Tendring Topics........on Line
The Cost of Weddings ………
Some thoughts on Taxation
The Cost of Weddings ………
One of the biggest changes in public attitudes that have taken place during my lifetime is that relating to love and marriage. In my childhood and youth the idea of an unmarried couple living together as man and wife evoked shock and horror. It was ‘living in sin’. The woman in such a liaison was regarded as ‘fallen’, any children were ‘illegitimate,’ a designation that could prove to be a lifelong disadvantage. As late at the early 1950s a popular song announced that, ‘Love and marriage, love and marriage, They go together like a horse and carriage. You can’t have one without the other’. Well, that was certainly what I - and many thousands like me – took for granted.
How different things are in the twenty-first century. It is considered perfectly normal – even wise – for a young couple to live together, and perhaps have one or two children before getting married or, in many cases, deciding not to marry at all. Sometimes they’ll say that they are ‘saving up to get married’ by which they usually mean saving up to be able to afford the kind of lavish wedding reception and honeymoon that will be the envy of their friends, neighbours and work colleagues.
Recently I was quite shocked to discover that many couples may have to ‘save up’ to pay for the actual ceremony. It was something with which I had never been involved. Traditionally it is the bride’s parents who pay for the wedding, though that too seems to have changed nowadays. Heather and I were married in the Methodist Church
I now learn that there has been a charge of £262 for a Church of England wedding and that this has recently been raised to £400. That is quite a lot of money to a great many people today; quite enough to make an impecunious young couple who had been thinking of ‘tying the knot’ think again. They may be facing a lot of other expenses including furnishing a home!
I would never have expected the Church to deter couples from the sacrament of marriage and am not surprised at the fact that at least some members of the clergy are rebelling against this latest charge. One such is Fr. Richard Tilbrook of St Barnabas’ Church, Colchester . He intends to stick to the former fee of £262. He is reported as saying, ‘In this economic climate in poor parishes this is a huge increase which is not acceptable. We work very hard to encourage people to come to church and to get married in church and I worry that this will turn people away. Fr. Richard has the support of Colchester ’s recently knighted MP Sir Bob Russell who has promised to raise the matter in parliament.
…….and of Funerals
Charges for Church of England funerals have also been increased to £160, not quite so much, but quite enough to add worry to a great many hard up new widows and widowers faced with the other inevitable funeral costs.
Oddly enough, I have had some direct experience here. It must have been about twelve years ago that an occasional attender at our Clacton Quaker Meeting who, like me, had been a POW in Germany during Word War II, asked me if I would officiate at his funeral service when the time came. No – he didn’t want a Quaker funeral, but he would like me to take it. I didn’t feel that it was the kind of request that I could refuse, though I didn’t take my promise all that seriously. There was no certainty that he would predecease me – and in any case, it would be his relatives who would decide on the form that the funeral would take.
However, eighteen months later I had a phone call from a local funeral director. He had died and his desire that I should officiate at the funeral had been included in the will. I was given the name and address of his son and daughter-in-law, and I went to see them. Yes, they would like me to officiate at the cremation. No, they didn’t want a Quaker funeral. They didn’t want long Quaker silences. No, none of the relatives wanted to speak at the funeral, though they were happy enough to tell me all about the deceased. No, they didn’t want any hymns.
A crematorium funeral service lasts only 20 minutes but that can seem quite a long while when it has to be filled with talk and prayer! I managed it, including a reading of the 23rd Psalm and Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, in which the poet compares dying with passing through the turbulent water at a harbour’s outlet. I pressed the button that brings curtains round the bier as I asked for a blessing on us all at the end of the service. My ordeal was over and the relatives were pleased.
They were even more pleased when I waived the £80 that the Funeral Director told me was ‘the usual fee’. £80 for twenty minutes work, perhaps an hour and a half in all if my preparation was taken into consideration! Still pretty good payment – but I wouldn’t have accepted any payment. Quite apart from the fact that to do so would have been considered unquakerly, I felt that I had simply been fulfilling a promise made to a former comrade; a straightforward not-all-that-difficult task dictated by friendship.
If the ceremony had taken place in a church that had to be maintained, kept clean at all times, and warm when required, it would, I suppose, have been reasonable to make a small charge for the use of the premises, but £160? – hardly. Once again Fr Richard Tillbrook of Colchester ’s St Barnabas’ Church is sticking to the old fee of £105 for a funeral – and I think that he is right.
