Week 18 2012

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

 ‘The Proof of the Pudding…………’

            It was about three years ago that I decided to have a solar water heating system installed.  My bungalow has a south-sloping roof and Clacton-on-Sea has, statistically, a good deal more than an average number of hours of bright sunshine.   I was then in my late eighties and knew perfectly well that I would be unlikely to recover the capital cost of installation.  However, thanks to the present government’s fiscal policies, it seemed probable that the money saved would be greater than the interest the cost of installation was earning in a bank savings account.  In any case, again thanks to government policy, my banked savings were inexorably decreasing in value as each month passed.

            The solar water system installed was a complicated one – a development of the very primitive solar systems that I had envisaged when writing my books about domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage twenty years earlier!    An additional small hot water storage cylinder was provided in the roof space. A temperature controlled pump circulated an antifreeze solution in a closed circuit between the solar panel on the roof and the new cylinder to warm the water stored in it.  A second electronically controlled pump exchanged this solar heated water with cooler water in the main storage cylinder. The flow and return pipes between the boiler and the main cylinder remained unchanged.

            The system worked very well when it was working properly.   My monthly direct debit payments for gas and electricity dropped from over £100 to something over £70. There was a lot that could go wrong though – and did!  Faults were always promptly put right by the installers. I called them teething problems though it must be said that some of them carried on well into the system’s adolescence!!  Last year at this time, we had had a hard winter in which I had let the gas boiler run night and day for several days.  Several faults had occurred and had been rectified. My monthly payments rose to £98.  I began to ask myself if it had all been worthwhile!

           

            Providentially (though it didn’t seem like that at the time!) last summer my main hot water storage cylinder failed.   It had been in constant operation for nearly a quarter of a century.   Its heat exchanger was covered with hard water scale. The gas boiler was taking an unreasonably long time to heat the water in the cylinder. 

            One of the operatives of Solar Power Ltd. my installers, suggested that I should replace the old cylinder with one of their recently developed ‘dual action’ solar cylinders and thus greatly simplify my system.  It would, I was assured, give me trouble-free service.   It was quite simple really.  The small cylinder in the roof space and the second circulating pump were dispensed with.  The new hot water storage cylinder is rather larger than the old one and is very heavily insulated.   It has two separate heat exchangers inside; one, in the top one-third of the cylinder is connected to the flow and return pipes from the boiler.   The other, near the base of the cylinder, has flow and return pipes connected to the solar panel on the roof.  There is just one electronically controlled pump which circulates an antifreeze solution through this latter heat exchanger when the liquid circulating through the solar panel becomes hotter than the water in the storage cylinder.  

During the summer, it would be possible on sunny days to switch the boiler off and rely entirely on the solar panel and that lower heat exchanger for all domestic hot water.   Even in the winter just an hour or two of sunshine would be sufficient to preheat the water in the cylinder before it passed through the boiler. Less gas would therefore be needed to bring it to the required temperature.

            The new ‘dual action’ cylinder was installed in mid-July.  At about the same time I took advantage of a Government grant and had my roof space heavily insulated by a specialist firm.  As we moved through autumn into winter the prices of electricity and gas rose dramatically and the government cut services and benefits.  Some old – and not so old – people were faced with a stark choice; Eat or Heat!

            My new solar hot water system was working perfectly.  It had no ‘teething problems’.   I could hear its pump switch on to warm the water in the storage cylinder, as the solar panel on the roof began to heat up.  I felt that that extra insulation above my ceilings was helping to retain warmth in my bungalow.  I awaited the annual review of my E-on account with both anxiety and hope.  Had the new system plus the insulation cancelled the effect of the price increases?  Would my monthly direct debit payments stay unchanged?  Was it just possible that they would be reduced?  The proof of the pudding is in the eating!

            That proof arrived last week – a large official communication from E-on.  I opened it with some trepidation, but I need not have worried.  My hopes had been more than justified.  My account was comfortably in credit.  £74.64 would be repaid to me within the next few days and, with effect from 1^st June, my monthly direct debit payments would be reduced from £98.00 to £62.00.   Solar power plus insulation had saved money!

            My improvements had been made towards the end of July.  They had therefore been effective for only nine months (the least sunny nine months) of the year.  Next April there should, with any luck, be a further reduction.  However, as I shall be celebrating my 91st birthday in three weeks time, it would (if I were a gambling man) be unwise of me to bet too heavily on my ever seeing that reduction!

            I hope, by the way, that I am not so pleased with the success of my own efforts to reduce my energy bills as to forget that there are many old people, and many poor families, who are not able to take similar action. They really do sometimes have to choose between Eating and Heating!   I wish I could solve their problems as effectively as I have solved my own.

An Evil Empire?

          When the Leveson Enquiry first began its work, I wrote in this blog that I had little doubt that the nefarious press practices of phone and email hacking, and the even more corrupt and illegal practice of bribing and/or threatening the Police and other public officials, would be thoroughly investigated and exposed.   I thought it likely though that there would be far less investigation and exposure of an exercise of press power that affects every single one of us but is probably not even illegal.  It is the way in which those who own and control the news media influence the policies and decisions of senior politicians, thus promoting national policies to the advantage of those owners and controllers rather than that of the rest of us – the nation as a whole.

