Week 43 1.11.2011

Tendring Topics…….on Line


‘You read it first….here!’

That may not be quite true. The idea of narrowing the gap between rich and poor has been around a long time and blog readers may well have seen and been attracted to the idea long before I became an enthusiast. Many years ago though, when I was writing Tendring Topics (in print) in the Coastal Express, I recall saying that my idea of a good Budget was one that narrowed that gap and a bad Budget was one that widened it. It follows that I have seen many more bad budgets, even during the reign of New Labour (now there’s something for which Ed Miliband should have apologised!), than I have seen good ones.

Over the years I have changed or modified my views on a great many issues, but the desirability of levelling incomes throughout the United Kingdom is a cause from which I have never wavered. For a long time I seemed to be one of a tiny minority, but within the past few weeks tens of thousands world-wide have shown their support in the only way open to them – in mass demonstrations. They started in Greece and Spain but have spread throughout the world, one of the largest and most vociferous taking place in New York, the very heart of the capitalist world. There have been few or none in Scandinavia – a prosperous corner of northern Europe where that gap between rich and poor is already narrow. We have had them in Britain too, and very peaceful and well mannered they have so far been. Their best-known manifestation has been the tented camp at the entrance of St Paul’s Cathedral. A headline in the Daily Mail announced the ‘The portrait of a very middle class protest: A poet, a mother and even an extra from Downton….just who is at the Tent City demo?’ Goodness, was the voice of Middle England going soft on Loony Lefties?

Daily Mail aficionados will have been reassured by Richard Littlejohn’s feature in the inside pages. It began in unwontedly conciliatory mood, ‘It would be understandable if the crowd demonstrating outside St. Paul’s was comprised of self-employed small businessmen and women’, but went on, ‘Predictably, though, it was the usual gormless rent-a-mob you always find on these anti-globalisation demos – Toytown Trots from Mickey Mouse Universities, social workers, lecturers, full-time mature students and Swampy wannabes’. He seems to have visited a different demo from whoever wrote the news story!

Mr Littlejohn’s most offensive rant was reserved for a member of the clergy, ‘None of these demos is ever complete without a daft vicar from central casting. Playing the Derek Nimmo character on this occasion was Rev Giles Fraser, who asked the police to move off the steps of St Paul’s and declared his support for the protesters’.

George Bernard Shaw once remarked that the Daily Mirror was for those who couldn’t read, and the Daily Mail for those who couldn’t think. That was before Mr Littlejohn’s time. The Sun may have replaced the Mirror as the choice of the illiterate but it’s nice to know though that at least one pre-war British tradition is unchanged!

Later News

I am very sorry that, as a result of the demo outside St Paul’s, the cathedral has closed to the public. I suppose that the Health and Safety reason must be that the presence of the demonstrators, even if they tried to co-operate, could prevent fire or other emergency workers gaining ready access to the building in an emergency, and could hinder a rapid evacuation if required.


I am sorry not only because I think it wrong for the public to be prevented from attending any place of worship, but because I support the cause of the demonstrators. Preventing free access to the Cathedral is unnecessarily alienating folk who might otherwise be expected to support those protesting against the rule of Mammon.

Since writing the above, the Cathedral has been at least partially opened to the public and the Cathedral Authorities and the Bishop of London are holding discussions.  I do hope that it isn't all going 'to end in tears' - or in violence. 

The Money-Lenders


Everyone tends to watch more daytime television after retirement than they ever did while going out to work. I am no exception. Six or seven years ago it seemed to me that daytime commercial tv was largely financed by ambulance chasing ‘no win, no fee’ lawyers, and by financiers eager to lend large sums of money to folk who, in their own interest, should never be allowed to borrow it! ‘Never mind’, the adverts insisted, 'if you’re old, haven’t got a job, have a low credit rating or have been refused a loan elsewhere, we may be able to help you.'


Times have changed. No longer do we see the adverts from those benevolent moneylenders eager, so it seemed, to throw good money after bad. Nowadays they offer only relatively small ‘payday’ loans. It is all so simple and straightforward. You are getting along nicely until, half way through the month, there’s a sudden crisis; a problem with the laptop, a leaky pipe or water storage tank, a blocked drain, an unexpected – and important – visitor. It is a crisis that can easily be solved with two or three hundred pounds but, alas, you’ve only just got enough money to last until payday, still a fortnight away.

An easy-to-arrange payday loan will see you through! £300? – no problem; it’ll added to your bank account within the hour. You’ll know how much interest you have to pay right away. It will seem quite a small sum though, expressed as an annual rate of interest, it could be very large indeed. Payday comes, you repay the £300 plus interest, and all is well.

Except, of course, that you had needed the whole of your month’s pay for the rent or the mortgage, the fuel bill and the food bill for that month – and you have just got rid of £300 plus a bit extra, of it. The solution? You could apply for another payday loan, perhaps from a different lender, - and another, and another! Of course, if you have a few hundred in a savings account, you can pay off your debt and that’s that. But if you had a few hundred in the bank you wouldn’t have needed to borrow in the first place. It seems that the only people who can safely apply for a payday loan are those who don’t really need one!

Learning that millions and millions of bail-out euros are being poured into the Greek economy while, at the same time, unemployment in Greece gets steadily worse, hundreds of thousands of Greeks are reduced to abject poverty, some scavenging restaurant kitchen waste to find thrown-out food to feed their families, made me realize that on a much bigger scale, Greece is in the same position as those domestic borrowers who need a little financial help just till payday.

