Week 13 2012 5.4.2012

Tendring Topics.......on line

The Budget – it’s getting personal!

            When the popular press has scare headlines about the ‘squeezed middle class’ they are not usually referring to people like me.  Their idea of ‘middle class’ means someone in a desirable residence in a leafy suburb, with two new cars in the drive and kids away from home in a posh boarding school!

            I therefore had something of a shock to discover that the Granny Tax in the Chancellor’s Budget which penalises grey-haired ‘Middle England’ seemed to be aimed point-blank at me! Not all of us oldies are affected.  Quite a lot of pensioners don’t have an income high enough to make them liable to pay income tax at all.   Others with an annual income in excess of £25,000 a year don’t qualify for age allowance.  But, as a spokesperson for Saga (specialising in services to the elderly) pointed out, anyone over 65 with an income between £11,000 and £25,000 a year does stand to lose something in the region of £80 a year as a result of the freezing of the age related income tax allowance.  I am definitely in that category.

            That, of course, is not the only blow that the policies of the present government have dealt us oldies.   Many of us have our life’s savings entrusted to the Bank or Building Society that, many years ago, had provided the mortgage with which we purchased our homes.   Thanks to artificially low interest rates, the interest on those savings (especially when income tax has been deducted!) is less than the rate of inflation.  In effect, our savings are diminishing in value.  Then too, public services on which many old people rely such as meals on wheels, social support services and so on are either cut or prohibitively expensive.  Charities, that once provided services to the old, have had their grants reduced or withdrawn altogether.

            Perhaps it is worth mentioning too that the ‘big increase’ that pensioners will receive next month that the Chancellor suggests will more than compensate for the ‘granny tax’ is simply the automatic rise resulting from high inflation last October. It compensates (six months late) for the rise in the cost of living at that time.

            I don’t want to exaggerate the effect that the ‘granny tax’ will have on me personally.  I shall weather that particular storm without too much trouble.  A loss of £80 a year isn’t going to break either my bank account or my heart!  My income is likely to remain sufficient for my needs (the scope for extravagant living is a bit limited when one gets to ninety!) and I have sufficient savings to cope with any probable calamity. If I thought that the money saved by freezing my age-related benefit would go towards helping those in much greater need and narrowing the income gap between the rich and the poor, I would part with that £80 – or more - gladly.

            What I do bitterly resent is the fact that savings made by the government from this ‘granny tax’ and from other ‘economies’ affecting the old, the sick and the disabled, are helping to make possible the reduction of the highest rate of income tax levied on those with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year, from £50% to 45%!  The utter rubbish spoken in justification of this indefensible tax reduction, benefiting only the seriously rich, is almost beyond belief! 

            ‘The 50% tax deters entrepreneurs from establishing new small businesses in the UK’    How many new small businesses do you know that pay over £150,000 a year to their founder or any member of his or her staff?  

             ‘The new 45% rate of tax will bring in more money than the 50% rate because people resent having to pay half their income in taxes. They won’t feel the same resentment about paying 45%.

            First – and this is a point that needs to be made abundantly clear – even if the highest rate of tax were 60% or 70%, no-one would be expected to pay anything like half their income in taxes.  The highest rate of tax is levied only on taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year!  In any case, does the Government really imagine that those who have successfully avoided paying tax at the 50% rate are going to repent and pay up promptly when the rate is lowered to 45%?   That really is Cloud Cuckoo Land!

So many people currently find ways of avoiding paying that 50% tax rate that it costs more to collect than it’s worth.

That’s like saying ‘It is so difficult and so expensive to prosecute fraudsters that we’d better stop trying to do so’.  If people manage to avoid paying some or all of the tax due, the government should plug those loopholes that make this possible!   Oh dear – I have just learned that our Prime Minister’s father-in-law is the proud owner of a Scottish island worth £2 million, registered in the West Indies for tax purposes. I do see the family difficulties!

            The Government claims that the Budget is ‘fair’ and taxes the wealthy while improving the lot of the working poor.  It taxes the wealthy?   Well, there is increased stamp duty when a palatial home changes hands.   How often to you suppose a Highclere Castle  (better known nowadays as Downton Abbey),  a £2 million pound Scottish island, or similar property, changes ownership?  The only other promised measure that could possibly cause the seriously wealthy even the least inconvenience is the attempt to close one or two of the tax avoidance loopholes.  That is something that should have been done years ago!

            It is easy to forget that we have a coalition government of Conservatives and Lib. Dems.   The name of the latter party derives from the coming together of the Liberals and the Social Democrats.  Perhaps they should now be renamed  Lib.Dem.Con.   No, the Con wouldn’t be short for Conservatives but for Conned – because ‘conned’ is what the thousands (including myself!) who voted for them in the last General Election have been.

