Tendring Topics……on line
Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate – a Retirement Village?
I learned with distinctly mixed feelings the suggestion that Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate could be transformed into a retirement village. I have a double interest in the idea. It is an area with which, as a Public Health Inspector, I first became acquainted in the late 1950s. It was then still trying to recover from the disastrous floods of 1953 that had taken many Jaywick lives. Its facilities were even more basic then than they are today.
My other interest is that today I am not just ‘elderly’ but ‘old’, and it would be people like me (though a bit younger!) who might be expected to make their homes there. Nothing less than an ambulance or I suppose, a hearse, will ever prise me away from the bungalow in Dudley Road in which I have lived for fifty-five years. Perhaps if I wanted to move home, I might be tempted by a modern bungalow within yards of Jaywick’s golden sands in a newly built ‘retirement estate’ on a redeveloped Brooklands. That though, isn’t quite what Jaywick campaigner Mick Masterton, founder member of the Friends of Brooklands, Residents Group, has in mind. He wants to retain the existing dwellings. He points out that many of those on the Brooklands estate are much too tiny for permanent family use. This is hardly surprising as, when built, they were intended only for brief holiday use in the summer months. He feels though that they would be perfect for residential use by retired couples. I wonder?
The Daily Gazette reports him as saying, ‘There’s not enough room to swing a cat in some of these properties, let alone stick a family of three in them. But they are a perfectly good size for people who have retired’ and, ‘you can’t put a mum, dad and three kids in a rabbit hutch with no room, but they are perfect for a retired couple’.
He goes on to say that, ‘If you start putting more mature people in there, it will start to become a nice place to retire and property prices might start creeping up’. He is hoping to persuade landlords and estate agents to rent these properties to the over 55s in the future. He believes that this could transform Brooklands. ‘If you live next door to old people, then you’re happy. They aren’t likely to go round smashing people’s windows. Could Mr Masterson have been misquoted? I hope so because the former public relations officer lurking within me thinks that his words are very unlikely to encourage the newly retired to seek a home in which you can’t swing a cat, or one that resembles ‘a rabbit hutch with no room’, even if it is unlikely to have its windows smashed in by its neighbours and is within a few yards of the golden tide-washed sands of Clacton-on-Sea’s sunset suburb!
Also, of course, no one puts ‘a mum, dad and three kids’ in accommodation in which they will be desperately overcrowded. They go into it because they can find nothing better. The reason for this is that Councils were compelled by the Right to buy legislation to sell off Council Houses built by their predecessors to eradicate homelessness and overcrowding, and cannot now build more homes for letting. Housing Associations and the Private Sector are quite unable to meet the demand.
Dreaming of an Empire?
Local control is what local government is all about – and it is a principle our present central government claims to support.
It is surely obvious that the smaller the local government unit the closer it will be to the people, and the more likely it will be to reflect their wishes. A few weeks ago I suggested that one way in which this objective could be furthered within Essex would be to abolish the County Council and to make the individual district and borough councils wholly responsible for all local government services within their own district. It now seems though that the very reverse is beginning to take place!
The Daily Gazette reports that Tendring Council has agreed to ‘share offices and work more closely with the Essex County Council’. This decision was made not by the full council but by its ‘Cabinet members’ and was signed by them on 6th September, not even being discussed at a subsequent meeting of the full council. Goodness – in my time such a revolutionary proposal would have been fully discussed by a multi-party council committee, reported in the local press for public discussion, and then debated at the next meeting of the whole council.
I am not surprised that Labour councillor Ivan Henderson sees this as the first step towards, ‘Essex County Council taking over control and making decisions about our local services. Decisions would be made to suit the county council and not the residents of Tendring’. Tendring Council leader Neil Stock, on the other hand, claims that this co-operation is, ‘a brilliant thing we are doing to protect, and hopefully create, jobs in the district, and improve services’.
I doubt if Mr Henderson’s forebodings will have been allayed (mine certainly haven’t been!) by the reported statement of the leader of Essex County Council that, ‘our customers want seamless and joined up delivery of services. They do not recognise the typical situation where geographical and organisational boundaries determine how services and management should be structured. By agreeing to this new joint way of working, we’re breaking down the barriers.’ This statement is made even more potentially sinister by the fact that the county council has signed similar agreements with Brentwood and Braintree councils. It is surely clear that the County Council’s ultimate aim is to establish itself as the single unitary authority in full control of all ‘local’ government services within the county.
Lord Hanningfield, the Council’s former leader, once declared (later he said ‘only jokingly’) that Essex was large enough and wealthy enough to be a sovereign independent state. He was clearly dreaming of an independent Kingdom of Essex (no need to ask whom he had in mind as king!). His successors are even more ambitious. They’re dreaming of an Essex Empire! And perhaps they’ll succeed. I learn that other County Councils have earned the praise of the government by organising similar mergers. I am sorry to say that I begin to see a future in which County Councils are the only units of what used to be called local government.
Recyclables Collection Centres
An example of the dire effects that can result from an attempt to manage Tendring District’s affairs by remote control from Chelmsford, is to be found in the readers’ letters page of last week’s (22.9.11) Clacton Gazette.
Mr James Smith of Spring Road St Osyth wrote:
It is said that the refuse centre off Colchester Road St. Osyth is to be closed in October. So, I gave the Rush Green depot a go. When I got there at about 10.00 a.m. there was an enormous trail of cars waiting to go in. If this is an example of what people can expect there will be more fly-tipping and Tendring Council will be to blame. Closing any refuse site is not an economy. Our time is just as valuable as councillors. So, think again.
There’s just one thing wrong about Mr Smith’s letter. Extra fly tipping won’t be the fault of the Tendring District Council though they’ll probably have to clear up the mess and try to prosecute the fly tippers. One of the more idiotic features of 1974’s local government reorganisation was that refuse collection remained the responsibility of district councils but refuse disposal became that of County Councils. Recycling wasn’t a major concern way back in 1974 but it has become very important since.
Recycling is obviously part of the process of refuse disposal, so naturally refuse and recycling centres became the County Council’s concern. I can well imagine some chairborne strategist at County Hall carefully studying a map of north-east Essex and congratulating himself (or, of course, herself) on noticing something that had obviously been missed by ‘those ignorant peasants out in the sticks’. There were two refuse disposal and recycling centres within a short distance of each other – one in the former Clacton Urban District Council’s area and the other in the area of the former Tendring Rural District Council. Close one down and thousands of pounds would be saved. ‘That’s the way MBEs are earned – should be worth at least another salary grade at the next review’.
