labour Exchange and Social Security Offices might have seen me as being, ‘without gainful employment’ but HM Customs and Revenue, who assessed my income tax liability, knew otherwise!

Then again, it has only been during the last few decades (I date it from the avaricious eighties, the age of Thatcherism) that married women, or perhaps to be PC I should say ‘women in stable relationships,’ ceased to see themselves as primarily ‘home makers’ rather than ‘bread winners’. Many, who continued in full-time employment when first married, found looking after the home and the family a satisfying full-time job once a baby had arrived. They would certainly have been counted among the economically inactive who, ‘did not want a job’.

Nowadays women are ‘emancipated from the kitchen sink’ only to find themselves enslaved to a supermarket check-out, a restaurant or hotel, a factory floor or a shop counter. They work till the last possible moment before their baby is born and return to wage-slavery the minute that they can arrange childcare. It may be though that even today, there are some women who find that looking after their home and children is career enough for them. Such women would add to the numbers of Colchester’s willingly ‘workless’.

I am constantly being told ‘you can’t put the clock back’ and in this case I am not sure that I would want to. I would certainly not wish to deprive anyone, man or woman, of the chance of becoming a doctor, or lawyer, or journalist, or police officer if they are yearning for such a career. For some women though, being a loving and competent wife and mother may be career enough.

We should be thankful for them. In the ‘bad old days’ when most women with children stayed at home to look after them, there were many fewer schoolgirl pregnancies, much less sexually transmitted disease among juveniles, less drug-taking and alcohol abuse, much less juvenile crime and much less antisocial behaviour. It was stay-at-home mums, who were ‘economically inactive’ but were always there when their children came home from school or in from play, that we had to thank for that.

Lord Hanningfield


Lord Hanningfield, former leader of Essex County Council, has been sentenced to nine months (of which I suppose he’ll actually serve four) imprisonment for fraudulently claiming, as a member of the House of Lords, expenses that he hadn’t incurred. It’s a good deal less than the penalty dealt out to members of the House of Commons who had similarly defrauded the public.

I hope that this was because he was old, frail, and in precarious health, and because the rules for Lords’ expenses are rather less clear-cut than those for the Commons – and not because, ‘The poor chap made a bad mistake and has to pay for it – but he’s one of us really; not like those bounders ‘on the make’ in the ‘other House’.


I don’t think that there was much point in spending public money on giving any of them a custodial sentence. They’re not going to do the same thing again and, for those who had relished being in the spotlight, exposure and public disgrace were surely punishment enough. As far as I am concerned it would have been sufficient for them admit their guilt, publicly apologise, and attempt to pay back the money that they had fraudulently obtained. There was little chance of that happening in Lord Hanningfield’s case. He really seems to believe that he has done nothing wrong. If, as has been reported, he intends to appeal I have little doubt that the Appeals Court will think otherwise – and could even increase his sentence.

We are told that his expenses claims as Leader of the Essex County Council are now under investigation. Here there could well be even larger sums involved. I hope that there will be no attempt by his former colleagues (some of whose own expenses claims might also merit examination!) to sweep the conclusions of that investigation under the County Hall carpet.

Now it’s getting personal!


News headlines and discussions on radio and tv following last week’s day of strike action by public service unions have made it clear to me that I am no longer a relatively impartial observer of the nation’s problems and of attempts to solve them. I am myself a major part of their cause!

We are, so they assure us, all living too long. That is the reason why those public service pensions are unaffordable and why everyone is going to have to wait longer for his or her state retirement pension. It is also why we have to have cut-backs in services for the elderly and the disabled, why we have to review the ways in which we pay for them to have social care either in their own homes or in a nursing home and, since not even the oldest of us is immortal, we have to consider the best – and, of course, the most cost effective - way of overseeing our final departure.

My latest birthday was over a month ago, and I am just getting used to the idea of being 90. What is more, I have been in receipt of a public service pension for over thirty years! I have certainly received value for the six percent of my salary that, for forty years, I paid towards the provision of that pension. I do remember though officials, on a considerably higher salary than me, whose lives ended while they were still in the council’s employment, and many others who died within a few years of retirement. Superannuation schemes have to take the rough with the smooth. As far as the local government scheme is concerned, I am part of ‘the rough’!

During the past decade I have, I fear, made quite a lot of use of the services of the NHS. I don’t feel guilty about this. The NHS is funded from general taxation. I have paid taxes all my life (I am lucky enough to be still liable for income tax) but, prior to the past ten years, I made few demands on the Health Service.

What of the future? So far, thanks at least partly to that public service pension, I have needed no support from Social Services. ‘Old people like to remain in their own homes and keep their independence’. This was an oft-repeated mantra of Lord Hanningfield’s, especially when the county council was selling off its care homes!

That is true up to a point. But I think that I would prefer residence in a good care home to the kind of ‘independence’ that consists of being roused every morning by a couple of professional ‘care workers’; washed, dressed and left in an easy chair in front of the telly until some time in the evening when they would return, undress me and get me into bed again, after a day punctuated only by changes of tv programme and the arrival of ‘meals on wheels’.

I sincerely hope that before I get to that stage, whatever may be left of me will have taken the advice given in a brief poem by A.E. Housman:

The hollow fires burn out to black,
The lamps are guttering low.
So square your shoulders, lift your pack,
And leave your friends and go.