 ‘Privatise! Privatise! – everything beneath the skies!

            That wasn’t one of the slogans of the Conservative Party, and it certainly wasn’t of the Liberal Democrats during the last General Election.  It could well have been though, because the one consistent thread of policy that has been followed by the coalition government has been to penalise the public sector of the economy and to privatise as many of its functions as is humanly possible – some might claim further than is humanly possible!

            Privatisation of large areas of the NHS and of the public sector has already been perpetrated by previous Conservative and New Labour governments.   Many local services previously carried out by democratically elected authorities – water supply, sewerage and sewage treatment, maintenance of publicly owned buildings,  refuse collection and street cleaning, maintenance of parks and gardens – are now undertaken by private contractors.  Contract cleaners are responsible for cleaning of hospital wards and corridors, instead of directly employed cleaners under the eagle eyes of ward sisters and Hospital Matrons.  It is no coincidence that it is only since this happened that patients admitted to hospital to be cured of illness find themselves at risk of contracting new infections there!

 Members of the Labour Party who voted for the removal of Clause 4 from the party’s constitution may have imagined that they were merely asserting that not every service and every industry needed to be nationalised.  They weren’t.  They were opening the door for every industry and service to be privatised!  New Labour was every bit as bad as its opponents in that respect.

Large sections of the NHS are to be ‘opened up to competition’. Ways of privatising the Royal Mail are being explored.  Many Police functions are to be taken over by private firms and now there is talk of highway maintenance being farmed out to private enterprise.

I wonder they haven’t gone even further. I am surprised they haven’t thought of inviting the gangs of juveniles who have been causing so much concern, to submit tenders for front line police duties?  ‘Set a thief to catch a thief’.  I understand that when the Kray brothers ruled London’s East End there were, at least, no other criminal gangs operating in their area! It surely shouldn’t need much re-training to transform a member of a ‘protection racket’ to a useful member of a ‘protection service’!   Yes, I know that that’s a daft idea – but not much dafter than some of the privatisations that are already in action or in the pipeline.   There is one thing that is certain when any service is privatised.  As well as paying the wages and buying or hiring all the equipment required, the contractor has to make a profit sufficient to keep his shareholders happy. That – not the quality of service to the public – will be his first concern.

The Equality Trust

          It was probably as long as twenty years ago that, at about this time of the year,  I wrote in Tendring Topics (in print) that my idea of a good national Budget was one that narrowed the gap between the very poor and the very rich.  It followed that it had been a long time since I had seen a good budget and I could see little possibility of one in the near future.  Gloomy as I was at that time, I hadn’t seriously imagined that after a decade of New Labour rule the gap would be wider than ever before – and that a leading member of the government would announce that he ‘had no problem with billionaires!’

            It seemed obvious to me that a more equal society was also a better one but I would have had difficulty finding firm evidence to justify that conviction.  It was not until The Spirit Level* was published in 2009 that authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrated beyond doubt that more equal societies were happier societies than unequal ones in every respect, and that the benefits of greater equality were enjoyed by those on higher as well as those on lower incomes.  Years of research into already published statistics of 23 developed countries made it clear that life expectancy was longer, that teenage births, obesity, mental illness, homicides, imprisonment rates, infant mortality rates and general mistrust were all lower, educational standards were higher and there was greater social mobility, in more equal societies than in ones with a wide gap between the poor and the wealthy.

             I was not alone in being persuaded.   In a speech at the end of 2009, David Cameron who was yet to become our Prime Minister, said that The Spirit Level showed that, ‘among the richest countries, it’s the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator……per capita GDP is much less significant for a country’s life expectancy, crime levels, literacy and health, than the size of the gap between the richest and the poorest in the population…..We all know, in our hearts, that as long as there is deep poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all remain the poorer for it’.  In September 2010, Ed Miliband said ‘the countries that are healthier, happier, more secure are the more equal countries.  The gap between rich and poor doesn’t just harm the poor, it harms us all’.  Vince Cable and Lynne Featherstone (my elder son’s MP), leading Lib.Dems. in the coalition Government, have both pledged themselves to reducing inequalities.

            It seems extraordinary that there should be such unanimity among our political leaders about our country’s ills and their cause - and so little inclination among any of them to work towards a remedy.  Greed and the desire for power (what an earlier generation might have called the worship of Mammon!) have so far proved more powerful than good intentions. Easter is almost upon us. One of the lessons of Easter is surely that ultimately good will triumph over evil.  We can all make our tiny contribution toward that end!

            Politicians need a great ground-swell of public opinion to spur them on their way.  We can add to that groundswell! The Equality Trust is a voluntary organisation set up to further the peaceful evolution of our country to greater equality and thus to benefit us all.  If you’d like to know more or (even better!) make your own small contribution towards the development of a fairer and more equal society, contact the Equality Trust web site at www.equalitytrust.org.uk .