Officials in County Hall, Chelmsford are unlikely to know what hundreds of Clactonians could have told them, that removal and disposal of recyclable and unrecyclable waste from a private car or van take up both time and space. As a result there is often a long queue of cars stretching from the Rush Green Civic Amenity Centre right back towards Cloes Lane. In my motoring days I can recall being held up in such a queue. That must have been ten years ago, long before interest in recycling became general. For much of the time Rush Green recycling Centre is used up to and beyond its capacity. Closing the St. Osyth Centre would undoubtedly result in unacceptably lengthening queues of cars obstructing Rush Green Road and probably in the fly tipping that Mr James Smith predicts.
Twenty-first Century ‘bear baiting’?
Lord Macaulay, early 19th Century historian, poet and politician famously berated the Puritans for having opposed bear baiting, not because of the pain suffered by the bears, but because of the pleasure that it gave to spectators. George Bernard Shaw, 20th Century dramatist and controversialist said that the Puritans had been quite right to oppose bear baiting on those grounds. He pointed out that bears, whether captive or in the wild, suffer pain regularly from a number of natural causes, as indeed do humans. What was truly appalling was that humans should watch and derive pleasure from the deliberate infliction of that pain – or of pain inflicted deliberately on any living thing.
Although no pain was involved, I felt rather similarly about the recent controversy over the spectacle of eight year old boys clad only in shorts wrestling with each other within a large wire ‘cage’, watched with enjoyment by a cheering audience consisting largely (perhaps wholly) of young to middle-aged men.
I am quite prepared to believe that not one of those boys was in the least danger of being physically injured; that they were safer in fact, than they would have been had it been a rough-and-tumble with their mates in one of their own back gardens. Mind you, I did find incredible the words of the father of one of the wrestling boys who claimed that if his son had not been engaged in this juvenile ‘cage wrestling’ he’d have been out on the streets ‘causing trouble.’ At eight! It doesn’t say much for his mum and dad’s parenting skills!
I don’t think that those who know me best would be likely to describe me as being either particularly squeamish or prudish. I have to say though that I found the spectacle of those scantily clad kids, inside a cage and wrestling before an excited adult male audience in an atmosphere of booze and betting, utterly revolting.
Drawing a line….
There’s nothing that top politicians like more than ‘drawing a line’ under the mistakes of the past and concentrating on the future. Burglars, muggers and confidence men feel just the same, when they have been caught out. One scandal that obstinately refuses to have a line drawn under it is that of Rupert Murdoch’s evil empire News International. It began with a revelation about phone hacking but has now progressed far beyond that. We knew that Neil Wallis, former Deputy Editor of the News if the World had subsequently been employed as a consultant to the Metropolitan Police who paid him £24.000 for his services. We now learn that during that time News International was also paying him over £25,000 for crime stories sold to them to which he had obviously had inside access. Meanwhile his former boss Andy Coulson is suing News International for failing to pay his legal fees for the litigation in which he is involved.
Why on earth should they? Andy Coulson hasn’t worked for News International for four years. Perhaps David Cameron – a more recent employer – will help him out.
27 September 2011
20 September 2011
Week 37.2011 20.9.2011
Tendring Topics…….on line
‘I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree’
So claimed American poetess Joyce Kilmer. I think that she was comparing chalk with cheese. What is indisputable though is that trees have inspired poets through the ages. They enhance the appearance and charm of the countryside, mop up some of the carbon dioxide that is produced by human activities and help to prevent soil erosion and flooding. They provide a safe haven, breeding ground and food supply for myriad forms of animal and plant life, as well as shade, recreational facilities, fuel and building materials for we humans.
Between 1974 and 1980, while I was Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer I remember that the Trees Working Party, under the chairmanship of tree enthusiast Councillor Malcolm Holloway, was one of the Council’s most successful working groups. Completely non-political, the Working Party encouraged tree planting as a condition of new housing, commercial or industrial development, and helped to preserve existing trees on public land by enlisting volunteer spare-time tree wardens throughout the district to report acts of vandalism and to water local street trees in times of drought. I recall that we organised a children’s essay competition on the importance of trees to humankind. This was judged by the editor of the East Essex Gazette (now the Clacton Gazette) and certificates and small prizes were presented to the winner and runners up. The Dutch Elm Disease epidemic was at its peak during the late 1970s. The Working Party made the public aware of this threat to the English countryside and encouraged replacement of diseased trees. At that time the Council had a ‘tree nursery’ on land beside Holland Brook near the Thorpe-le-Soken sewage treatment works. On it ‘tree whips’ were grown into saplings ready to be planted out in public places. This received publicity both in the local and regional press and on tv.
The Silver Jubilee of the Queen’s reign occurred during those years and I believe that Chairman Malcolm Holloway was the first to coin the slogan Plant a Tree for the Jubilee! that was later widely used nation-wide. If he were alive today I am sure that he would be delighted by the fact that the Woodland Trust intends to plant six million trees in Britain to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year. The biggest proposed tree-planting project is for a 4,600 acres area in Leicestershire, but there are other less ambitious schemes planned throughout the UK, which at present is said to have proportionately the lowest area of woodland of any country in Europe.
I wish the campaign every success. I wonder though how it will fit in with the government’s determination to speed up the granting of planning permission for new development by watering down local authorities’ already limited powers of veto, and creating a presumption of approval for proposed development. This it is hoped will lead to more homes and more jobs? I have a feeling that woodland will not be allowed to stand in the way of developers’ profits and that, despite lip service to ‘localism’ the government will override local objections to wholesale tree felling.
In this connection I was interested to learn from a national newspaper that three government ministers, the Chancellor of the Chequer among them, while endorsing the government’s relaxation of planning legislation nationally, are strongly supporting local protests against unwelcome development their own constituency areas!
NIMBY!
Unemployment
The latest unemployment figures – another 80,000 jobless during the past three months bringing the total number of unemployed to two and a half million, seem to have come as a total surprise to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Regular readers of this blog will not have expected me to be surprised. Drastic cuts in the public services are just beginning to have their effect. There will be worse to come.
Nor was I surprised to note that the Private Sector had been quite unable to find work for those made jobless in the Public Sector. Much Public Sector work is contracted out to private consultants and contractors. What’s more, the Public Sector provides an environment in which private firms can thrive and make their profits.
They are the people who repair and keep litter-free the roads and pavements along which everyone comes to work. They take away and dispose of domestic and commercial waste. They try to maintain law and order. They maintain a healthy and pollution free environment. They make sure that our food is fit to eat and that our restaurants, pubs and cafes are safe places in which to eat it. They care for and treat the sick and injured. They help struggling mothers with young babies and old folk even more helpless than I am!
Did you notice that when ‘the west’ wanted to get Libya on its feet again and out of the chaos produced by months of civil war – nobody said, ‘We must get that casino, those night-clubs and that race course on their feet again to create some wealth‘ or even, ‘We must get the supermarkets, the factories and the oil pipe lines in operation as a first priority’. Not a bit of it. Their first task was to pay the public servants who hadn’t been paid for months. Only when law and order had been restored, and the essential health and environmental services brought back into operation, could they begin to think of getting the private sector enterprises working again. The public sector provides the foundation on which modern society is built. It is not an optional extra. It is neglected at our peril.