            On 25^th April Mr Rupert Murdoch, whose News International owns forty percent of Britain’s national press and has similar holdings in North America and in Australia and New Zealand., assured the Leveson Enquiry that he had never asked a favour of Mrs Thatcher or of any other British Prime Minister.  It was a claim that was dismissed by the Daily Mirror (not a Murdoch publication!) as codswallop.  I have little doubt though that the Mirror was wrong and that Rupert Murdoch’s claim was literally true.

            Mr Murdoch wouldn’t condescend to ask a favour of any politician. Why on earth should he?  He doesn’t seek their favour.  They seek his.  Tony Blair created New Labour, reversing everything for which the pioneers of the Labour Movement had fought, to gain the approval of Mr Murdoch and the electoral support of the Sun.  David Cameron, while still in opposition, interrupted a family holiday in Turkey to fly to Rupert Murdoch on his private yacht on the Mediterranean.  In office he consulted with him and his lieutenants again and again, inviting him to the back door of 10 Downing Street to escape the notice of the non-Murdoch press.   Cameron appointed Andy Coulson, former News of the World Editor, to be his personal spin doctor and pursued a neighbourly relationship with Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s ‘right hand woman’.  Rupert Murdoch doesn’t need politicians’ favours.   They need his!

            Murdoch has never concealed the fact that he owns and controls newspapers to promote political causes - unfettered free enterprise and extreme Euroscepticism!  Politicians who support those causes can expect the support of the Murdoch press empire – those who don’t can expect derision!   When, after a Tory electoral victory, the Sun claimed ‘It was us what done it!’ it was no idle boast.

            If we really want a free and independent press (independent of ‘big business’ as well as of the state) we will make certain that it is impossible for a substantial section of it to come under the control of one individual, particularly not someone who is a foreign national, has his home and principal interests outside the United Kingdom, and owes and acknowledges no loyalty to our country, its culture, and its traditions.

 ‘I don’t believe it!’

            My nature is, I think, to be somewhat credulous and unsuspicious; the uncharitable might say ‘gullible’.  I tend to believe what I have been told until I have good reason to do otherwise.  On balance, I prefer, very occasionally, to be deceived, rather than to suspect wrongly that someone is deceiving me.  There are limits to my credulity though. I find that these days those limits are constantly being overstepped by politicians and others in the media spotlight.

            Take, for instance, the case of Mr Jeremy Hunt, Culture Minister.   Mr Hunt took over from Lib.Dem. Vince Cable the decision about the ownership of the residual BSkyB shares when Mr Cable was trapped into remarking that he had declared war on Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire was eager to acquire BSkyB in its entirety.  Mr Hunt was on record as an admirer of News International, so David Cameron obviously felt that he could be depended upon to make an absolutely impartial judgement and arrive at the decision everybody (well, everybody whose opinion mattered) wanted!

            Adam Smith, Mr Hunt’s principal adviser, seems to have imagined that our Government was the political wing of News International (it was a mistake anyone might have made!) and carried on a considerable email correspondence with News International on that assumption.  What I find difficult to believe is that, considering the nature of the ‘advice’ that Mr Hunt must have been receiving from his adviser, he still had no doubt that he would  be able to make an impartial judgement on the disposal of those BSkyB shares.  I am reminded of the story of the judge in America’s ‘wild west’ who told a captured bandit, ‘We’ll give you a fair trial – and then we’ll hang you!’  

              There is little doubt in my mind that the acquisition of the whole of BSkyB by News International would have gone ahead ‘on the nod’ had not the extent of News International’s phone hacking activities come to light at a crucial moment – and Rupert Murdoch had decided that it would be politic to withdraw his bid for those shares rather than to risk its being refused on the grounds that News International was an unsuitable organisation.

That brings me to the other news story that has stretched my credulity beyond its limits.  I just cannot believe that Rupert Murdoch, the astute news media superman, who prided himself on keeping a tight rein on all his enterprises, on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Antipodes, could possibly have allowed himself to become a victim of a conspiracy of his underlings to prevent his learning about the wide-spread phone and email hacking that had become the practice in at least part of his British media domains.  He was, so he claimed, a victim of that conspiracy and not its source.

            As Victor Meldrew, anti-hero of One Foot in the Grave, used to proclaim on our tv screens, ‘I  don’t believe it!’

‘The Cruellest Month!’

          T.S. Eliot begins his poem ‘The waste land’ with the remark that ‘April is the cruellest month’.   April 2012 certainly was that for our Prime Minister and the coalition government.  A unpopular Budget benefitting millionaires was followed by a scathing comment from one of his own Conservative MPs that he and his Chancellor of the Exchequer were ‘two arrogant rich boys who don’t know the price of milk’

Then there were those emails to which I have referred above – and Lord Leveson’s disinclination to stray into the Prime Minister’s domain and decide whether or not Jeremy Hunt had breached ‘the Ministerial Code’.   Almost at the end of the month came the pronouncement of Scotland’s Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop that the government’s policies were benefitting the rich at the expense of the poor.  On the same day came the official revelation that the richest of rich Britons had become even richer!   The rest of us don’t need official confirmation to know that we have become poorer!

This week are the local government elections.  The Prime Minister must surely be praying that the electorate will concentrate on local issues!