And – a final thought! 

I’ll probably have further comment about Political Party funding next week. For now I’ll just say that the risk of super-wealthy individuals exercising undue influence on political leaders would be markedly reduced if the aims of the Equality Trust were achieved and there were no desperately poor or super-wealthy individuals!

   

*Now published in paperback by Penguin at £10.99, with additional material answering critics of the first edition.

                       

    

Week 12 2012 22..2012

Tendring Topics.........on line

 That ‘Special Relationship’

            Benjamin Disraeli, founder of the modern Conservative Party, was a very shrewd observer of his fellow men and women.  ‘Everybody,’ he once remarked, ‘likes flattery – and with Royalty one should lay it on with a trowel. Today, even in a country like ours with a constitutional monarchy, top politicians have largely taken the place held by royalty in Disraeli’s Victorian age.

            How very heart-warming was the welcome given by the USA to David Cameron and his wife! And how inspiring were the speeches made by the two leaders! Our relationship with the USA, over whose policies we have no influence whatsoever (why should we?) is obviously much more important to our Prime Minister than our membership of the European Union whose policies we can help to shape.

            ‘Britain and the USA have stood together and bled together’, it was said.   Sometimes we certainly have, though not always (in 1810 for instance!) on the same side.   On the basis of lies (Saddam Hussein had ‘weapons of mass destruction that were threatening us …….Iraq was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack on the USA’) Tony Blair, our then Prime Minister, persuaded Parliament to ignore the million-plus British protesters (I’m proud that my sons and their families  were among them) who believed otherwise. Parliament voted for an illegal war that cost Britain millions of pounds and hundreds of lives. 

            The war in Afghanistan was a little more justifiable.  I have no doubt that the Taliban Government was sheltering El Qaida and similar terrorist organisations threatening ‘the West’.  That is why other NATO countries joined in.  However El Qaida has now simply moved its bases across the border into the tribal areas of Pakistan, and to the Yemen and East Africa.

             

            Those were the times when Britain’s special relationship led us to the support of the USA.  There was one occasion on which it didn’t.  Prime Minister Harold Wilson did not send troops to ‘stand and bleed’ beside the American troops in Vietnam fighting the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong rebels, as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair undoubtedly would have.  Does anyone in Britain today regret that the United Kingdom was not part of the USA’s war which ended in defeat and ignominious withdrawal – or the fact that there are no British names on Vietnamese war memorials?

            Incidentally, we were told at the time of the Vietnam War that if the Vietcong won it would be the end of civilisation as we knew it.  Stalinism would prevail over the Far East.  Well – the Vietcong did win.  I really have no idea what kind of government there now is in Vietnam.  I do know though that Vietnam has become a popular holiday destination for western tourists who, despite the lasting damage done by the USA, are made welcome.

            How about the USA’s response in Britain’s hours of need?   They didn’t help in any way when in 1974 Turkey invaded Cyprus, then part of the Commonwealth. In the 1980s they actually organised and took part in the invasion of Grenada, another Commonwealth country in the West Indies; an illegal act of aggression that was condemned by the United Nations.   They didn’t help when Argentina flagrantly invaded the Falklands – an occasion when American intervention really would have made a difference.  The USA’s mining of the approaches to Cuban ports in the furtherance of an illegal blockade, endangered British shipping.  During Britain’s struggle with the IRA, United States law-courts repeatedly refused to extradite IRA terrorists – even those who had been convicted but had escaped – to face British justice.

.

18^th May, 1941. My twentieth birthday and, watched by a hungry dog, I am taking a break from sentry duty. 

The UK had been at war for over eighteen months.

France had fallen.  The USA and the USSR were both still neutral.

 Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone against Hitler    

The Americans came into World War II to save to us from defeat?  That really is a myth than needs to be debunked.  The USA, like the Soviet Union, came into the war only when they themselves were attacked.  In 1941 the Japanese attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbour.  The USA declared war on Japan. Hitler, in accordance with Germany’s treaty obligations, immediately declared war on the USA.  We shall never know whether, had Hitler not made that fatal mistake, the USA would have engaged Hitler at that time.  Perhaps, wisely from their point of view, they would have said they would deal with the Japanese threat and leave the UK, the Commonwealth and the Soviet Union to deal with the Nazis.

            Right now, I believe that David Cameron is being softened up to support (or at least not to oppose) the USA and Israel in a ‘pre-emptive’ strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, because of their conviction that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.  I wonder if the intelligence sources that have led to this conviction are the same as those that, just a few years ago, confidently asserted that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

           

            I fear that, thanks to the flattering star-spangled manner of his reception in the USA, David Cameron may have already pledged his unquestioning support.