Incidentally, just as in Scotland there was none of the recent rioting that afflicted England, neither has there been a rise in unemployment. On the contrary ‘north of the border’ there has been a reduction in unemployment. This is because the devolved Scottish government has embarked on a programme of public works and has thus created much-needed jobs.
This, so our government insists, is the road to ruin. We shall see. In the meantime the Scots may have to cope with increasing numbers of white Anglo-Saxon economic migrants from ‘down south’!
Tuberculosis stages a comeback!
A recent news item on the radio (I think it must have been on the BBC World Service) sent cold shivers down my spine. Tuberculosis, so the newsreader said, was again beginning to become widespread, thanks to the development of strains of the Tuberculosis Bacillus that were resistant to all known antibiotics My own acquaintance with that one-time killer disease that we all thought had been tamed for good, was in 1948. I was 25 and my wife Heather 23. We had been married just two years. During the previous, very hard, winter she had had two or three bouts of what had appeared to be ‘flu. bed rest and aspirin had been prescribed and she had slowly recovered her health, but not her strength, on each occasion. In the late summer of 1948 she had another attack – and this time aspirin and bed rest didn’t help. She had a persistent cough. Her voice became husky. Her temperature was abnormally high in the evening and low in the morning. She perspired heavily at night, had no appetite, had lost her strength and was visibly losing weight. X-ray and sputum tests revealed that she had a severe tubercular infection of the larynx and left lung. The prognosis was not good. She was admitted to what was then the British Legion Sanatorium at Nayland near Colchester. For several weeks her condition deteriorated and I was in despair.
The new ‘wonder drug’ streptomycin had just appeared on the scene. It was expensive and in short supply. It was given only to patients who were very ill indeed but not beyond all hope. Heather fell into that category. Her right lung had never been affected and that made recovery a possibility. A course of streptomycin was supplemented by P.A.S (para-aminosalicylic acid) and the partial collapse of the left lung by crushing the phrenic nerve and pumping air into the space below the diaphragm, a pneumo-peritoneum (PP). ( How extraordinary that I can remember these medical terms after half a century but can’t remember the name of someone I was talking to this morning!)
It worked! Heather’s larynx healed and the progress of the disease in the left lung was halted.. To complete the healing process the left lung had to be permanently collapsed. This was achieved during an eight weeks stay in Papworth Hospital, then a centre for TB treatment. In three separate operations, each a fortnight apart, eight of Heather’s ribs were removed (an eight-rib thoracoplasty) and the diseased lung collapsed. The operation was a success. Heather gradually regained her strength and her appetite. She was discharged cured (well, as cured as she would ever be) in time for Christmas 1950.
It had been a life-saving operation. It had also been a crippling one. Heather had, in effect, just one fully operational lung. She had to rest for an hour or so every afternoon. I always had to help her with shopping and with heavy work about the house. ‘Evenings out’ were too much for her. Our guests, for whom she never spared herself, didn't know how exhausted she was on their departure. When, in her seventies, she developed osteoporosis, the absence of supporting ribs increased the spinal curvature that developed..
No one could have had a better wife, nor could our sons have had a more loving and supportive mother. Yet sometimes I find myself thinking how different her life could have been had the full potential of antibiotics been realized a few years earlier and she had been spared the crippling operation that had cured her tuberculosis - but at a heavy price!
That is why I experienced a shock when I heard that Tuberculosis was staging a comeback – and that the bacillus had now developed a resistance to all existing antibiotics.
‘I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree’
So claimed American poetess Joyce Kilmer. I think that she was comparing chalk with cheese. What is indisputable though is that trees have inspired poets through the ages. They enhance the appearance and charm of the countryside, mop up some of the carbon dioxide that is produced by human activities and help to prevent soil erosion and flooding. They provide a safe haven, breeding ground and food supply for myriad forms of animal and plant life, as well as shade, recreational facilities, fuel and building materials for we humans.
 |
| In my back garden are two apple trees (in blossom) a damson tree, a Japanese winter-flowering cherry and four silver birches. I do try to practise what I preach! |
The Silver Jubilee of the Queen’s reign occurred during those years and I believe that Chairman Malcolm Holloway was the first to coin the slogan Plant a Tree for the Jubilee! that was later widely used nation-wide. If he were alive today I am sure that he would be delighted by the fact that the Woodland Trust intends to plant six million trees in Britain to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year. The biggest proposed tree-planting project is for a 4,600 acres area in Leicestershire, but there are other less ambitious schemes planned throughout the UK, which at present is said to have proportionately the lowest area of woodland of any country in Europe.
I wish the campaign every success. I wonder though how it will fit in with the government’s determination to speed up the granting of planning permission for new development by watering down local authorities’ already limited powers of veto, and creating a presumption of approval for proposed development. This it is hoped will lead to more homes and more jobs? I have a feeling that woodland will not be allowed to stand in the way of developers’ profits and that, despite lip service to ‘localism’ the government will override local objections to wholesale tree felling.
In this connection I was interested to learn from a national newspaper that three government ministers, the Chancellor of the Chequer among them, while endorsing the government’s relaxation of planning legislation nationally, are strongly supporting local protests against unwelcome development their own constituency areas!
NIMBY!
Unemployment
The latest unemployment figures – another 80,000 jobless during the past three months bringing the total number of unemployed to two and a half million, seem to have come as a total surprise to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Regular readers of this blog will not have expected me to be surprised. Drastic cuts in the public services are just beginning to have their effect. There will be worse to come.
Nor was I surprised to note that the Private Sector had been quite unable to find work for those made jobless in the Public Sector. Much Public Sector work is contracted out to private consultants and contractors. What’s more, the Public Sector provides an environment in which private firms can thrive and make their profits.
They are the people who repair and keep litter-free the roads and pavements along which everyone comes to work. They take away and dispose of domestic and commercial waste. They try to maintain law and order. They maintain a healthy and pollution free environment. They make sure that our food is fit to eat and that our restaurants, pubs and cafes are safe places in which to eat it. They care for and treat the sick and injured. They help struggling mothers with young babies and old folk even more helpless than I am!
Did you notice that when ‘the west’ wanted to get Libya on its feet again and out of the chaos produced by months of civil war – nobody said, ‘We must get that casino, those night-clubs and that race course on their feet again to create some wealth‘ or even, ‘We must get the supermarkets, the factories and the oil pipe lines in operation as a first priority’. Not a bit of it. Their first task was to pay the public servants who hadn’t been paid for months. Only when law and order had been restored, and the essential health and environmental services brought back into operation, could they begin to think of getting the private sector enterprises working again. The public sector provides the foundation on which modern society is built. It is not an optional extra. It is neglected at our peril.
