Tendring Topics.......on Line

Welcome Northumberlandia!

          Where seams of coal – or other valuable natural material – are close to the earth’s surface, opencast mining provides an inexpensive and relatively safe way of extracting it.  It does leave a ruined landscape though – an enormous hole in the ground and tons and tons of rock, clay and soil ‘spoil’.   There are various ways of dealing with this problem.   Who, for instance, would guess that the delightful lake, venue of every kind of water sport that, on a recent visit, I could see from my bedroom window in the Haus am See Hotel in Olbersdorf in eastern Germany, was once an opencast lignite (‘brown coal’) mine?

            Rather nearer home American landscape architect Charles Jencks has found an even more imaginative way of dealing with the aftermath of opencast mining in Northumberland.  From 1.5 million tons of rock and clay spoil from a local mine he has created the enormous reclining figure of a woman (Northumberlandia!) as the centrepiece of an attractive country park.   The figure is 1,300 ft. long and 112 ft. high at its highest point. The recumbent figure is encircled by carefully planned and sited footpaths. 

She is naked but not, I think, in a way that will cause offence.  She is surely much more attractive than the male figures cut into the chalk hills of the southern shires. Northumberlandia  certainly complements that other iconic local figure, the well-loved Angel of the North.  I am not at all sure, mind you, that this newly arrived curvaceous and very earthy lady is an appropriate companion for an angel.  Perhaps it is just as well that they are a few miles apart and strictly immobile!     Last week, she was officially declared ‘open to the public' by the Princess Royal.  I hope that she, and the country park of which she is the central feature, will attract many visitors.

            My only criticism is of her name.  Northumberlandia surely is a bit of a mouthful for northerners and southerners alike.  I have no doubt that local people will soon think of an appropriate and less long-winded title.  My own suggestion would be Geordina, as a tribute to the nickname by which her fellow northern English are happy to be known?

Some Modern Myths

          A disillusioned blog reader has written to me expressing his disgust at the fact that the then Housing and Local Government Minister Grant Shapps had said in the course of a newspaper interview that Social Housing should be renamed Tax Funded Housing.   He hoped presumably to arouse the resentment of other tax payers. My correspondent points out that Mr Shapps is himself a Tax Funded Minister and that he and all his parliamentary colleagues are tax funded MPs!   Perhaps we should be grateful that the former Minister for Housing and Local Government has been ‘promoted’ (is his new job really more important?) to that of joint Chairman of the Conservative Party.

            The idea that folk in social housing are uniquely supported out of taxation is just one of the modern myths that divide our society.  There is, for instance, a general belief that those in Social Housing are work-shy drop-outs living off the State.  I know from my own experience (and am assured that the situation hasn’t changed materially in that respect) that most tenants either do have a job that pays only the minimum wage or little more, or are pensioners with no capital and no occupational pension.

            There is a similar myth that housing benefit, helping tenants in the private sector, is just for the unemployed.   In fact, a great many claimants are hard working people whose salary is just too low to pay an exorbitant rent, or folk who have retired after having been a shop assistant or something similar all their lives, and who are now surviving on a state pension.

            Finally there is the particularly noxious belief encouraged by the government that all public service workers (including doctors, nurses and ancillary health workers and therapists, fire fighters, teachers, the police and so on) are ‘a drain on the economy, funded by the‘productive’ part of society the ‘private` sector. This, of course includes moneylenders, those involved with the betting ‘industry’, proprietors and employees of escort agencies and massage parlours, beauty and make-up artists.

            My correspondent speculates on how different the world would look if we were all rewarded in accordance with the contribution that we make to society.  Heading the list would be those who produce the food that we eat, the buildings that we live and work in and the clothes that we wear - agricultural workers, builders and factory workers making items that everybody needs. Somewhere in the middle would be those who provide the services that those essential workers and all the rest of us need (most of today’s public services).  Right at the very end would come the makers and vendors of luxury goods, of  designer clothing and of junk food and drinks, together with money lenders, gamblers and those who currently make a fortune by moving money from one account to another - just about a total reversal of the present position in fact!

             That certainly would be the day - and I had thought that some of my ideas were pretty utopian!

This year?..........next year?........sometime?.............    