Tendring is doubly fortunate!

          The village of St. Osyth, just two or three miles from Clacton-on-Sea is said to be the driest spot in the United Kingdom.  It follows that the Tendring peninsula’s  coastal towns from Harwich to Brightlingsea are the British holiday resorts in which visitors are least likely to have their holiday ruined by rain.

            During the 1970s when I was the Tendring District Council’s Public Relations and Press Officer, I used to make the most of this fact.  Our rainfall, I would say, was comparable with that of the fringes of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert!  When my family and I had moved to Clacton some two decades earlier, the then Council had the holiday publicity slogan ‘Champagne Air – Rainfall rare!’  It was hardly the most brilliant example of the use of the English language, but it made its point.

            Though, as the district’s official Spin Doctor I loved our low rainfall, as an enthusiastic amateur gardener I detested it.  Why did my garden have to be just a couple of miles, as the crow flies, from the driest spot in the United Kingdom!  No wonder that during the summer months I had to spend an hour or so every evening with the hose pipe watering my thirsty runner beans, sweet peas, tomatoes and courgettes.

            Nowadays I cultivate my garden no longer. I was still pleasantly surprised though to discover that the Tendring District – Britain’s driest area – is the one district in our region that isn’t having to endure a hose-pipe ban from the beginning of April; this despite the fact that water level in the region’s reservoirs is even lower than it was during the scorchingly hot and dry summer of 1976.

            The reason so I understand, is that Veolia East, supplier of our water, obtains it from giant natural reservoirs or aquifers deep underground.  Thus they are not so dependent on seasonal rainfall and surface reservoirs as, for instance Anglian Water,   Colchester’s supplier.

            Our supply is still finite.  We should all use water as sparingly as we can – if only to keep our water bills within the household budget!   It does mean though that I’ll be able to continue to enjoy my daily morning shower without twinges of conscience!

Will Private Enterprise ‘Breathe new life’ into the NHS’?

            Those (there must surely be some!) who are looking forward to the Government’s  NHS Reform Bill sweeping away bureaucratic cobwebs and bringing the fresh air of the private enterprise and the market place into the NHS may be interested in this story brought to light by ever-vigilant Private Eye:

            Four years ago the Camden Road Medical Centre, serving 4,700 patients in North London, was acquired by the American health giant United Health who undercut a bid by local GPs by twenty-five percent.  Within a month there were complaints about inferior service and, in particular, about the loss of two locum doctors, one of whom had been based at the practice for eighteen years.

            A year ago, quietly and without consulting or even informing patients, United Health        sold the practice franchise to a company called The Practice plc.  Now The Practice plc has failed to renew its lease on the premises that have been used by doctors for almost a century.  The Centre is closing, staff will lose their jobs and the 4,700 patients will have to find other GPs – miles away!

            It must never be forgotten that privately owned businesses are run primarily to make money for the shareholders – not for the benefit of those it claims to ‘serve’.

Salute to Slovenia!

          Since last November, when I changed the means by which I gain access to my weekly blog to Google, I have been able to keep a check on how many people view it and the countries in which it is most popular.  For some time the greatest number were in India – the United Kingdom coming a poor second!  In the New Year my Indian viewers almost disappeared but there has been a welcome increase in viewers from Britain, the USA, Germany and Russia.

            Some smaller and/or less populous countries came and went – Sri Lanka, Israel, Belgium, Australia, United Arab Emirates and so on.  One small country though remained constant.  I haven’t many Slovenian viewers – usually between six and twelve – but then it is a small country, and those viewers are loyal.  There has never, so far, been a day on which I have checked my ‘readership’ and found none at all from that small but beautiful country.

And beautiful it certainly is.  When my wife Heather and I toured what was then a united Jugoslavia in 1980 in our motor-caravan our first, and very happy, experience was of crossing the frontier from Austria into Slovenia and driving to the shores of Lake Bled where we parked our van and spent our first night .  We spent the last day and night of our tour there too.  It was there that I first tasted Slivovice!

Many years later, after Slovenia had gained its independence, my elder son, daughter in law and younger grandson Nick also visited – in the winter – and found it, and its capital Ljubljana, to be a true winter wonderland.  Nick incidentally, became an expert on European travel and is currently Acting Executive Director of the European Travel Commission, encouraging folk from all over the world to spend their holidays in beautiful and historic Europe (see, www.visiteurope.com)

Our motor-caravan at sunset in an olive grove

            So, may I say thank you to my Slovenian viewers.  I very much hope that you will continue to find my blog interesting.  I am not sure whether or not this picture, of sunset in a lakeside olive grove, was taken in Slovenia. Then there were no national boundaries within Jugoslavia.   If not in Slovenia it was certainly taken not far away and it typifies the memories that I have of a very happy holiday; memories that are specially precious because they are of the last overseas holiday that my wife and I were to enjoy together.    