Incidentally, just as in Scotland there was none of the recent rioting that afflicted England, neither has there been a rise in unemployment. On the contrary ‘north of the border’ there has been a reduction in unemployment. This is because the devolved Scottish government has embarked on a programme of public works and has thus created much-needed jobs.
This, so our government insists, is the road to ruin. We shall see. In the meantime the Scots may have to cope with increasing numbers of white Anglo-Saxon economic migrants from ‘down south’!
Tuberculosis stages a comeback!
A recent news item on the radio (I think it must have been on the BBC World Service) sent cold shivers down my spine. Tuberculosis, so the newsreader said, was again beginning to become widespread, thanks to the development of strains of the Tuberculosis Bacillus that were resistant to all known antibiotics My own acquaintance with that one-time killer disease that we all thought had been tamed for good, was in 1948. I was 25 and my wife Heather 23. We had been married just two years. During the previous, very hard, winter she had had two or three bouts of what had appeared to be ‘flu. bed rest and aspirin had been prescribed and she had slowly recovered her health, but not her strength, on each occasion. In the late summer of 1948 she had another attack – and this time aspirin and bed rest didn’t help. She had a persistent cough. Her voice became husky. Her temperature was abnormally high in the evening and low in the morning. She perspired heavily at night, had no appetite, had lost her strength and was visibly losing weight. X-ray and sputum tests revealed that she had a severe tubercular infection of the larynx and left lung. The prognosis was not good. She was admitted to what was then the British Legion Sanatorium at Nayland near Colchester. For several weeks her condition deteriorated and I was in despair.
 |
| Heather had to gain a stone in weight before she could go to Papworth for surgery. She had just achieved that aim when this pcture was taken at Nayland Sanatorum. |
It worked! Heather’s larynx healed and the progress of the disease in the left lung was halted.. To complete the healing process the left lung had to be permanently collapsed. This was achieved during an eight weeks stay in Papworth Hospital, then a centre for TB treatment. In three separate operations, each a fortnight apart, eight of Heather’s ribs were removed (an eight-rib thoracoplasty) and the diseased lung collapsed. The operation was a success. Heather gradually regained her strength and her appetite. She was discharged cured (well, as cured as she would ever be) in time for Christmas 1950.
It had been a life-saving operation. It had also been a crippling one. Heather had, in effect, just one fully operational lung. She had to rest for an hour or so every afternoon. I always had to help her with shopping and with heavy work about the house. ‘Evenings out’ were too much for her. Our guests, for whom she never spared herself, didn't know how exhausted she was on their departure. When, in her seventies, she developed osteoporosis, the absence of supporting ribs increased the spinal curvature that developed..
 |
| Heather happily camping in the 1970s |
Heather wasn’t one to moan and groan. She gave me two fine sons who, in their turn, gave us three wonderful grandchildren of all of whom we had every reason to be proud. She was a good and untiring cook, an expert with the needle and with the sewing machine and a great make-do-and-mender! She enjoyed life too though her physical activities were limited. She was hardly an ‘outdoor girl’ but she thoroughly enjoyed the camping holidays that we took every year.
No one could have had a better wife, nor could our sons have had a more loving and supportive mother. Yet sometimes I find myself thinking how different her life could have been had the full potential of antibiotics been realized a few years earlier and she had been spared the crippling operation that had cured her tuberculosis - but at a heavy price!
That is why I experienced a shock when I heard that Tuberculosis was staging a comeback – and that the bacillus had now developed a resistance to all existing antibiotics.
13 September 2011
Week 36 2011 13.9.2011
Tendring Topics………on Line
‘Why don’t they eat cake?’
I do not recall ever before having heard quite such blatant rubbish on tv as that put forward to urge the abolition of the higher rate of income tax!
It is worth giving some thought to what this ‘higher rate’ actually amounts to, and who has to pay it. It applies only to those with a taxable income of £150,000 a year or more. That is a sum so large that it is all but meaningless to most of us. It works out at over £2,884 per week or, if you prefer, £12,500 per calendar month. Do you know anyone with that sort of an income? Probably you don’t, neither do I. Perhaps to members of a government that includes 17 millionaires it may seem pretty commonplace - middle of the road in fact. I don’t think though that I am even acquainted with anyone who wouldn’t consider those liable to the higher rate of income tax as being very wealthy. These fortunate people are required to pay back 50% of any income above £150,000 a year. Hardly, it might have been thought, likely to cause the ‘victims’ of the tax serious hardship!
The idea of abolishing that higher rate of income tax received a boost last Wednesday (7th Sept) when 20 top financial experts wrote an open letter to the Financial Times urging that course of action. The very rich should be charged only the standard rate of 40 percent that I, and a great many others of us, have to pay on at least part of our incomes. The removal of the higher band of income tax would, so they claim, remove a brake on Britain’s economic recovery and allow us to forge ahead into a golden future. Among the flood of protesting emails responding to this item on BBC Breakfast was at least one asking if any/many/perhaps all of those twenty financial experts were themselves in receipt of incomes in excess of £150,000 a year and therefore had a personal financial interest in the matter.
On that same Breakfast programme another financial expert explained that entrepreneurs from overseas were dissuaded from setting up small businesses in this country when they were expected to pay back half their incomes to the government. If the higher tax band were retained all those with the best brains would emigrate. In any case, few people actually paid that tax because they are astute enough to protect their wealth by putting it into off-shore accounts in tax havens or in retirement trusts and the like.
I have been trying to think of a small business that could be expected to provide its founder and owner with an income in excess of £150,000 – drug dealing, gambling, the arms trade, money lending, the sex trade, organised crime perhaps. They’re all that come to mind and they are all activities we can comfortably manage without. Every listener to that broadcast must surely have known that no one at all has to pay half his income in tax – half of any income in excess of £150,000 is a very different matter.
To even think of increasing the incomes of the wealthy in a time of growing unemployment – particularly youth unemployment - while cutting public services and benefits to the poor, the sick and the disabled, is an obscenity. In lack of sensitivity and human understanding it is comparable with the ill-fated Queen Marie Antoinette’s famous suggestion when told that the poor of Paris were clamouring for bread ‘Why don’t they eat cake?’
Let us hope that it doesn’t have similar consequences!
I am more than ever convinced that Britain’s hope of mending our ‘broken society’ and discovering our country’s true ‘greatness’, lies in narrowing, certainly not widening, the yawning gap between the wealthiest and the poorest of our nation. A good start could be made by reviewing our income tax system and, with the aim of eventually making it truly progressive, bringing the threshold of liability for the higher rate of tax down from £150,000 a year to £100,000, while simultaneously seeking out and closing those currently legal loopholes by means of which the seriously wealthy avoid carrying their fair share of the country’s financial burden.