Not a single euro of those millions of the bailout money extracted from the wallets, handbags and bank accounts of ordinary working people throughout Europe, goes to help the Greeks. Every single cent goes straight back to the French and German bankers who made the loans, and thence into the pockets of their shareholders. When Ireland had similar, though mercifully smaller, problems, British taxpayers made a very considerable contribution to bail out the Irish Republic. This was not out of friendship and fellow feeling for our Irish neighbours, but simply because it had been British banks that had made rash loans to Irish enterprises. It was British bankers and their shareholders, not the Irish, who benefited from our apparent benevolence.

Our contribution to these bank bailouts together with the cost of wars in Iraq and Afganistan and of our support for the revolution in Libya, make a very considerable contribution to the size of the budget deficit for which the Government prefers to blame their New Labour predecessors.

A puzzled viewer wrote to the BBC recently pointing out that when a ‘rogue trader’ speculated with money with which he had been entrusted and lost it, he was arrested and prosecuted and punished. However, when banks do much the same thing with money with which they have been entrusted – nobody is prosecuted and punished. Instead we have to bail them out!

Under-occupied Properties?


A few weeks ago I commented in this blog on the bright idea of regenerating Brooklands Estate, Jaywick by encouraging retired folk to move into the township’s properties, described as ‘rabbit hutches’ and quite unsuitable for families but fine for elderly retired singles or couples. I thought that it was a stupid and insulting suggestion, and said so.

Now a similar idea has surfaced and appears to have gained some credence. It has been noted that some such elderly couples and singles (often widows or widowers like me) selfishly continue to occupy three-bed-roomed properties after their children have grown up and left home, thus denying bedrooms to the needy. They should be encouraged (no-one has yet suggested compulsion!) to move into one-bed-roomed homes, quite adequate and much more appropriate to their needs.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that when grown-up offspring leave home they usually do so to get married (or these days, I suppose, to find a partner!) and start a family. Most of them from time to time come back, with their families, to visit Grandpa and Grandma. Are they really to be told on these occasions that as their ageing parents are now living in a one-bedroom flat (a kind of ‘pending file’ as they await the grim reaper!) they’ll have to find themselves an hotel or bed and breakfast accommodation when they visit for more than a day?


88 Dudley Road, Clacton. New Years's Day 1979


My wife and I certainly welcomed and accommodated our sons and families when they visited us for the weekend or longer. Nowadays, old and living alone, I can cope only with ‘day’ visitors. However the smaller former bedroom of my small – but three bedroomed – bungalow is now my ‘office’ where at a desk, surrounded by a printer, a scanner and book-cases, I am writing this blog.

The other ‘spare’ bedroom is now a store-room, used for the storage of items which – if I were still capable of climbing a ladder – would be up in the roof space. There is no inducement that would make me voluntarily leave the home in which I have lived for sixty-five years, in which five years ago my wife’s life came to an end, and in which I hope that my life too will end.

I suggest that before looking for unused bedrooms, those who are keen to remedy the housing shortage look for all the empty houses, the second and holiday homes unused or used only occasionally. In 1947, when I was undergoing my practical training as a Sanitary Inspector (nowadays they are Environmental Health Officers!) in Battersea, we would look out for empty houses and report them to the Council’s legal department with a view to commandeering them to solve an even worse housing situation than exists today.

That surely would be a possibility worth exploring. Empty houses are rather easier to spot than empty bedrooms!

Degrees of Wickedness


It was quite wrong to kill Colonel Gaddafi after his capture. That is unquestionable. However I don’t feel that his murder, carried out it seems by a young irregular soldier just after the heat of battle, was quite as wicked as:

The massacre, again by anti-Gaddafi militia, of 50 pro-Gaddafi fighters whose bodies were found in Sirte with their hands tied behind their back.

The deliberate killing rather than capture, of Osama Bin Laden. 

The computer assisted assassination, by unmanned ‘drone’ aircraft controlled from a base thousands of miles away, of individuals believed to be leaders of Al Q’aida.

There must have been sighs of relief in Whitehall when, thanks to Colonel Gaddafi’s murder, it was realized that there would now be no risk of the former Libyan leader making public exactly how much help his torturers and death squads had received from MI6 and its political masters in the days when Tony Blair and Gaddafi had been photographed warmly embracing each other.

Week 42 2011 25.10.2011

Tendring Topics…….on Line


‘Oh no – not again!’




Pete with his dog Zoe in the Scottish Highlands

 I reckon that that is what Ms Lynne Featherstone Lib.Dem MP (and coalition government member) says when she sees another letter from my son Pete. He is one of her constituents and voted for her in the General Election hoping that, by so doing, he would help bring in a Liberal Democrat Government under its new dynamic leader Nick Klegg.

Instead, he was rewarded with a coalition in which the Conservatives are the dominant party but in which Ms Featherstone secured a government (though not a cabinet) post. Since then, as our country has gone steadily down hill, Pete has written to her on a number of occasions reminding her of the Lib.Dems’ broken promises.

This time as you’ll see, he has written her a letter of congratulation though, since it is congratulating her on opposing a suggestion that could become government policy, it is possible that they are congratulations she’d prefer not to receive. Here is the letter:

Dear Lynne,


Having voted for you at the last election, I have since been critical of the Coalition and your role in it.


I therefore thought I should express my appreciation and total agreement with your stand – as reported in today’s Observer – that you are totally opposed to proposals, outlined in a White Paper which originate from Adrian Beecroft, venture capitalist reporting directly to the Prime Minister, that flexible arrangements over maternity and paternity leave should be shelved, and even that maternity pay should be scrapped altogether.


I am a small business owner, employing seven staff, one, of whom has just returned from maternity leave, another is about to go on maternity leave. I have had good notice and found it possible to provide for these upheavals. I am very conscious that balancing work and family responsibilities and budgeting for child care is a very big issue for my staff. If reasonable provisions were not available, they would not be able to cope, and might have to leave employment altogether, leaving me with a much larger problem. The business has been negatively affected by “the cuts”, and no elimination of red-tape, or freeing up bank lending, will undo the damage caused by the impoverishment of our customers. This must be true of so many small businesses at the present time.