Week 11 2012 15.3.2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

‘Some corner of a foreign field…………’

          Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Rupert Brooke wrote his best-known poem The Soldier, which begins with the lines;

If I should die, think only this of me

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

These assume that in that corner of a foreign field, the poet’s remains will at least be left in peace.

          By no means the worst or the most tragic image shown on tv last week, but the one that has remained most persistent in my memory, was that of the vandalised and broken tombstones of British war dead in Benghazi’s British military cemetery and the desecration of the stone crucifix that had been provided there.

            The spectacle filled me with deep sadness – not for those buried there (they are past caring about such things), nor because among those war dead are former comrades of mine who died in a PoW transit camp in Benghazi in the late summer and autumn of 1942.  Nor even was it because of the desecration of the image of Christ, the Prince of Peace, and of the cross on which he had been executed. It was a cross that a fellow-countryman of the vandals, Simon of Cyrene, had helped him carry to Golgotha, the place of execution.                 

            What made me saddest was the thought that, anywhere in the world, there were people who harboured such a hatred of Britain, British values, and of the Christian faith, that they were prepared to vent it even on the dead and on the sacred symbols of their faith.  Such unreasoning and implacable hatred cannot be overcome by force of arms. Nor, I think, can it be defeated or brought to acceptable compromise by reasoned argument and discussion.

            It is for that reason that I see no possibility of an end, either by  military victory or agreed compromise, to the war in Afghanistan that continues to take a toll of our young men and, of course, of an unknown number of Afghan civilians. I have no doubt at all that exactly the same implacable hatred motivates our Taliban opponents there.  Last week six young British men died in just one incident, an event that brought renewed calls for an immediate withdrawal of British troops.

            It is a new experience for me to find myself on the same side as much of the popular press, but there really is no point in waiting a couple more years in the hope that by that time we’ll have had a miraculous victory or that the Taliban will have accepted a reasonable compromise.  Nor do I think that we can rely on the NATO trained and equipped Afghan Army to have either the ability or the inclination to step into the role currently held by our troops.   What is certain is that in that time there will be yet more pointless deaths of young men, more weeping widows and children, and more sorrowing parents.  I am sorry for the Afghans – and particularly for the Afghan women and girls – who have acquired western ways and embraced western values. I can only hope that they will be able to escape from their benighted country before the hate-fuelled  retribution of some of their fellow-countrymen catches up with them.

Later Developments

          Since I wrote the above there have been further disturbing developments, none of which encourage me to change my general view of the situation in Afghanistan.

            Last Saturday 10^th March I learned that the Afghanistan Religious Council, funded by the Afghan Government (and thus, indirectly, by us!) whose decrees had already resulted in Afghan women tv news readers having to wear a head scarf while working, has now decreed that Afghan women and men should not work or be educated together, and that women should not go out in public unless accompanied by a male member of their family.   This decree doesn’t yet have the force of law but it is certainly a straw in the wind, and an indication of the probable fate of Afghan women and girls when NATO forces depart.

            Then, on the following day I heard the appalling news that a United States soldier (a staff sergeant in fact) had gone alone into two Afghan villages in the dead of night and deliberately massacred at least sixteen people, including a number of women and children.   The perpetrator of this horrific crime must obviously have been either insanely drunk or simply insane at the time. This though is unlikely to be regarded as an excuse by those who will demand vengeance.

            Back in Essex, on the same day came news of the vandalising and desecration of a churchyard memorial to British troops who had died in Afghanistan.  Is this evidence of the same implacable hatred, now in England, that resulted in the violation of British war graves in Benghazi?

.

‘A Bridge over Troubled Waters’

            Opening my newly delivered copy of The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, last week, I was surprised to see a photograph that reminded me of a very happy period of my life.  The picture was of the old Turkish packhorse bridge in Mostar, Bosnia; the ‘old bridge’ (or ‘stari most’) that gave the town its name.  I remembered it from the late summer of 1980 when my wife Heather and I had toured what was then a united Jugoslavia in our motor- caravan.

Here is a picture that I took at the time.  Young men were demonstrating their machismo by diving from the apex of the bridge into the turbulent waters of the fast-flowing River Neretva beneath. It was a peaceful scene and, throughout our visit, we saw no sign of the suspicion, hatred and resentment that were so soon to lead to bitter civil war.

A casualty of that civil war was that beautiful old  bridge, destroyed in conflict between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims.  It was rebuilt with funding from the Turkish Government (sadly there is no way of similarly restoring the thousands of human lives lost in that conflict!)  The picture in The Friend on International Women’s Day, 8^th March, was published as a symbol of peace and reconciliation.