‘Those who sup with the devil need a long spoon’
So says the proverb and I think it likely that some of our politicians and police officers wish that they had had a rather longer spoon when they fraternised with Rupert Murdoch and the top executives of News International.
James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and representative, and two former senior employees of News International have been recalled for further questioning by the House of Commons Select Committee. The evidence of the latter two absolutely contradicts that of James Murdoch. On which testimony, I wonder, will the Committee base its final report?
The Committee’s continuing activities have prompted our Prime Minister to comment that perhaps he had allowed himself to get a little too close to representatives of News International, but this had been because he had been eager to explain the Government’s policies to the top management of all the news media – not just the Murdoch Press.
I don’t really think that the proprietors of the Guardian, the Independent, and the Daily Mirror enjoyed quite the same measure of Prime Ministerial attention as did the owner of the Times, Sunday Times, News of the World and the Sun, either from our Prime Minister or most of his predecessors. I am sure that no-one would dream of criticising Mr Cameron for explaining government policy to any or all of them. What is a matter of concern though, is the extent to which our present, or any past, Prime Minister may have been prepared to bend or change the emphasis of government policy in order to ensure friendly headlines, news stories, and feature articles and reviews in a powerful section of the national press. Remember the Sun’s boast after a Thatcher electoral victory – ‘It was us wot done it!’
One recent Prime Minister, John Major declined to pay homage to Rupert Murdoch and News International. It was to his credit – but he didn’t remain very long in office did he? It is for this reason that I believe very strongly that no substantial part of the British news media should be under the ownership, influence and control of a single individual, certainly not of an individual who is not British and who owes no loyalty to Great Britain, or to British and European values and traditions.
Who is being subsidised?
The residents of ‘Middle England’, through the columns of their self-appointed mouthpieces in the press (I have in mind in particular the Express, the Mail and the Telegraph) constantly remind us that they, as hard-working, honest and respectable citizens, have to subsidise the life-styles of unemployed layabouts, single parent families, old folk who are no longer making a contribution to society, other people’s children’s care and education, public transport, a European Union that they wish they had never heard of and so on, and on ……and on.
I have just heard it confirmed that I, and quite a few mostly old folk like me, are quietly subsidising the comfortable lives of a great many devoted readers of those newspapers. We, the unwilling and unwitting benefactors of aspiring Middle Britain, are those who have paid off our mortgages and are truly home owners. We have since built up a few thousand pounds of savings in savings accounts in the Banks or Building Societies that had lent us the money with which we had purchased our homes. Those accumulated savings are month-by-month diminishing in value, as inflation at twice the rate originally forecast by the government, outstrips the meagre interest that they nowadays earn. They will continue to shrink while the Bank Rate fixed by the Bank of England remains at the record low level of half of one percent.
And who gets the benefit of the value creamed off our life savings? Why, the keen go-ahead young couples who probably describe themselves as home owners but are, in fact, home buyers. The real owners of their homes, as they’ll quickly find out if they default on their mortgage payments, are the banks or building societies that loaned them the purchase money and now hold the deeds of their homes.
The interest that home buyers are paying is at a record low level, kept there artificially by the continuing absurdly low bank rate. The idea is, no doubt, that this boost to their income will give them more cash in their pockets which will encourage them to go out and spend – and get the wheels of Britain’s economy moving again. It is, of course, simply robbing Peter to pay Paul and on this occasion I am one of the Peters. I’ll survive. My savings aren’t substantial enough to attract a great deal of interest even if the bank rate and mortgage interest payments rose. It must though be a severe blow to those elderly people depending upon the interest on their savings to finance their retirement.
‘Our Holiday Season is ending early, due to lack of interest ……..from Tendring Council’.
During the late 1970s and early ‘80s, after my retirement from Tendring Council, my wife and I would often take a week’s holiday with our motor-caravan in late June and another early in September. The roads and the camping sites were less busy than in July and August, the children were back at school (ours had long since left school!) and the weather was often warmer and sunnier than it had been in the height of the holiday season. Sea temperatures too are often higher in September than in June and early July.
I have noticed that a great many, particularly elderly or childless couples do the same thing. The September weather this year has so far been disappointing but, who knows, there could be an Indian summer towards the end of this month or even into October. Those who decide to visit the Essex Sunshine Coast a little outside the peak of holiday season this year are likely to be disappointed by the reception they receive.
Many of Tendring’s Tourist Information Centres closed and the Council-run beach patrols stopped operating on 1st September. John Halls, Walton-on-the-Naze Town Mayor is furious. He is reported in the Daily Gazette as saying that there are still people coming here and holidaymakers can often be seen here until October. ‘This town relies on the tourist trade and we are trying to extend the holiday season, not cut ii short as soon as we reach September………Not all children have even gone back to school yet, and people don’t feel safe on the beaches without a patrol there. They have done a lot of good this summer but if someone gets stuck on the rocks now they will not be there to help’.
Needless to say, Councillor Stephen Mayzes, Tendring’s Tourism Boss, has an answer. ‘It is considered to be the end of the season, the schools are going back and there are far fewer people around. We have got to look at how many people are actually going into the information centre. We did a study last year and worked out that it was costing us about £7.00 for every person who walked into the centre’. Mr Mayzes would like to see in the future a hi-tech replacement for the centre. He has in mind an interactive screen that would allow people to explore tourist information all year. I can’t imagine anything more likely to put people off Walton forever than having to consult a giant computer screen rather than a friendly and helpful information officer! A virtual information office for virtual people – real people, on holiday, won’t want to go near it!
I suppose I haven’t made a terrible error about the responsibilities of a District Council ‘Tourism boss’? I had the possibly silly idea that his task was to attract tourists and other holidaymakers to our Holiday Coast. Mr Mayzes response to a prestigious camping and caravanning club making use of the playing field of the Coastal Academy during the holiday period, and his action in prematurely closing Information Centres and ending Beach Patrols, makes me wonder if his task is the precise opposite – to discourage strangers from making their way here and to keep our golden sands and holiday facilities unsullied for the enjoyment of ‘natives only’. If so, he is doing very well!
‘Why don’t they eat cake?’
I do not recall ever before having heard quite such blatant rubbish on tv as that put forward to urge the abolition of the higher rate of income tax!
It is worth giving some thought to what this ‘higher rate’ actually amounts to, and who has to pay it. It applies only to those with a taxable income of £150,000 a year or more. That is a sum so large that it is all but meaningless to most of us. It works out at over £2,884 per week or, if you prefer, £12,500 per calendar month. Do you know anyone with that sort of an income? Probably you don’t, neither do I. Perhaps to members of a government that includes 17 millionaires it may seem pretty commonplace - middle of the road in fact. I don’t think though that I am even acquainted with anyone who wouldn’t consider those liable to the higher rate of income tax as being very wealthy. These fortunate people are required to pay back 50% of any income above £150,000 a year. Hardly, it might have been thought, likely to cause the ‘victims’ of the tax serious hardship!
