The European Travel Commission’s new Acting Director!
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| Jo. AKA Ms Josephine Hall M.A., B.Sc |
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| 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 |
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.
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| 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!
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