I am dismayed that you appear to be surprised that such proposals are being made to and have the ear of the Prime Minister.


The same faction of our society has eloquently proposed in recent weeks, that the 50p tax (for people earning over £150K pa) should be scrapped to improve competitiveness and create jobs, while the minimum wage (for people earning £12K pa) should also be scrapped (lowered) for the same reason. It is becoming clear, that the more the economic problems bite (the root causes of which no one on the Left or the Right cares to address), the more the Right Wing will seek solutions from extreme policies which are essentially designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. I believe the day will come when people of conscience within the Liberal Democrat Party will be unable to support such polices and the Coalition will cease to exist.


Peter Hall



Heather - as Andy and Pete knew her

 I couldn’t have put it better myself! From time to time both my sons, by their actions and attitudes, make it clear that they haven’t discarded the Quaker values (though they’re by no means exclusive to Quakers) that my wife Heather and I had tried to instil in them in their childhood. Their Mum – who had much more to do with it than I had – would have been very proud of them.






Another 'Bridge too far'?

Quite early in the saga of the former Defence Secretary Liam Fox, there was mention of a Charity called Atlantic Bridge, claimed to have been created to further the ‘special relationship’ between the USA and the UK. The British end of the bridge, so it was said, had been run from Liam Fox’s official office – but was so no longer.

I found that Atlantic Bridge’s web site was temporarily closed. It did however yield the information that it was an organisation that had the aim of bringing ‘conservatives’ from the UK and USA together to discuss policy and other mutual interests. Remembering that Amnesty International had been refused Charity status because of its political associations, it seemed strange that this obviously political organisation should have been successful. It also seemed strange that an obviously ‘political’ organisation should have been run from a Government, rather than a Party, office.

I then heard William Hague, our Foreign Secretary, interviewed on BBC Radio 4. Asked about the Atlantic Bridge he said that he believed it to be a means of exchanging ideas between the UK and people of every shade of opinion in the USA – that was surely a good thing. And so, I suppose it could have been – had it been true.

I dug a little deeper (how did we manage before Google?) and found out a great deal more. The founder and chairman of Atlantic Bridge had been none other than our former Defence Secretary, Liam Fox. Its Chief Executive, and its only paid employee, was Adam Werrity. It had an Advisory Council consisting of William Hague, George Osborne, Chris Grayley and Michael Gove. A great many other leading Conservative politicians had been closely associated with it. Could William Hague, a member of the Advisory Council, really have been unaware of the Bridge’s real nature? It seems hardly likely.

Perhaps even more disquieting, I discovered that Ms Gaby Bertin, David Cameron’s Press Secretary, had worked for Atlantic Bridge and, until Adam Werritty had taken her place, had been its sole employee on this side of the Atlantic.

Finally, I learned that only last month the Charities Commission had declared the Atlantic Bridge to be a wholly political organisation (goodness knows why they had taken so long to discover that!) and stripped it of its charitable status. I wonder if the Government, keen as they are on hunting down benefit cheats and tax dodgers, will pursue those who – for a number of years – have fraudulently claimed tax relief and other benefits by virtue of this false claim to charitable status?

I find the thought that Atlantic Bridge may have been providing the members of the most bigoted and bellicose faction of the USA easy access to the very heart of British government, extremely disquieting. Have some of our top politicians forgotten that, despite a shared language and some common objectives, the USA is a foreign country with interests that do not necessarily coincide with those of the United Kingdom?


And there’s UKIP – and our own MP – worrying themselves to death about the EU robbing us of our sovereignty!

A Damp Squib!

Some people, I have little doubt, had great hopes about the meeting of our Prime Minister with the representatives of the UKs gas and electricity suppliers. He was the champion of Middle England – a twenty-first century Cromwell. He had tackled the red-tape-bound bureaucrats of Britain’s town and county halls. Now he was going to take on and tame the lords of the power supplies. Reductions in fuel bills were confidently expected

Judging from the results of the confrontation, his performance resembled more closely that of the timid policeman in Doc Martin than that of the iron man of the 17th century.

Clearly he was persuaded that the suppliers were without blame for the massive above-inflation increases in the price of gas and electricity. It is up to us consumers to put up with them and make the best of them. We must, as Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit might have put it, stand on our own two feet or perhaps to leap onto our bikes and find our own solution.

First, we must shop around to make sure that we are on the fuel tariff that is best for us. There are only six main fuel suppliers so that shouldn’t be too difficult. Except of course, for the hard-up single mum or the pensioner who doesn’t own a laptop and certainly wouldn’t know how to use one. I’d be very surprised anyway if there is very much difference between suppliers’ tariffs. I use E-on myself because they have an arrangement with Age UK that gives me substantial benefits in frosty weather. Perhaps – for all I know – other suppliers do the same.

In any case, many of us oldies simply don’t like ‘shopping around or haggling’. We feel that there is a right price and that is the price that we should be charged. It was because folk came to realize that they would never overcharge and would never haggle, that such 19th Century Quaker enterprises as Cadbury and Fry (not to mention Trumans and Charringtons!) thrived and prospered.

The other thing that we consumers are advised to do is to conserve the heat that we have purchased so expensively. To be fair to the government, they do have very worthwhile schemes to help pensioners and others to prevent heat loss from their homes by insulating the roof space and infilling cavity walls. My wife and I had our cavity walls infilled at our own expense many years ago, but I have found free improved roof space insulation to be well worth having. Also, it is suggested, we should use our heating sparingly and economically.