            When the Tendring District Council introduced its controversial refuse collection/recycling scheme earlier this year there was a storm of angry protest from local householders.   One of the more justified complaints was that in at least one respect, less material was being recycled under the new scheme than had been under the old one.

Those of us who had co-operated with the council’s recycling efforts (there has always been a substantial minority who didn’t!) had put out our green boxes every week with paper and cardboard waste, metal cans of all descriptions and most plastics – including, for instance, plastic bags, yoghurt and margarine containers and other plastic food containers, as well as plastic milk bottles and other plastic bottles used for cleaning fluids and so on, together with our black plastic bag filed with unrecyclable refuse for landfil..   

With the new system was introduced we were all issued with a red box into which we put our waste paper and cardboard to be collected on alternate weeks.  The existing green box was to be used for plastic milk bottles and other plastic bottles only, and was to be put out for collection on the other alternate weeks.  The weekly collection of our non-recyclable rubbish continued under the new system, but we were asked also to put out every week a new locked-lid container with waste food.   Plastic bags and plastic containers other than bottles, which had previously been collected for recycling, now had to go into the black plastic bags for landfill.   These plastic items comprised a considerable proportion of many householders’ refuse.  Failure to collect them for recycling seemed to nullify the whole purpose of the new scheme.

Enquirers at the Council’s offices were told that the Council was aware of this problem and intended to solve it.  In the future there would be a comprehensive collection of plastics.  No date was ever given or suggested but enquirers undoubtedly hoped that this would take place within months, rather than years.

We now know that it won’t!   Tendring Council’s hopes of expanding the present system rest on a new recycling sorting centre to be opened in Basildon.   It will, says the Clacton Gazette recover recyclable materials such as metal, plastic and glass. Work on the new sorting centre hasn’t yet started, but the County Council hopes that it will start sometime in 2013 and will be completed by 2015, still three years away!   It isn’t even quite certain yet that the centre will be started or that, if it is ever in action, it will take plastics not covered by the present scheme.  Tendring’s ‘Cabinet Member for the Environment’, Councillor Nick Turner, is reported as saying, ‘We don’t know the fine details yet, but as far as we are led to believe, we will be able to collect more plastics’.  Oh yes, and the final paragraph of the Gazette’s report tells us that the sorting centre site 'is currently waiting for planning permission!’  This year?...........next year?.........sometime?........never?

‘Lies, damned lies – and statistics!’

In tv interviews I have heard economics expert after economic expert express surprise at the fact that although Britain’s economy is undoubtedly in a double dip recession with no signs of an early recovery, unemployment figures haven’t been rising as one would have expected.  They have either remained static or have fallen slightly.

A study by Sheffield Hallam University led by Professor Steve Fothergill and welcomed by Tendring Council leader Neil Stock suggests that the reason could be that the state of our economy is established by an independent body and is beyond dispute, while the unemployment statistics are based on data selected by the government.   The study finds that unemployment in seaside towns in the south of England is much worse than official figures suggest.  In our own Tendring District of north-east Essex, for example, the government figure for unemployment is 4.2 percent.  The study suggests that the true figure is 9.6 percent, more than twice as high as the official figure, with almost one in ten people out of work.

One explanation of the discrepancy is that since the 1980s successive governments have hidden the real unemployment figures by moving unemployed people onto sickness and incapacity benefit. Now this process is being reversed but there is still a long way to go.  Another factor is the number of unemployed people disqualified from claiming Job Seekers Allowance because they have savings or because they have a partner who is working.

I certainly remember in the 1980s a friend of mine, in his early sixties, who was told that he could draw his retirement pension early if he undertook not to look for work.  Sixty-five year old Peter Bloomfield of Enfield, interviewed by a Gazette reporter, confirmed that this practice of the Thatcher years continued into the Blair governments of the 1990s.  ‘When I was unemployed in the 1990s, they put me onto incapacity benefit, even though I was only unemployed.  I was told that because of my age I wouldn’t find work’.

In conclusion Professor Fothergill makes a point that I have made over and over again in this blog.  ‘Our figures cast serious doubt on the likely impact of  government initiatives such as the Work Programme and Universal Credit, which are founded on the assumption that unemployment can be brought down simply by encouraging the unemployed to look for work.  There has to be jobs for people to go to.