The idea of abolishing that higher rate of income tax received a boost last Wednesday (7th Sept) when 20 top financial experts wrote an open letter to the Financial Times urging that course of action. The very rich should be charged only the standard rate of 40 percent that I, and a great many others of us, have to pay on at least part of our incomes. The removal of the higher band of income tax would, so they claim, remove a brake on Britain’s economic recovery and allow us to forge ahead into a golden future. Among the flood of protesting emails responding to this item on BBC Breakfast was at least one asking if any/many/perhaps all of those twenty financial experts were themselves in receipt of incomes in excess of £150,000 a year and therefore had a personal financial interest in the matter.
On that same Breakfast programme another financial expert explained that entrepreneurs from overseas were dissuaded from setting up small businesses in this country when they were expected to pay back half their incomes to the government. If the higher tax band were retained all those with the best brains would emigrate. In any case, few people actually paid that tax because they are astute enough to protect their wealth by putting it into off-shore accounts in tax havens or in retirement trusts and the like.
I have been trying to think of a small business that could be expected to provide its founder and owner with an income in excess of £150,000 – drug dealing, gambling, the arms trade, money lending, the sex trade, organised crime perhaps. They’re all that come to mind and they are all activities we can comfortably manage without. Every listener to that broadcast must surely have known that no one at all has to pay half his income in tax – half of any income in excess of £150,000 is a very different matter.
To even think of increasing the incomes of the wealthy in a time of growing unemployment – particularly youth unemployment - while cutting public services and benefits to the poor, the sick and the disabled, is an obscenity. In lack of sensitivity and human understanding it is comparable with the ill-fated Queen Marie Antoinette’s famous suggestion when told that the poor of Paris were clamouring for bread ‘Why don’t they eat cake?’
Let us hope that it doesn’t have similar consequences!
I am more than ever convinced that Britain’s hope of mending our ‘broken society’ and discovering our country’s true ‘greatness’, lies in narrowing, certainly not widening, the yawning gap between the wealthiest and the poorest of our nation. A good start could be made by reviewing our income tax system and, with the aim of eventually making it truly progressive, bringing the threshold of liability for the higher rate of tax down from £150,000 a year to £100,000, while simultaneously seeking out and closing those currently legal loopholes by means of which the seriously wealthy avoid carrying their fair share of the country’s financial burden.
‘Those who sup with the devil need a long spoon’
So says the proverb and I think it likely that some of our politicians and police officers wish that they had had a rather longer spoon when they fraternised with Rupert Murdoch and the top executives of News International.
James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and representative, and two former senior employees of News International have been recalled for further questioning by the House of Commons Select Committee. The evidence of the latter two absolutely contradicts that of James Murdoch. On which testimony, I wonder, will the Committee base its final report?
The Committee’s continuing activities have prompted our Prime Minister to comment that perhaps he had allowed himself to get a little too close to representatives of News International, but this had been because he had been eager to explain the Government’s policies to the top management of all the news media – not just the Murdoch Press.
I don’t really think that the proprietors of the Guardian, the Independent, and the Daily Mirror enjoyed quite the same measure of Prime Ministerial attention as did the owner of the Times, Sunday Times, News of the World and the Sun, either from our Prime Minister or most of his predecessors. I am sure that no-one would dream of criticising Mr Cameron for explaining government policy to any or all of them. What is a matter of concern though, is the extent to which our present, or any past, Prime Minister may have been prepared to bend or change the emphasis of government policy in order to ensure friendly headlines, news stories, and feature articles and reviews in a powerful section of the national press. Remember the Sun’s boast after a Thatcher electoral victory – ‘It was us wot done it!’
One recent Prime Minister, John Major declined to pay homage to Rupert Murdoch and News International. It was to his credit – but he didn’t remain very long in office did he? It is for this reason that I believe very strongly that no substantial part of the British news media should be under the ownership, influence and control of a single individual, certainly not of an individual who is not British and who owes no loyalty to Great Britain, or to British and European values and traditions.
Who is being subsidised?
The residents of ‘Middle England’, through the columns of their self-appointed mouthpieces in the press (I have in mind in particular the Express, the Mail and the Telegraph) constantly remind us that they, as hard-working, honest and respectable citizens, have to subsidise the life-styles of unemployed layabouts, single parent families, old folk who are no longer making a contribution to society, other people’s children’s care and education, public transport, a European Union that they wish they had never heard of and so on, and on ……and on.
I have just heard it confirmed that I, and quite a few mostly old folk like me, are quietly subsidising the comfortable lives of a great many devoted readers of those newspapers. We, the unwilling and unwitting benefactors of aspiring Middle Britain, are those who have paid off our mortgages and are truly home owners. We have since built up a few thousand pounds of savings in savings accounts in the Banks or Building Societies that had lent us the money with which we had purchased our homes. Those accumulated savings are month-by-month diminishing in value, as inflation at twice the rate originally forecast by the government, outstrips the meagre interest that they nowadays earn. They will continue to shrink while the Bank Rate fixed by the Bank of England remains at the record low level of half of one percent.
And who gets the benefit of the value creamed off our life savings? Why, the keen go-ahead young couples who probably describe themselves as home owners but are, in fact, home buyers. The real owners of their homes, as they’ll quickly find out if they default on their mortgage payments, are the banks or building societies that loaned them the purchase money and now hold the deeds of their homes.
The interest that home buyers are paying is at a record low level, kept there artificially by the continuing absurdly low bank rate. The idea is, no doubt, that this boost to their income will give them more cash in their pockets which will encourage them to go out and spend – and get the wheels of Britain’s economy moving again. It is, of course, simply robbing Peter to pay Paul and on this occasion I am one of the Peters. I’ll survive. My savings aren’t substantial enough to attract a great deal of interest even if the bank rate and mortgage interest payments rose. It must though be a severe blow to those elderly people depending upon the interest on their savings to finance their retirement.
‘Our Holiday Season is ending early, due to lack of interest ……..from Tendring Council’.
 |
| Camping beneath the pines in September sunshine |
I have noticed that a great many, particularly elderly or childless couples do the same thing. The September weather this year has so far been disappointing but, who knows, there could be an Indian summer towards the end of this month or even into October. Those who decide to visit the Essex Sunshine Coast a little outside the peak of holiday season this year are likely to be disappointed by the reception they receive.
Many of Tendring’s Tourist Information Centres closed and the Council-run beach patrols stopped operating on 1st September. John Halls, Walton-on-the-Naze Town Mayor is furious. He is reported in the Daily Gazette as saying that there are still people coming here and holidaymakers can often be seen here until October. ‘This town relies on the tourist trade and we are trying to extend the holiday season, not cut ii short as soon as we reach September………Not all children have even gone back to school yet, and people don’t feel safe on the beaches without a patrol there. They have done a lot of good this summer but if someone gets stuck on the rocks now they will not be there to help’.