All very sensible advice, but it hardly needed a conference of the Prime Minister and the bosses of the energy companies to produce it. I would have been happy to pass on all those ideas to David Cameron had cared to give me a ring – and so would thousands of other people!

A Cheerful Note on which to end




Doesn't she look happy!

 This hasn’t been the cheeriest of blogs, so here is a photograph that warmed my heart when I received it from friends of mine in Germany. Their little daughter Maja (my ‘honorary German niece’) celebrated her fifth birthday during September. Here she is on that auspicious occasion:

I won’t live to see it, but I hope most sincerely that by the time she is in her mid-teens, she and my great-grandchildren, if any, will be living in a truly united Europe in which the most easterly part of Germany where she lives will seem no more remote and ‘foreign’ to East Anglians than the Lake District or the coves of Cornwall do to us today. May you have many, many more very happy birthdays Maja, my dear child!

Doesn't she look happy!

Week 41 2011 18.10.2011

Tendring Topics……..on line


A trip into the Past

They don’t possess a Tardis or a Wellsian ‘Time Machine’. Nevertheless, my younger son and daughter-in-law took me for a trip into the distant and the not-so-distant past last week. Andy and Marilyn, whose home is in Enfield, are regular visitors. We usually lunch at the Bowling Green in Weeley and visit one of Tendring’s coastal resorts or inland beauty spots. This time though they were coming earlier than usual and had asked me if there was anywhere further afield that I would like to visit. I thought that I would like to go to Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge where there was the site of a seventh century Anglo-Saxon Ship Burial that had been excavated and had revealed a great deal about the lives and culture of our early ancestors.

So – to Sutton Hoo we had driven. To get there we had to bypass or drive through Ipswich. We took the opportunity of visiting the place where Heather and I had spent part of our early married life in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. Still further back in time, we visited places where I had spent my childhood and adolescence eighty years ago.

First we found the bungalow, just off the Norwich Road in Barham, where Heather and I had had our first real home and where our older son, Andy’s brother Pete had been born in 1953. It had been one of four one-storied buildings that had formerly been an isolation hospital and had been converted into homes for members of Gipping Rural District Council’s staff. Our bedroom, where Pete was born, was the room on the right of the picture. The middle section had been the quite large kitchen. On summer days Pete would be in his pram on the lawn just outside while Heather worked in the kitchen. Just below the sash windows, one of which would be wide open, we would place a low stool so that Heather could step out of the window and be with the pram in a second!

Driving back into Ipswich we passed the spot, in Bramford Road where when I was about ten, climbing a tree in search of bird eggs I had fallen (served me right!) and grabbed a piece of barbed wire as I fell. The scar is on my right hand to this day! The house to which Andy and Pete’s mum, then a schoolgirl of 15, had been evacuated, just before the outbreak of war in September 1939, and where I had first met her, had been demolished and replaced with a modern home. We passed the church that I had attended and had been first a choirboy and then a server, and drove to Valley Road, along which I had cycled to and from the Northgate School for six years.

On to Sutton Hoo, a couple of miles from Woodbridge, on a hillside overlooking the river Deben. It didn’t disappoint. There had in fact been two ship burials as well as many other interments on the site in the first half of the seventh century A.D. This was before the conversion of East Anglia to Christianity though the faith was gaining ground in Enland. The occupants of the ship graves had been military men, perhaps royal, of great power and wealth.

Excavations had been carried out throughout the 1930s but it was not until July 1939 (I well remember that feverish last summer of peace!) that the real treasures were found. I quote the official guidebook:

‘They included silver bowls and spoons, fragments of clothes and textiles, weapons, armour, buckets, chains, cauldrons, fine Celtic enamels and many other wonderful things. Most impressive were the many large gold ornaments of early Anglo-Saxon workmanship, elaborately inlaid with bright red garnets. These, finer than anything else of their kind, came from the ground as bright as the day they were buried. It was among the richest graves ever excavated in Europe’

Much of the treasure is now safely in the British Museum where Andy and Marilyn visited it that same weekend and sent me back this picture of an excavated warrior’s helmet. We found the museum on the site of great interest. Exhibits included a reproduction of the burial chamber, examples of the treasures found and a model of part of the structure of the ships, which were 27 metres long, clinker built, with boards carefully shaped and held together with iron rivets.

You may be wondering how I managed to get round the museum and the quite large Sutton Hoo site. I could I suppose have managed to walk round the museum, but it would have exhausted me. Andy though was good enough to push me round in one of the wheelchairs freely available for visitors. I certainly enjoyed the visit more that I would have had I tried to walk. As for getting round the site – there are three electric mobility scooters, just like my own familiar and friendly ‘iron horse’. These have to be – and mine was – booked in advance. There is also a welcoming licensed buffet restaurant on the site where we were able to obtain a more-than-adequate lunch and, before we drove back to Clacton, a welcome cup of tea. It had been a very enjoyable excursion into my own past and the past of the English people. Perhaps there had been rather more light and colour in those dark ages than we may have imagined.


Myself at Sutton Hoo - burial mound in the background



A Piece of Good News
It is pleasant to be able to record a little good economic news in our Tendring District, in contrast to the gloom that seems to deepen by the hour!

In the face of strong competition from other European enterprises a Brightlingsea boat-building firm, CWind, secured the contract from Siemens, the giant Munich based global engineering corporation, to build three specialised catamarans to work on the London Array offshore wind farm being built in the Thames estuary.

The first of these catamarans CWind Alliance has now been completed, launched, and is off to work. Its equipment includes an amphibious rescue pod, capable of carrying out rescues on sand.

