‘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?
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| 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.
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