Did you, by the way, know that 8^th March was International Women’s Day and that women  were holding demonstrations on bridges round the world, hoping, says a spokesperson for Women for Women International, that they will represent ‘bridges of peace and hope for the future’?  The organisation declares that ‘Women are forced to bear the burden of war and are targeted for mass rape, mutilation and torture as a tool of war’ and that ‘Eighty percent of wartime refugees are women and children’.

I am only sorry that International Women’s Day wasn’t more widely publicised beforehand.  The campaign reinforced my own idea (for which no-one else seems to have much enthusiasm!) that there should be an all-embracing ‘Civilian Victims Day’, a companion of Remembrance Day on which we remember the war dead of the armed forces.  On that day there would be special religious services of remembrance and of repentance and we would all be urged to wear white poppies as a symbol of our desire for peace.   The proceeds of the sale could be used to help civilian victims of conflict. in a similar way to that in which the proceeds of red poppies on Remembrance Day are used to help wounded and disabled members of the armed forces.

Perhaps the reason that this idea hasn’t caught on is the fact that while virtually every nation of the world has civilian war dead to mourn, very few indeed have no need to repent the suffering they have inflicted  on the civilian victims of other nations, other creeds or other ethnicities.

‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things unto even one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me’, said the Prince of Peace.

A Boost to the Economy – and Solution to Britain’s Housing Problem?

            I am referring to the Government’s recently announced initiative to underwrite loans from Banks and Building Societies for purchases of new-built homes to enable those lenders to require a deposit of only 5 percent of the total purchase price.  This, it is claimed, will give a boost to the building trade, and thus to the country’s economic recovery. It would also make it possible for thousands of potential purchasers, who could afford the monthly repayments on their loan but were unable to find the all-important deposit, to get their feet on the first rung on the property ladder.

             Will give a boost to the building trade?   I think that it is the sort of idea that could only emanate only from a government of millionaires, remote from the world most of us live in! Even 5 percent of the price of a new home would be well beyond the reach of many would-be purchasers.  It was in 1956 that my wife and I bought the bungalow in which I am now writing these words.  We did – in those distant days – have the offer of a loan with a deposit of only 5 percent. We had been married for ten years.  I had an adequate salary, but   our two young sons, and a loan to repay on the cost of the car I needed for my job, ensured that we had very little money saved.  We had to sell some of our furniture – and my wife’s engagement ring (a transaction for which I have felt guilty ever since!) – to raise that deposit.

            We did manage to pay the monthly repayments unfailingly. I was a Public Heath Inspector employed by Clacton Council.  In those days local government salaries were lower than comparable ones in the private sector, but they were secure and part of that salary was contributing to a pension.  Nowadays salaries in the lower reaches of the local government service are still low but the jobs, like all jobs these days, are anything but secure.  What is more, pension contributions are going to be higher and today’s local government officers are going to have to wait (and work) longer for a lower pension.  Jobs in the private sector are scarce and certainly no more secure.  With all of this in mind prudent home seekers should surely think twice – and then again – before incurring a debt that, like the student loans, is going to be a burden for decades to come, and for which any change of circumstances could make it impossible to keep up the repayments.

            We are, thanks to those ‘brilliant brains’ in the banking and financial services sector, already a nation in debt.  The government seems determined to make us also a nation of debtors!

A Moment of Remembrance – and foreboding.

          I am an early riser.  Last Sunday (11^th March) I switched the tv on to BBC 1 at about 5.40 a.m.   Usually at that time there is a discussion about the European Union in progress.  Last Sunday was different. Unknowingly I had switched on just before the exact moment at which, on that same day a year earlier, the devastating earthquake and Tsunami, followed by a catastrophic nuclear energy emergency, had taken place in eastern Japan.  I was watching a memorial event, presided over by the grey-haired Japanese Emperor and Empress, in an enormous crowd-filled arena. There were recorded scenes of the earthquake, of the subsequent enormous ‘tidal wave’ engulfing all before it – and of the radiation polluted landscape that remains devastated to this day. Then, at the anniversary of the moment the earthquake struck, came a minute of silence As one, the enormous audience fell into silent mourning for the tens thousands of dead, many of whose bodies have never been recovered.

            We are fortunate in this country in that we rarely experience a damaging earthquake and never, so far, a tsunami.  We have had devastating tidal floods though (one on this coast as recently as 1953), and we too have nuclear plant in locations liable to flooding.  A recent survey predicted that within this century, there is a strong probability that both Bradwell and Sizewell nuclear plants, neither very far from us and one very near, will suffer dangerous flooding as a result of the inexorable progress of global warming. 

We have been warned!

           

                       

           

           

                                                 

Week 10 2012 8.3.2012

Tendring Topics..........on Line

 ‘The best that money can buy!’

