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!