Needless to say, Councillor Stephen Mayzes, Tendring’s Tourism Boss, has an answer. ‘It is considered to be the end of the season, the schools are going back and there are far fewer people around. We have got to look at how many people are actually going into the information centre. We did a study last year and worked out that it was costing us about £7.00 for every person who walked into the centre’. Mr Mayzes would like to see in the future a hi-tech replacement for the centre. He has in mind an interactive screen that would allow people to explore tourist information all year. I can’t imagine anything more likely to put people off Walton forever than having to consult a giant computer screen rather than a friendly and helpful information officer! A virtual information office for virtual people – real people, on holiday, won’t want to go near it!
I suppose I haven’t made a terrible error about the responsibilities of a District Council ‘Tourism boss’? I had the possibly silly idea that his task was to attract tourists and other holidaymakers to our Holiday Coast. Mr Mayzes response to a prestigious camping and caravanning club making use of the playing field of the Coastal Academy during the holiday period, and his action in prematurely closing Information Centres and ending Beach Patrols, makes me wonder if his task is the precise opposite – to discourage strangers from making their way here and to keep our golden sands and holiday facilities unsullied for the enjoyment of ‘natives only’. If so, he is doing very well!
06 September 2011
Week 35 2010 6.9.2011
Tendring Topics………on Line
‘In the bleak midwinter…….’ Do we Heat or Eat?
I had thought that I might have been exaggerating just a little when I suggested a few weeks ago that during the coming winter many poorer families could well be facing a stark choice of ‘heat or eat’. I now believe that this gloomy prediction may prove to have been all too accurate. Since I wrote those words there has been an enormous surge in the price of gas and electricity and the cost of food has continued to increase. Inflation, particularly of the items that all of us need to purchase regularly, is now at more than double the government’s declared target, and increases in pensions and benefits are calculated by a method that no longer reflects accurately the increase in human need.
Our weather is notoriously fickle. During the past two weeks there have been days of wall-to-wall sunshine and others on which I have seriously thought of switching on my central heating! One thing is certain. Winter is coming. Like the last two winters, it could well be a long and hard one.
There is not a great deal that we can do about government policy and even less that can be done about the weather! Most of us though can do something to counter the worst effects of both. When my family and I first moved into our bungalow in Clacton’s Dudley Road in 1956, space heating was by open fires in the kitchen and sitting room. Water was heated from a back boiler to the kitchen fire with flow and return pipes directly connected to an unlagged hot water storage cylinder in the airing cupboard. The bungalow was cold and draughty. During cold weather in the winter it had definite ‘no go’ areas.
Over the years (we had a car-loan from the council and a mortgage to repay, and two small sons to bring up!) my wife and I made improvements, all without any grants or subsidies whatsoever. A porch for the front door and, years later, an extension at the rear of the bungalow, helped with the draughts. After the back boiler, and, a few years later its successor, corroded and leaked, I had the ‘direct’ hot water system replaced by an ‘indirect’ one, but it was not until after my retirement from the Council in 1980 that we had a thermostatically-controlled gas-fired central heating system installed, with a gas fire and back boiler replacing the open fire.
We were early converts to the idea of cavity wall infilling and had ours infilled by Rentokil with their Rockwool system in the early 1970s. We had double-glazing provided throughout, and I clambered up into the roof space (I certainly couldn’t do that nowadays!) and laid a fibreglass mat between the rafters to reduce loss of heat through the ceilings. It had taken us a long time, but by the early1980s - and for the last twenty-five years of my wife’s life – there were no ‘no go’ areas in the winter and our bungalow was pretty comfortable all the year round!
Heather and I with our two sons outside our bungalow in 1947. The windows are not double-glazed and the porch not filled in
Sadly, my wife (and everything that had seemed to give my life a purpose) died in July 2006. With steadily diminishing strength and energy, but with the never-failing support of family, friends and neighbours, I have since kept myself fully occupied.
My solar panel. My mobility scooter (iron horse) is in the driveway.
Just a month or so ago (in July 2011) my hot water storage cylinder (which had scaled up in over thirty years of continuous use) failed. I seized the opportunity to update my solar water heating system. It is now simpler and, I think, even more effective. I look forward to lower fuel bills despite the price increases. I would probably have to live to well over a hundred to recover, in money saved, the capital cost of the solar installation. However I have no doubt whatsoever that what I am saving is much more than the meagre interest I would have received on that sum had it remained in a Halifax Saving Account. I have added to the value of my home, made a minute contribution towards ‘saving the planet’ and, what’s more, I don’t have to pay income tax on the money I have saved , as I certainly would have had to on the bank interest!
All of the above – the porch and the rear extension, the cavity wall infilling, the double glazing, the roof space insulation, the solar water heating system – were done without any support from the government or the council.
No-one can see what the future holds, but I now have up-to-date space and water heating systems, infilled cavity walls, double glazing and a heavily insulated roof space. My mobility scooter (my iron horse) has an all-weather canopy. It is therefore confined to ‘its stable’ (leaving me housebound) only by falling and laying snow.
‘In the bleak midwinter…….’ Do we Heat or Eat?
I had thought that I might have been exaggerating just a little when I suggested a few weeks ago that during the coming winter many poorer families could well be facing a stark choice of ‘heat or eat’. I now believe that this gloomy prediction may prove to have been all too accurate. Since I wrote those words there has been an enormous surge in the price of gas and electricity and the cost of food has continued to increase. Inflation, particularly of the items that all of us need to purchase regularly, is now at more than double the government’s declared target, and increases in pensions and benefits are calculated by a method that no longer reflects accurately the increase in human need.
Our weather is notoriously fickle. During the past two weeks there have been days of wall-to-wall sunshine and others on which I have seriously thought of switching on my central heating! One thing is certain. Winter is coming. Like the last two winters, it could well be a long and hard one.
 |
| Dudley Road, Clacton, January 2011. It could have been much worse! |
Over the years (we had a car-loan from the council and a mortgage to repay, and two small sons to bring up!) my wife and I made improvements, all without any grants or subsidies whatsoever. A porch for the front door and, years later, an extension at the rear of the bungalow, helped with the draughts. After the back boiler, and, a few years later its successor, corroded and leaked, I had the ‘direct’ hot water system replaced by an ‘indirect’ one, but it was not until after my retirement from the Council in 1980 that we had a thermostatically-controlled gas-fired central heating system installed, with a gas fire and back boiler replacing the open fire.
We were early converts to the idea of cavity wall infilling and had ours infilled by Rentokil with their Rockwool system in the early 1970s. We had double-glazing provided throughout, and I clambered up into the roof space (I certainly couldn’t do that nowadays!) and laid a fibreglass mat between the rafters to reduce loss of heat through the ceilings. It had taken us a long time, but by the early1980s - and for the last twenty-five years of my wife’s life – there were no ‘no go’ areas in the winter and our bungalow was pretty comfortable all the year round!