            The Leveson Enquiry into the conduct of the press, having been absent from the front headline news recently, came back with a vengeance early last week. On the Monday we had learned of the successful launch the previous day of News International’s latest venture, the Sunday edition of the Sun. Over three million copies of the new publication had been sold and Mr Rupert Murdoch, who had launched it in person, was said to be delighted.

On the following day he may have been a little less happy. A high ranking police official revealed to Lord Leveson that bribery of the police and other public officials had been endemic among the staff of the Sun and that this corruption had been condoned at the very highest level.  It was believed that one public official had been paid as much as £80,000 to reveal confidential information!  Furthermore, this activity had been carried out despite the knowledge that it was against the law and that the jobs, pensions and liberty of those involved were at risk. Various devious schemes had been devised to conceal it.

No wonder the recent widespread arrests of Sun journalists, that aroused so much indignation among media pundits, had taken place simultaneously, at dawn, and by surprise.   This had clearly been intended to remove the possibility of evidence being tampered with or destroyed.  

Mr Murdoch is reported as saying that although those activities may have taken place in the past all News International employees would have clean hands in the future. Perhaps so – but it will be remembered that throughout this sorry ongoing saga News International has admitted wrong-doing only when compelled to do so by irrefutable evidence.  In the first instance it was claimed that just one lone culprit had resorted to ‘phone hacking’, and he was a freelance private investigator, not a News International employee.  Then it was just the one publication, the News of the World that was culpable.  Mr Murdoch closed it down, throwing it to the wolves to protect the rest of his media empire.  Now the Sun, News International’s flagship enterprise in the UK, is accused of being a centre of bribery and corruption.  In a tv interview singer Charlotte Church, who, with her parents, has been the victims of phone hacking and harassment, pointed out that when News International says ‘sorry’ it doesn’t mean that they are sorry about their wrong-doing – only that that they are sorry to have been caught out! 

Serious as is the systematic bribery and corruption of members of the Police Force and other public officials, it is the evil influence of News International at the very highest level that most concerns me – and should concern us all.  If the Police were, as is admitted, much too close to the Murdoch Empire – what are we to say of successive Prime Ministers who have enjoyed the close friendship of Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants?  It began with Mrs Thatcher but was closely followed by Tony Blair and by David Cameron, our present Prime Minister. There was the video shown on tv of Tony Blair greeting Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch’s ‘viceroy’, with an affectionate kiss. There was David Cameron and family spending part of Christmas 2010 with the same lady, and David Cameron appointing Andy Coulson, a former News of the World editor, as his personal spin-doctor.  More recently we have had the cosy mental image of David Cameron enjoying  a brisk canter – on a horse ‘loaned’ to Rebekah Brooks by the Metropolitan Police! 

No wonder News International employees imagined that, with ‘friends at the top’ they could get away with anything.   Now I notice that, as a result of an internal enquiry, News International is handing to the Police evidence of the wrong-doing of some of its employees.  I am reminded of the German farmer who in 1946, when asked what he had been doing that morning, replied, ‘I’ve been de-Nazifying my carrot field – pulling out the little ones so that the big ones can flourish!’

No-one would dream of suggesting that our top politicians could be bribed – or that even the brashest of cosmopolitan media billionaires would be foolish enough to attempt to bribe them.  The former though, are well aware of the fragility of their electoral success and of the power of the rulers of the press to manipulate public opinion for or against them.  This power was impressively demonstrated when, to make New Labour ‘electable’ Tony Blair swung his party’s policies sufficiently to the right to secure Rupert Murdoch’s approbation, and the support of the Sun in the next General Election campaign - which New Labour then won.  Before the latest General Election the Sun returned to its support of the Conservatives, and the Conservatives emerged as the strongest party.  Rupert Murdoch must have been well satisfied with this exhibition of his power.

 The billionaire owners of most of the national press are able to exert far too powerful an influence on our political leaders – an influence that the revelations of the Leveson Enquiry may give us an opportunity to curb.  We boast of our ‘Free Press’ . It isn’t free.  It isn’t even cheap.  It is just the very best that money can buy!

‘When I hear the word “culture”……. I reach for my revolver!’

          Thus in the late 1930s, allegedly spake the late and unlamented Air-Marshal Hermann Goering, the most colourful of Hitler’s entourage.

            We haven’t yet reached that state in this country as we progress in the second decade of the twenty-first century.  There’s no doubt though that in our schools, lessons on what I think of as cultural subjects – history, geography, English literature – come a poor second to those which prepare the young to be employable human resource units supplying the needs of the global market economy; the ‘proles’ of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ .

             A basic knowledge of British and World History and Geography (where we are in both time and space, how we got there, and the direction in which we are heading!) is surely essential for us all in a parliamentary democracy.  How could we hope to exercise the vote intelligently and effectively without that background knowledge?  As for English literature – quite apart from the great pleasure that is to be derived from the magnificent prose and poetry of the past, it teaches us to express our thoughts clearly and concisely (without the constantly reiterated ‘know what I mean? that we hear so often today) and how those in the past have met and tried to resolve the problems that confront us daily.

            I heard a cocksure fifteen year old asserting on tv that Shakespeare is irrelevant these days.  Irrelevant, really?  Romeo and Juliet deals with gang warfare between the Montagues and Capulets,  the dangers of carrying knives (the gang members had long ones called swords!) for ‘protection’, the perils of teenage sex and of ignoring parental advice, and the dangers of meddling by well-meaning busybodies (Brother Lawrence).   And that’s just one of the plays!  Aspiring modern politicians could do worse than study Macbeth ­and Julius Caesar and those tempted to try to make a fortune on the stock exchange might try The Merchant of Venice. 

           

Watching University Challenge on tv can be a humbling experience.  I don’t really understand most of the questions, never mind know the answers.  However I do occasionally know the answers to questions on English history or world geography, and I quite often know more about some aspects of English Literature than any of the contestants.  I have been astonished to observe young men and women who know things about physics, chemistry, zoology, and mathematics that are a complete mystery to me, but who seem never to have heard of such poems as Milton’s sonnet On his Blindness, Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, Keats’  La belle Dame sans Merci, and John Betjeman’s Subaltern’s Love Song.   Betjeman’s poetry I have come to know and enjoy fairly recently (well, in the past half-century)  but the others, and the Shakespeare plays I have mentioned, were just part of the English syllabus for the London University General Schools Certificate that I took and passed before leaving school in 1937 at the age of 16.

            I can’t say that the maths and science subjects that I was taught at school have been of no value to me. I have always had enough Maths to cope with my income tax returns and to work out royalties due to me from book sales.  My knowledge of General Physics was a help to me when, in my 50s and 60s, I wrote half a dozen commercially successful books about domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage.  It is though, from my study of English Literature that I have gained my ability to string words together into a readable narrative, and from my knowledge of history and geography that I have the temerity to write and publish this blog every week. I wish I knew more about other cultural subjects such as classical music and art. 

            In Great Britain culture isn’t yet the target of a revolver – but it is being slowly strangled in the service of Mammon!

‘Bad News for Home Owners?’

          When the news reader announced that there was ‘bad news for home owners’ at breakfast time this (3^rd March) morning, I wondered what was coming next.  I needn’t have worried.  It was home buyers, not home owners that had reason to be anxious.  Interest rates on mortgages were set to increase, in some cases by as much as fourteen percent.  Some home buyers will shortly discover – when they find themselves unable to make their mortgage repayments – that it is the bank or Building Society, not themselves, who is the true owner of their home.

            I feel very sorry for those who may lose their homes, but not for the politicians who have lured them into a debt that they won’t be able to repay.  Remember David Cameron saying how proud the new householder was when handed the key of his own home?  Just imagine how that same householder will feel when his home is repossessed and he has to hand it back again!

’‘Essex Works!'

            Yes, as far as I am concerned it certainly does.  You’ll recall that a fortnight or so ago I recounted my experience of trying to get a hand-rail fitted to help me get safely from the threshold of my front door to the concrete front path.  A wooden ramp had been provided (by a friendly neighbour) over the two steep steps, but I still felt the need to descend that ramp with extreme care, never venturing upon it without my trusty walking stick!

            The biggest hurdle that I had to deal with was that of getting through to a human voice at the County Hall.  I gave it up one day and rang off while a mechanical voice was assuring me that my call was valued and that I was moving up the queue.  The next day I was more determined (and possibly a little more patient!) and eventually a human voice, of a very helpful young lady greeted me.  I was ‘assessed’ over the phone.  It became clear to me that despite my age there were not a great many things that I might want to do but was unable.  I could get out of bed, wash, shower and shave, do my own shopping, visit friends, cook my own meals and do the washing with the aid of a washing machine.   I had already arranged help with cleaning and with the garden.  No, I definitely wasn’t top priority.

            However, someone would visit me in due course to see about a hand-rail and to see if there were any other hazards about the house were capable of being remedied.  It took about three weeks but ultimately some-one did call.  He agreed that I needed a handrail but thought that otherwise I was coping well with the effects of old age.  Someone would phone and make an appointment to fix the handrail.  And so they did.  A very helpful operative phoned and said that, if it was OK with me, he would call and fix the handrail at about lunchtime today, 3rd March..

            And so he did, quickly and efficiently.  See for yourself.

            It will take a long while to erase from my memory the County Council’s former political leader, Lord Hanningfield.  But in the meantime I am happy to confirm that Essex Works – and worked effectively for me!

.