Week 35 2012

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

A Red Cross Parcel

            It is strange how, as one gets older, a recently taken photograph can stir up memories of a distant past.  Here is a photograph, taken recently, of my German friend Ingrid in the reception office (it looks as though it doubles as someone’s breakfast room!) of a guest house near Colditz Castle, familiar to a great many film and tv viewers.  Ingrid was on a sight-seeing visit.

            What particularly stirred my memory was the cardboard box with a Red Cross on it by Ingrid’s right hand.  It is one of the Red Cross Parcels that saved the lives of thousands of British prisoners of war (including myself) during World War II.  Each parcel contained a tin of powdered milk, tins of meat or fish, butter or margarine, and jam or other sweet spread.  There were also biscuits and a packet of either tea or coffee.  Each PoW was supposed to receive one such parcel a week.  At the small working camp in Zittau in eastern Saxony where I spent the last eighteen months of World War II, we received our parcels regularly even when the Third Reich was visibly crumbling around us.  At the large POW Camp in Italy where we had spent the previous eighteen months of our captivity, delivery was much more spasmodic, probably due more to failure in the local transport system than to malice.

            I thought that there was an element of malice though in the Italian authority's practice of opening each parcel and deliberately puncturing every tin before distributing them. The excuse was that it was to prevent our storing up tins for an escape attempt.  We would watch this process taking place with both hatred and hunger in our empty bellies!   On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion we watched an Italian Officer unwittingly puncture a ‘blown can’.  It made our day when the stinking contents exploded in his face and all over his immaculate uniform! 

            Colditz is, of course, famous for its escape attempts and I have been asked – perhaps a little reproachfully – why we never attempted to escape from our working camp in Germany.  We wouldn’t have needed to construct tunnels or build gliders to get away.  While working we enjoyed a great deal of freedom, often with only an elderly civilian, wearing an official armband, nominally in charge.  We could simply have walked away – but where to?  Working all day, and living cheek by jowl with our guards, we had neither the time nor the ability to forge identity papers, obtain civilian clothing and otherwise make plans for a journey of hundreds of miles through a hostile Germany to the nearest neutral country.  Wearing British uniforms with a big red triangle on the back of the jacket, and speaking very little German, I don’t think we would have got far before being recaptured.

            And the consequences of a failed escape? The escapee would have been instantly despatched to some other, much stricter and more secure, working camp.  Our easy-going guards would have been posted away, probably to active service on the Eastern Front.   They would have been replaced by Nazi zealots and a much more rigid regime would have been instituted.  Our lives, which had been tolerable, would have become those of closely guarded slave labourers – and all for an attempted escape that would have been doomed to failure from its very first moment.   

            Attempted escapes of rank and file prisoners were likely to have been taken rather more seriously than those of officers. Captured officers were an expensive burden to their captors. We were actually needed as labourers to replace a German workforce which, thanks to the folly and wickedness of their Nazi government, was bleeding to death on the Russian steppe and in the fields of France.

‘Load sixteen tons and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt’

            Those two lines, that I quote from memory from a protest-song of the 1960s, came to my mind when I learned that despite all the austerity, all the increased taxes like VAT disproportionately penalising the less wealthy, all the cutting of public services, our country has had to increase its debt this month and we remain obstinately in the grip of a double-dip recession.

            A few weeks ago I quoted an email from a blog reader who pointed out that George Osborn’s policies increased the number of people needing financial support and reduced the income from taxation. It reduced the chances of economic recovery, since a population impoverished by government policy and above-inflation price rises lacked the spending-power that was needed to get those wheels of commerce and industry turning again.  The email pointed out that the Chancellor’s  uncompromising fundamentalist attitudes meant that his only answer to the economic crisis  exacerbated by his imposed austerity and savage cuts in public expenditure, is to impose yet more austerity and cut even more deeply.  He is deepening the economic hole in which he is proudly standing!

            The Prime Minister, Chancellor and their colleagues seem blissfully unaware of the effects on taxpayers and voters of cuts in services and allowances coupled with increasing prices. Last year, as an over-eighty year old householder I had a 25 percent cut in my winter fuel allowance; from £400 to £300. At about the same time there were over-the-top increases in fuel prices. My supplementary solar water heating and the increased insulation I had installed helped me weather both these economic blows.   One large fuel supplier now warns of price increases three times above inflation that will be imposed this autumn.  Where one supplier leads it is likely that others will follow.   I can only hope that the new condensing gas-fired boiler that has replaced my old Baxi Bermuda back boiler, will limit the effect of that increase too.  Many elderly householders, because they do not own the property in which they live, or simply haven’t the financial resources needed, are in a much more serious position than I am.  They may well be faced with the stark choice; eat or heat!