Cwind first came to the attention of Siemens London Array project manager when he had worked with them on the Gunfleet Sands wind-farm off Clacton-on-Sea. There he had had been impressed by the company’s approach and attitude. He said, ‘It’s important for us to have confidence in the skippers, their crew and the quality of the vessels’.

At a recent international conference held in Clacton to discuss the regeneration of deprived areas like Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate, it was suggested that servicing the growing number of off-shore wind farms could be our area’s best hope of reviving its economic prospects. CWind has clearly shown the way.

A Public Correspondence

Several weeks ago I mentioned in this blog that when picking up a local or national newspaper, after a quick glance at the front page headlines, I go straight to the Readers’ Letters. Whether wise, misguided or just plain stupid, each one expresses ideas about which someone feels sufficiently strongly to ‘write to the paper about it’. It is a pretty safe bet that for every letter written and published there will be dozens? hundreds? thousands? of other people who feel exactly the same way as the writer.

A regular contributor to the local daily Gazette is a David Brown who, possibly inspired by the Daily Mail, the Daily Express – or even by the expressed views of our own Clacton MP – attributes most of the United Kingdom’s ills to our folly, as he sees it, in joining the European Union and remaining in it. I always read his letters with horrified fascination.

His latest (though I am sure not his last) contribution to the Gazette’s letters page described the Euro as a ‘car crash’ and said how grateful we should all be to the Eurosceptics who kept the UK out of the Eurozone.

I was pleased to see a prompt reply from Roy Procter of Thorpe-le-Soken, a fellow Quaker who is much more knowledgeable about financial matters than I can ever hope to be. It must be said though, that one doesn’t have to be an economics whiz kid to follow the points that he made.

His letter was sadly abridged, no doubt unavoidably, by the Gazette subeditor and thereby lost some of its impact. I thought that blog readers might like to see the original unabridged and unexpurgated version, so here it is:
.
David Brown (Letters 3/10/2011) describes the Euro as a 'car crash' and how good it is that the Eurosceptics kept us out- I suggest he should look a bit further than the Daily Mail's leaders for his information - In 1999 a Euro would have cost 64p, in 2003 70p, in 2007, 69p and today 86p.- how exactly is increasing its value against other currencies (and not just Sterling) a 'car crash'?


Those in the Eurozone can trade with each other without paying the banks an extra percentage to simply pay bills and tourists can get at their own money in a large area for free.


The Euro would be even stronger with UK participation, and UK businesses and tourists would pay less in fees to the bankers - so the losers would be banks and the city, and the gainers - everyone else. How is that a bad idea?

I hope that Roy is right.  I note that despite the gloomy predictions, the Euro continues to maintain its value against the pound.  Of one thing I am certain.  The United Kingdom's best future lies with the European Vision rather than the American Dream!

Cause – and Effect


There were two apparently unconnected news stories on BBC Breakfast tv this (14th Oct.) morning, that I believe have a close association. The first was the shocking revelation that nationwide young children are being tricked, bullied or blackmailed into the hands of criminal gangs whose members sexually abuse them and/or force them into prostitution. Sometimes the victims are first ‘groomed’ with generous hospitality and lavish gifts, and then kept in subjection by blackmail or by threats of physical violence to themselves or members of their families.

The other piece of news was that, in the future, part of the child benefit of single mums will no longer be paid once their youngest child reaches five years – the age for starting school. It will be assumed that they will then be in a position to get a job to supplement their incomes. Only oldies like me will remember with nostalgia the time when it was usual for the man-of-the-house (he was always, of course, a husband in those distant days!) to be the breadwinner and for his wife to be the home-maker and primary child carer.  The few 'single mums' in those days were most likely to be widows.  Nowadays women with partners are expected to go out to work and, according to their financial circumstances, either help pay the rent or the mortage and help feed and clothe the family or, for the better off – make possible the second car, the yacht and the annual holiday in Bermuda. Those without partners are deprived of their benefit to force them into work.

In the ‘bad old days’ when at least one parent reckoned to know where the children were after school, there was far less risk of teenagers joining criminal gangs or of young and innocent children being trapped, groomed and abused by them.

Week 40 2011 18.10.2011

Tendring Topics……on line


The European Travel Commission’s new Acting Director!




 Jo. AKA Ms Josephine Hall M.A., B.Sc





Chris is nominated Teacher of the Year


















All three of my grandchildren are sources of great pride and satisfaction to me. There is Jo, my only granddaughter who is both an M.A. and a B.Sc. and has a socially valuable job as Social Worker with the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital   Then there is Chris, her cousin and my elder grandson. He graduated in art but has found his vocation as a teacher of English to both children and adults in Taiwan.. A couple of years ago he was nominated ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the educational enterprise that employs him.

Nick, Chris’ brother, is the youngest of my grandchildren, but by no means the least! He has always been a great traveller and many years ago won a Guardian competition with a prize of £5,000 with which to travel cheaply all over Europe, sending a weekly report on his adventures to the Guardian Travel Supplement. This inspired him, in his last year at University to retrace my travels sixty years earlier as a POW, from Tarranto in southern Italy to a POW camp in the north of the country. Thence to a working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Germany and finally, after the war ended, through Czechoslovakia to Prague. As he did so he created a video diary that helped to earn him a good honours degree in photography at Westminster University.
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Student Nick on his travels

This experience, plus an unrivalled knowledge and experience in IT (it was he who organised the blogspot and web site on which I am publishing these words!) ensured the success of his application for the post of On Line Sales Manager, with the European Travel Commission in Brussels. The ETC is a non profit-making international organisation which encourages, co-ordinates and facilitates tourist travel to Europe from the rest of the world. Its members are the national tourist offices of 33 co-operating European states, many of them members of the European Union but others (Norway, Switzerland and Serbia for instance) that are not. ETC has an elected President (currently a German lady) and an executive committee of national representatives.
The ETCs permanent staff have a headquarters in Brussels and are headed by a Director (in effect the Chief Executive and head of paid staff). Nick’s duties as On Line Sales Manager took him all over the world. He was also personally involved in the development and launch of www.visiteurope.com ETC’s own publicity web site, invaluable for all visitors to any part of Europe.