Heather and I with our two sons outside our bungalow in 1947. The windows are not double-glazed and the porch not filled in
Sadly, my wife (and everything that had seemed to give my life a purpose) died in July 2006. With steadily diminishing strength and energy, but with the never-failing support of family, friends and neighbours, I have since kept myself fully occupied.
Nearly three years ago I decided to have a solar panel installed in my south-facing roof, harnessing solar power to augment my gas-fired boiler for water heating. It worked well, markedly reducing my fuel bills.  |
My solar panel. My mobility scooter (iron horse) is in the driveway.
Just a month or so ago (in July 2011) my hot water storage cylinder (which had scaled up in over thirty years of continuous use) failed. I seized the opportunity to update my solar water heating system. It is now simpler and, I think, even more effective. I look forward to lower fuel bills despite the price increases. I would probably have to live to well over a hundred to recover, in money saved, the capital cost of the solar installation. However I have no doubt whatsoever that what I am saving is much more than the meagre interest I would have received on that sum had it remained in a Halifax Saving Account. I have added to the value of my home, made a minute contribution towards ‘saving the planet’ and, what’s more, I don’t have to pay income tax on the money I have saved , as I certainly would have had to on the bank interest!
All of the above – the porch and the rear extension, the cavity wall infilling, the double glazing, the roof space insulation, the solar water heating system – were done without any support from the government or the council.
The Government is currently paying the full cost of home insulation for the over-seventies including, for instance, increasing the thickness of loft insulation to a level considerably greater than I had installed. I decided to take advantage of this free service. The roof space was surveyed, the installers came by appointment a few weeks later. They did the job in about three hours without causing me any inconvenience, and departed without leaving any mess whatsoever behind them. If you think you may be entitled to free, or reduced price insulation, do enquire about it (the Council, or Age Concern should be able to suggest an approved firm). It really is worthwhile.
No-one can see what the future holds, but I now have up-to-date space and water heating systems, infilled cavity walls, double glazing and a heavily insulated roof space. My mobility scooter (my iron horse) has an all-weather canopy. It is therefore confined to ‘its stable’ (leaving me housebound) only by falling and laying snow.
I am able to face the winter of my ninety-first year with quiet confidence.
Is your County Council really necessary?
I was directly involved in the local government service for something like forty years. It was only fairly recently though that I fully appreciated that three quarters of my council tax payments were going straight to an authority based in Chelmsford in which I had no confidence whatsoever. I came to the conclusion that county councils were a layer of local government that we could well do without, and that among the first to disappear should be our own Essex County Council. While loudly blowing its own trumpet (‘Essex works!’) and embarking on such extramural activities as funding influential councillors’ world-wide jet travel ‘on‘County Council business’, taking over failing post offices, launching its own bank, and establishing a branch office in mainland China (some corner of a foreign field that is for ever Essex?) it was selling off its old people’s homes and failing in its statutory duty of child care.
I didn’t, and don’t, believe that there is a single function of the Essex County Council that couldn’t be better performed by the county’s borough and district councils.
I was heartened to see that a former Lib.Dem. Tendring Councillor Mrs Sue Shearing, has come to the same conclusion. She believes that Tendring Council should become a unitary authority, responsible for all local government services in our area. She is reported as saying that this would be, ‘a fantastic idea. It would benefit the whole district. Wouldn’t that truly be localism, as the government is pushing nationally ……….. local councillors know their areas and are passionate about them’.
Mrs Shearing’s damascene moment came when she realized that the County Council had paid its Chief Executive Ms. Joanna Killian more than £5,500 per week last year, despite her generous acceptance of a ‘pay cut’ that had miraculously left her better off! Those who like to have a yardstick to compare incomes may care to know that that it would be possible to hire two Prime Ministers for that amount! She also realized that the County Council receives 74 percent of the money that she pays to Tendring District Council in Council Tax. Tendring retains 10 percent of it and the remaining 16 percent goes to the fire and police services.
‘Surely’, she says, ‘The time has come to rid ourselves of this burden and allow councils, like Tendring, to keep the money they collect and run the district in a much less grandiose way.
Mr Neil Stock, Tendring Council leader, is dismissive of the suggestion. Mrs Shearing, he said, was five years too late with the idea. He is reported as saying, ‘It was tried with others and one or two unitary authorities were created, but it was not very popular’.
Well, it certainly wasn’t very popular with the County Council, or with Whitehall bureaucrats, who much prefer having to deal with one large authority rather than half a dozen smaller ones. I don’t think though, that Southend-on-Sea and Thurrock would describe their unitary status, and consequent independence of County Council control, as ‘not very popular’!
I wish Mrs Shearing every success with her campaign but fear that it is doomed to failure. She should not, I think, pin too much hope on the government’s support of ‘localism’. Despite their verbal enthusiasm for giving power to local people I can’t think of a single example of a government or a county council service being handed down to a truly local authority. I can think of a number of instances of elected local authorities being divested of powers and responsibilities that they once had. These were either retained by central government or handed over to unelected groups or individuals directly funded by government.
The recipients of this largesse would be wise to remember that, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune!’
The Voice of the Voter
Whenever I pick up a local paper, be it the Clacton Gazette, the Daily Gazette or the East Anglian Daily Times, after a quick glance at the front page headlines, I go straight to Readers’ Letters. These, whether they are simply restating the obvious, are controversial, or are just plain stupid, express the strongly-felt opinions of real people, not those who – as I did in the past – write for a living. What is more, it is usually the case that for every reader who feels strongly enough to write to the newspaper, and who write sufficiently coherently for the editor to publish the letter, there are likely to be dozens, perhaps scores, of others who feel just as strongly but who would describe themselves as ‘not much of a letter writer’, or feel that they have better things to do with their time.
For that reason I was delighted to find that in the latest Clacton Gazette (1st Sept. 2011) there were no less than three readers’ letters echoing my comments in last week’s blog about Tendring Council’s Tourism boss Stephen Mayzes’ extraordinary outburst against the Coastal Academy for letting the school’s playing field for a fortnight during the school holidays to the highly respectable Camping and Caravanning Club of Great Britain for a rally of the club’s members.
One of the letters is from Michael Weighell, a Governor of the Academy, one from Ms. Janet Hayes of the Grove, Clacton and the other from B. Nicholson of Douglas Road, Clacton who remarks that ‘Also, the site was left clean and tidy and not in need of cleaning up at the rate-payers’ expense’ thus confirming the accuracy of the prediction I had made in my blog the previous week.
I think that Mr Mayzes owes an abject apology to the Coastal Academy, The half-million members of the Camping and Caravanning Club, and to the officials of the Council’s Planning Department, whose time he has wasted!
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