            Nor, of course, is the price of heating our homes the only extra expense that many taxpayers are facing now, or will have to face in the coming months.  Transport costs (since virtually everything that we buy has to be transported, the effect of these goes far beyond private motorists) are much higher than they were last year and are destined to rise further.    Those who think it both economically wise and socially responsible to use public transport rather than a private car have also had a shock. Rail travel costs are to rise well above the level of general inflation.  The Gazette reports that the cost of a season ticket from Colchester to London will rise by over £300.

            Despite recent reports of a slowing down, even reversal, of house price inflation the fact remains that since the dawn of the new millennium twelve years ago, house prices in the Tendring District have risen by 82 percent.   A home which in 2001 cost £93,412, today has a price of £170,285.  Meanwhile average wages in our area increased by only 31 percent, rising from £12,376 to £16,571 a year.  The dream of our becoming a nation of home owners encouraged during the Thatcher years is becoming an ever more distant mirage.

            At the same time as the gap between incomes and house prices is widening, Banks and Building Societies, having been stung as a result of having given 95 percent and even 100 percent mortgages to very dubious borrowers, are tightening their rules and demanding ever-larger deposits.  The Gazette reports that a decade ago, banks were willing to take deposits of 10 percent of the value of the property.  Now, many require up to 25 percent.  As a result, although monthly repayments on mortgages are at a record low level, the average deposit required for the purchase of a house in Colchester has leapt from £11,496 to £50,703!

            Way back in 1956 when my wife and I obtained a mortgage to buy the bungalow in which I am writing these words, the normal 10 percent deposit required was reduced to 5 percent because of a guarantee from Clacton Council, then my employer.  I hesitate to reveal what a tiny sum by today’s reckoning that was.  We still had to sell my wife’s engagement ring to raise it though!  In those days, for £50,000 you could have bought several  very nice homes outright!

            Then though, every local authority had a stock of council house, bungalows and flats available, and an annual building programme to meet local future need.  These Council homes were not just to accommodate the penniless homeless, but were intended for any local family that needed a home and lacked the capital to pay a mortgage deposit, or an income large enough to pay the regular mortgage repayments, plus the other expenses that house purchase brings. That situation ended with the passing of the Right to Buy legislation in the 1980s which required local authorities (but not private landlords) to sell off to existing tenants at bargain-basement prices. the properties they had inherited from their thrifty forebears, We are still suffering from the effects of that legislation (which has been described as buying votes with other people’s money) today.  

            No, I don’t know how our country can reduce its deficit and drag itself out of recession, though I have no doubt that, in the long run, narrowing that yawning gulf between the super rich and the poor would help.  The fact that I don’t know the answer doesn’t matter in the least.  What is of concern is that I don’t think that George Osborn and David Cameron know the answer either.  Nor, I think, does Ed Miliband (who actually apologised for the fact that New Labour had opposed the Right to Buy legislation!)

            Oh – for anyone who is interested I think that the next two lines of the protest-song from which I quoted at the beginning of this comment are:

St Peter don’t you call me, ‘cos I can’t go,

I owe my soul to the Company Store!

Rupert’s Revenge?

          Of course, Rupert Murdoch may have had nothing directly to do with the publication in his flagship newspaper the Sun, alone among British Newspapers, of the pictures featuring Prince Harry that have been the subject of so much publicity and controversy, and that ‘the Palace’ had particularly asked should not be published in the British press.   It is difficult though to believe that the editor of a newspaper in which Mr Murdoch has always had a special interest would go ahead and publish them without first consulting and obtaining the approval of his boss. Mr Murdoch may well have welcomed an opportunity to cause further embarrassment to the British ‘Establishment’ which, having sought his favour for years, had now seen fit to repudiate him.

            The circumstances under which the pictures were taken suggest that Prince Harry may have been carefully chosen as the victim of a ‘honey trap’. The fact that the photographer managed surreptitiously to take such photos at crucial moments does suggest careful preparation – and, I am quite sure, will have earned him (or her) a great deal of money.  As for the Prince himself, I really have no comment to make.  A personable and wealthy young man who is also third in line for the throne is faced with opportunities for self indulgence (old fogies like me think of them as being 'temptations') far beyond the experience of the overwhelming majority of us. Who knows how we might have responded to such opportunities at his age and in similar circumstances.   I think that there may be a greater risk of  the Prince becoming an object of ridicule rather than of either envy or disgust.

            Meanwhile the readership of the Sun, the only British newspaper to ignore the royal request, has probably reached fresh heights today The editor claims that, by publishing the photos, he has struck a blow for Free Speech!  He will certainly have struck a blow for Richard Murdoch’s claim last year (flatly contradicted by his sister this week!) that profitability is the sole criterion by which a newspaper should be judged.

            If freedom of the press means no more that freedom to publish the salacious details of the private lives of celebrities, then it really isn't a freedom worth fighting for.