Now Nick has risen to the very top of the organisation. Last week the President and Executive Committee confirmed his appointment as Acting Director. Nick’s achievement is all the more remarkable for the fact that the United Kingdom is not one of the thirty-three members of the ETC. Among the membership you’ll find large countries like Germany, tiny ones like San Marino and Monte Negro, island states like Cyprus, Iceland and the Irish Republic – but no United Kingdom. I suppose that if there are many British ‘Tourism bosses’ of the calibre of Tendring District’s, and many MPs as stubbornly Europhobic as Clacton’s, we shouldn’t be surprised.


Nick in Zittau with myself and our friend Ingrid Zeibig.


It does demonstrate very clearly that Nick’s promotion was owed entirely to recognition of his own merit and not as a result of pressure from national representatives. There were none. It also demonstrates that European Union rules, that permit citizens of any member state to live and work anywhere within the EU, do not work only in one direction. It is possible for a Brit with determination and the necessary skills, to find and hold down a worthwhile job on the continent.

I am proud and very pleased that a grandson of mine has done so.

Late News!


Hardly had Nick been appointed to his new post before he was required to accompany ETC's President and Vice-President to a meeting of European Union Tourism Ministers in Krakow, Poland, last Thursday (6th October). He says that he was given VIP treatment, sharing a car with the Vice President and racing through the streets of Krakow with a police escort. He had, of course. helped the ETC's President to prepare for the occasion and was very pleased to hear almost universal praise and support from the EU Ministers for the work of ETC and for the www.visiteurope.com web site. He feels that he has made a good start


Buying Votes…….with other people’s money


That was how I described the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation when it was enacted during Mrs Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister. I make no apology for doing so. It might more accurately have been described as ‘Compel to sell’ legislation, as it compelled local councils (as democratically elected as our rulers in Westminster!) to sell off to sitting tenants at bargain basement prices, council houses that had been provided and paid for by earlier generations to house the homeless, alleviate overcrowding and make possible slum clearance in their areas. The same privilege was not of course, offered to tenants of privately owned homes. Their owners were, for the most part, loyal supporters of Mrs Thatcher’s political party.

It took a few years for the baleful effects of that legislation to take full effect. Almost immediately though the best homes in the most desirable locations were sold off. Many were sold to tenants who could ill-afford the mortgage and insurance repayments, the cost of maintenance and the separate rate bills for which they became responsible. Many grown-up children of elderly parents spotted their opportunity to cash in on already steadily rising house prices. They provided the small deposit required and in some cases even offered to pay the mortgage on their parents’ home. Naturally it was understood that they would inherit it in due course.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, while they waited to inherit and for the time to expire in which the house couldn’t be resold, house prices didn’t just rise. They rocketed. Former council houses were sold at a handsome profit. In rural areas houses that had been built to house members of village communities were snapped up as second homes or as bases from which to commute to the nearest big city. Councils were unable to build houses for affordable letting and Housing Associations were unable to satisfy the resulting need for social housing . House price inflation meant that young families, whose forebears had been part of the village community for generations, were unable to find a home. Villages ‘died’, no longer having enough daytime round-the-year residents to keep going a pub, a church, a village hall, a post office – or even a well-stocked village store.

Particularly in urban areas, council estates deprived of their former not-too-badly-off tenants, took the first step on the road towards becoming drug ridden, crime-infested slums. A further step was taken recently when the government dictated (so much for localism!) that in future, council tenancies should be short-term only. Tenants whose financial circumstances improved would be expected to buy their own homes or rent privately. I can think of no better way of ensuring that the interior of council houses are never redecorated and the gardens never cared for!

For all of the above reasons I was absolutely astonished when, in the midst of an otherwise inspiring speech at the Labour Party Conference, Ed Miliband apologised for the Labour Party’s opposition to Right to Buy, way back in the 1980s!  He should, on the contrary, have apologised for New Labour’s failure to repeal that Act and to encourage local authorities to build homes for letting in their areas, when they were in a position to. Had they done so it might have put a brake on out-of-control house price inflation and avoided today’s nation-wide housing shortage.

Now I see that David Cameron, possibly dazzled by his Party’s success in buying votes with other people’s money in the 1980s, is trying to breathe new life into Right to Buy. I think that he’ll be unsuccessful this time round. There is no longer the spiralling house price inflation that made home ownership such a profitable investment 30 years ago. The policies of his government are ensuring that the occupants of council houses are increasingly limited to the very poorest of society, those least able to aspire to ‘home ownership’. As for the equivalent of those who helped their poor old mums and dads to own their own homes in the ‘80s – with incomes failing to keep up with inflation, plus government cuts and the threat of unemployment, they are struggling to survive themselves these days. They are also well aware that eventual home ownership no longer offers the prospect of wealth-to-come that once it did.

‘Can do?’ – Yes, you can add the final straw that breaks the camel’s back

Thank goodness that the Conference season is over for another year. Most of us, I think, have really seen enough of posturing politicians!