Unjustifiable charges play into the hands of the National Secular Society and others who would like to separate religion from every aspect of what they regard as ‘real life’.
Did you notice the story last week about Civil Servants whose salary was being paid into a limited company to reduce their tax liability? There was a tremendous fuss about whether or not they really were civil servants – or were they just contractors to the civil service.
Whether or not they were civil servants is surely beside the point. What was to the point was that due to a loop-hole (one of many I fear) in the law, the Inland Revenue was deprived of tax to which it would otherwise have been entitled and which the rest of us will now have to pay. The exact employment status of those concerned should not have mattered in the least.
It is tax loop-holes of this kind that the government needs to seek out and close with at least the same vigour and enthusiasm that it seeks out Benefit Scroungers, if it is to persuade even the most gullible that ‘we’re all in this together’.
Then there was the promise last week by the opposition that, if they were elected, they would take those with the lowest incomes out of the income tax system altogether because it had been found that extra money in the pockets of those with the lowest incomes tends to be spent, thereby helping Britain’s economic recovery. Extra money in the pockets of better off people tends to be saved – however wise that may be personally it isn’t going to speed national recovery.
I understand that argument but, though raising the level of income tax liability would certainly be to my advantage, I don’t think that it is the right way to achieve that objective. I believe that we need to reverse the transfer of direct taxation (income tax, death duties, national insurance and so on) to indirect taxation such as VAT and customs duties on alcohol, petrol and diesel fuel. This was initiated during the governments (I nearly said the reign!) of Mrs Thatcher and continued enthusiastically during those of Tony Blair.
VAT is paid by rich and poor alike (‘we are all in this together’) but it is a much larger proportion of the total income of the poor. Its imposition and removal therefore affects the poor more than the rich. Reducing the cost of goods by cutting VAT would make it possible for the poor to buy goods that would otherwise have been beyond their reach – and help economic recovery.
I have personally had an example of that during the past few weeks. I have recently self-published part of my autobiography as a 65 x A5 page booklet entitled ‘Zittau….and I’, relating to my association with that small German town both during World War II and more recently. I had 250 copies printed to give to friends, family and anyone who may be interested. Printing work of this kind is not subject to VAT – so I was able, within my means, to have the work done and thus help keep the printing firm functioning. Had the work been subject to VAT I couldn’t have afforded it, and probably many of the firm’s other customers wouldn’t have been able to either.
As for income tax – well, it is the one tax that could be levied on all of us according to our ability to pay it. Properly graded, so that we all paid a similar proportion of our incomes, it could make sure that we really were all in this together.
I believe that even the poorest should pay a small amount in income tax. They too could then claim to be tax payers and free themselves of the jibe that others have to pay for public services that they enjoy. Those – like me – who are a little better off should pay a larger amount but the same proportion of our income in taxation and so on, with the very wealthy paying a much larger amount, but the same proportion of their incomes. It seems blindingly obvious to me that that is the path towards fairness and the creation of a true Common Wealth.
I should add that I don’t think that there is the least possibility of the present, or any currently-possible alternative government, pursuing that path in the foreseeable future!
Provoking ‘The Wrath of God’
It is becoming more and more certain that NATO’s adventure in Afghanistan Afghanistan
This opinion has been reinforced by recent events. A population that supported, or meekly endured without protest, the outrages of the Taliban was raised to hysterical fury by the accidental burning of some copies of the Koran by American troops. There have been days of frenzied rioting and hate-demonstrations against NATO and ‘western values’ generally, culminating in the murder of top American Army Officers in what should have been the most secure compound in the most secure city in Afghanistan. The murders are believed to have been committed by interpreters or other Afghans trusted as being ‘on our side’. We may succeed in training Afghans in the use of modern weapons and in the skills of modern warfare – but we can’t dictate against whom those skills and weapons will be used!
How extraordinary that all the violence and killing has been done in the name of God. The God in whom I believe knows very well that books, however significant and sacred may be the words that they contain, are made by human hands and, when destroyed, can easily be replaced with identical copies. Every single one of our fellow humans, on the other hand, is (as our Quaker Advices and Queries assert) unique and a child of God, created by God in his own image and irreplaceable. My God, learning that sacred books dedicated to his worship and service had been destroyed, would metaphorically shrug his shoulders and say, ‘My servants will make many more to replace them’. I believe though that nothing would be more likely to arouse his anger than learning that someone had killed even a single fellow human, one of his children, and had claimed to have done so in his name
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