I am not sure whether it was Ed Miliband’s apologies for New Labour policies that were right (goodness knows that there were plenty that were wrong) or David Cameron’s constant reiteration of that idiotic trans-Atlantic mantra ‘can do’, that I found the more irritating. It was because greedy, irresponsible and incompetent bankers thought that they ‘could do’ anything that they thought would make a profit, that we are in the current financial mess. They ‘did’ us! I think that our Prime Minister would do better to consider a few of the things that can’t be done either by him or any of us. It was an American President who remarked that you can fool some of the people all the time and all the people part of the time but - no matter how loudly and how often you say, ‘can do’ - you can’t fool all the people all the time.

Nor can you indefinitely assert with apparently total conviction and sincerity one thing while doing the exact opposite. In his Churchillian final speech to the Conservative conference David Cameron asserted the importance, to the individual and to the nation, of paying off debts promptly and not adding to them. Yet this is the same Prime Minister whose government is piling tens of thousands pounds worth of debt on students and saying, in mitigation, that that debt doesn’t have to be paid off for years, in fact. in many cases it may never need to be paid off. Only a few days earlier he had been encouraging council house tenants, who haven’t already done so, to incur more debt by buying their homes.

While urging that local people should make decisions about local matters Mr Cameron’s government is systematically stripping democratically elected local authorities of their powers particularly, in relation to planning matters and to the letting of their own social housing. While stripping the armed forces of both personnel and equipment and, so many believe, reducing their ability to deal with any emergency that might arise – he has declared that those enormously expensive and totally useless Trident nuclear submarines that prowl the world’s oceans are sacrosanct.

As the government continues cutting services and pursuing policies that penalise the poor, the weak and the vulnerable, while having minimal impact on the wealthy and privileged, Mr Cameron may care to reflect that among things that top politicians can do is to add the final straw that breaks the camel’s back!

Week 39 2011 4.10.2011

Tendring Topics…….on line


The Financial Crisis – a Point of View


I have never pretended to understand either the national or the international financial crisis. What worries me is my suspicion that none of our top politicians, nor our financial experts (none of whom forecast the bursting of the housing boom bubble in 2008) understand it either.

Below is part of an email that I have received from a regular blog reader and occasional correspondent whose judgement and opinions I have come to trust. He is neither a young wild-eyed revolutionary nor an old has-been like myself. He is, in fact a successful entrepreneur in late middle age, with a wide experience in both the public and the private sectors. He is the founder and Managing Director of an IT consultancy known and respected nation-wide, and is a member of the Institute of Directors. He has written to me about the economic situation.

Apparently Ed Miliband is promising to use the money that will come from the eventual sale of the Nationalised Banks to pay off the deficit, whereas Nick Clegg and David Cameron both have plans to give it away in some form. Ed Miliband is right to say that. I am absolutely horrified that anyone has suggested otherwise. First of all we (very unwisely) bail out these banks instead of telling the investors they have lost their money. Then we have a horrendous five years of cuts to services, benefits, public sector salaries and pensions to pay for the deficit created; then I suppose, when the deficit is paid off, and the state “rolled back” to the size Cameron thought it should always have been, they are just going to have some pre-election giveaway with the surplus cash!! It will be blatantly stealing from one section of the community to reward the rest and buy the votes of the majority. This so immoral and outrageous, I cannot believe that Cameron and Clegg could sink so low.


This whole thing is getting absolutely ridiculous. I was reading this morning (in the Observer) about the terrible hardship they are forcing on the people of Greece, who have lost 50% of their spending power, now have 15% unemployment, and a suicide rate that has rocketed. People are raiding bins in the evening for food and there is just no end in sight for them, just more and more misery. And all of this is so that French and German Banks (that is actually the investors in French and German Banks) don’t lose any money. But now the “good news”, is that the politicians are talking of setting up a £1.5 trillion rescue fund, paid for by Eurozone tax payers, to bail out, yet again, the banks and offer Greeks the “kindness” of defaulting on 50% of their debt.


I am almost reaching the point of hoping for a major financial meltdown, in the hope that it will serve as the catalyst to sweep away these self-serving politicians, unelected financial gurus and incompetent civil servants in central banks and treasuries. Then people who just want to make money by working, not gambling or cheating, can get on with their lives.


I am glad that he is only almost hoping for financial meltdown. I very much fear that, much as the idea appeals, sacking our current governing hierarchy could create a power vacuum waiting to be filled by a thrusting and charismatic young politician promising to sweep away the worn-out ideas of the past and to lead a proud and united nation to a shiny new promised land…….. someone, for instance, like the young Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin or Benito Mussolini!


A Terrible Dilemma

Nothing that has happened in Afghanistan inclines me to change my opinion, first expressed several years ago, that in that country we with NATO, are engaged in a war that we cannot hope to win. Twice during the 19th Century we attempted to defeat the Afghans – and failed. Towards the end of the 20th Century the Soviet Union made a similar attempt – and failed. We, the British and Americans, helped to bring the Taliban to power by our support for the ‘gallant mojihadin’ in defeating them – and we therefore bear some responsibility for the Taliban’s excesses. Do you believe that life in Afghanistan was worse under the Soviet puppet government than under its successors? I certainly don’t.

Now, after a decade of war, the Taliban are still well able to mount successful attacks on targets in the very centre of Kabul, the capital. In an attempt to find a face-saving exit strategy we decided to negotiate with ‘the moderate Taliban’. The Taliban’s peace negotiators duly turned up but with explosives in their turbans. They blew to smithereens both themselves and those with whom it was hoped they would negotiate. It is not in the nature of members of the Taliban to be ‘moderate’ – and they have no doubt that death occurring while killing ‘infidels and apostates’ will ensure them a place in Heaven. Scarcely a week passes without news of another British soldier killed by a sniper or an improvised explosive device (it may well have been a member of the CIA or of our ‘special forces’ who showed the Mojihadin how to make them – for use against the Russians of course)

Every instinct within me urges that we should get our forces out of that benighted country before more British blood is shed. Perhaps the Taliban would mellow. After all, civilisation as we know it was expected to collapse if the Viet Cong triumphed in Vietnam. Thank goodness that we then had a Prime Minister who declined to get us involved. The Viet Cong did triumph. The world didn’t come to an end and Vietnam is now a popular holiday destination for both British and Americans.

A fortnight ago though, I read an article in The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, that told me that for Afghan women in particular, the departure of NATO forces would be unlikely to bring a ‘happy ending’. The article illustrates the author’s contention that, ‘In some cultures contempt for women is deeply endemic and extreme violence may be used against them with complete impunity’. One such culture existed in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban, and may well lie just below the surface today. An extreme example of that contempt was the treatment of a ‘woman’ accused of adultery in Somalia in 2008, in an area of the country controlled by the African equivalent of the Taliban. Her execution by stoning was staged as an entertainment in a football stadium before a crowd of over a thousand. She cried and begged for her life as she was buried in the ground up to her neck prior to the stoning. Amnesty International’s investigators discovered that this judicially murdered ‘adulteress' was a thirteen-year-old child who had been sadistically tortured and brutally gang-raped by the Somali military. The men who perpetuated this nauseating atrocity completely absolved themselves from any culpability. They had, so they claimed, simply obeyed ‘The Law of God’ - thereby adding a most appalling blasphemy to their catalogue of infamy!

It is known that such ‘entertainments’ as this – together with a bloodbath of those who collaborated with the puppet government – followed the departure of the Soviet Army from Afghanistan. I very much fear that within months of NATO’s departure the Taliban will again be in control. Those who collaborated with ‘the West’ could expect to be treated much as were those who did so with the USSR. As for women and girls – the very best that they could hope for would be a return to virtual slavery and an end of any hopes of an education and rewarding career.

Should we abandon those whom we have made our friends, as the USSR did theirs in Afghanistan and as the USA did theirs in Vietnam? Or should we continue indefinitely to wage a war of attrition, patching up the wounded, honouring the fallen as their bodies are returned to this country – and hoping for a miracle? I just don’t know the answer to this terrible dilemma.

A depressing experience

For some years Churches together in Clacton, particularly the Salvation Army and the Baptists, have – as part of their Christian witness – been taking practical steps to alleviate the plight of people in our area who are homeless or badly housed. At the end of September they arranged for the Tendring Council official responsible for dealing with the homeless to explain the current situation to concerned members of individual churches. I attended both as a Quaker and because of professional knowledge and experience, both as a Public Health Inspector and a Housing Manager in this field (albeit between 40 and 50 years in the past!) I was very pleased that there were three other Quakers as the meeting despite the fact that we have fewer members than any other church in our area.

It was a thoroughly depressing experience. The situation certainly hasn’t improved in the past half-century and in many ways it seems to be appreciably worse.

As well as the Tendring Council official’s talk there was a fairly general discussion among those present, among whom was a district councillor and representatives of housing charities. I can’t, I am afraid, recall with certainty who said what but the following statements – that I felt revealed appalling circumstances – were made and remained unchallenged:

There were houses in our district in multiple occupation (several families and/or individuals renting ‘furnished rooms’ in one house) served by a single toilet that was out of order. If an attempt were made to force the landlord to make the toilet serviceable he would refuse to do so and would evict all the tenants, making them homeless. In my days as a Health Inspector a threat of this kind would have been ignored, notice served on the landlord and legal proceedings taken against him if he failed to comply. The chances are that his threat would have been a bluff (the landlord wouldn’t really want to lose his rent income). In any case though, since this was in the days when Councils were encouraged to build houses for letting and most had large housing estates, the chances are that they would have been able to find accommodation for any displaced tenants within a few weeks.

Serious overcrowding no longer qualifies housing applicants for urgent consideration. The whole purpose of the housing legislation enacted at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century was to alleviate the overcrowding that was recognised as a major cause of the epidemics common at that time. In my day we took overcrowding very seriously, helping – as promptly as we could – families found to be overcrowded and prosecuting those who deliberately overcrowded their properties.

Any homeless single person with a child applying for accommodation could expect the child to be taken immediately into care. I thought that the BBC’s tv docudrama ‘Cathy come home’ (remember that?) helped to put an end to that practice years ago. I found it quite appalling. If true it explains the determination of some vulnerable people never to seek help from Social Services. It may be that there are occasions when taking a child into care is the best answer to a particular problem. Surely though, in the vast majority of cases, every effort should made to find accommodation for the adult and child together.

I think that what was revealed at that meeting would have had the public health, housing and social service pioneers of the 19th and 20th centuries, (Sir Edwin Chadwick, George Peabody, George Cadbury, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry and so on), turning in their graves.

A Prophecy fulfilled!

I generally refer to the weather with extreme caution in this blog. I know from experience that hardly have I posted such a comment than there is likely to be a sudden and dramatic change in the weather that makes nonsense of it. Yes – I do know that I could retrieve my blog and edit it after posting but that, I feel, would be cheating!

However, a few weeks ago, criticising Tendring Council’s decision to end the holiday season and close at least some of their holiday services on 31st August, I remarked that the weather at the beginning of September was disappointing but that towards the end of the month, and even into October, there might well be a heat wave.

I hardly thought that that tentative prophecy would fulfilled quite as convincingly as it has been. I shall be surprised if the first weekend of October hasn’t brought scores of visitors to our sunshine coast for a day or two of wall-to-wall sunshine and, before autumn really sets in, a satisfying draught of 'the last of the summer wine'.

Thanks to cheese-paring Tendring Council and its Tourism boss, they’ll have found that there are no beach patrols and that many of the Tourist enquiry offices closed weeks ago for the winter!