Week No 40 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Patronising the Poor?

            Nick Clegg continues to insist that the wealthy must make a bigger contribution to the nation’s finances, though quite how he hopes to achieve this is far from clear.   There are financial incentives to encourage universities to accept more students from deprived backgrounds and schools are given similar incentives to provide extra educational help to children from deprived families.  There are free school meals for children who need them and free public services for those in receipt of means-tested benefit.  Meanwhile well-meaning politicians boast that they have removed the income tax burden from thousands of less-well-off families by raising the level at which this tax becomes liable.

            These measures are like treating acute pneumonia with a couple of aspirins!   Our aim should surely not be to make poverty more tolerable but to reduce and ultimately abolish it.   I do not believe that it is a good idea to remove those with low incomes from income tax liability.  This encourages the idea of the division of society into the tax payers, whom the taxman robs of the fruit of their labours, and the rest of the population who benefit from this, including of course the scroungers and benefit cheats of whom we read so much in the popular press.   It encourages folk like Mr Romney, Barak Obama’s opponent in the forthcoming Unites States Presidential Election to announce that he has no interest in the 47 percent of the American population who are not wealthy enough to be taxed.

            In this blog I have again and again stressed my conviction that income tax should be the principal source of government revenue and should be regarded as our annual subscription for membership of a very exclusive international club; British citizenship.  It should be a fixed proportion of the gross income of every adult British citizen without exception, from the very poorest to the very wealthiest.  The contribution of those surviving on job seekers’ allowance, disability living allowance, the state retirement pension, or the minimum wage would be very little, while that of the very wealthy would be a great deal. We would though all be contributing an equal proportion of our income to our country’s needs.  All of us, from the very lowest to the very highest, would have a stake in our country’s future prosperity.  Did not Jesus Christ point out that the widow who contributed her ‘mite’ to the Temple Treasury was making a bigger sacrifice than the wealthy – since they merely handed over part of their surplus wealth while  she gave all that she had? 

            The proportion of each adult’s income that would be needed to balance the nation’s books could be worked out every year.  If everybody contributed I’d be surprised if it would need to be higher than 20 percent.  This, I believe, would be sufficient to fund all necessary public services (a government sensible enough to adopt such a system would surely also have the sense to scrap those nuclear submarines!) and to pay generous allowances to those unable to work or unable to find work.

            Don’t let us patronise the poor.   Let’s abolish them!

It’s just a word!

           As incidents go, it wasn't  a very important one, but Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell’s reaction when frustrated by the Police in Downing Street, certainly demonstrated that when the occasion arises, well-heeled patricians from society’s top drawer can be as bad tempered and foul-mouthed as the very toughest and roughest of plebs.   I thought that Mr Mitchell was at his most objectionable, not when he lost his temper (we all do that sometimes!) but when he made a half-hearted apology, implying that the long-suffering police were lying about the actual words that he had used.

 It all brought to my mind (as so many things do these days!) an incident that occurred, it must have been in 1932 or ’33, when I was eleven or twelve and we had Ron, a cousin of mine from Bethnal Green, staying with us in Ipswich during the school holiday.  Ron’s dad, my uncle, was a mounted policeman and the family lived in married quarters in Bethnal Green Police Station.  Ron was a few months younger than me.  We were good friends and we got into all sorts of trouble together.

Ron (on the right) and I

           

On one occasion I remember that something had upset him and he used one of the words that, from Mr Mitchell’s lips, have caused offence.  No – it wasn’t ‘plebs’. I doubt if Ron would have heard of that.  It was the other one and, just like Mr Mitchell, he used it ‘adjectively’.  It happened that he was at the time within the hearing of my normally easy-going mother – and I was totally astonished at her reaction.  That, she thundered, was a truly dreadful word that was used only by the very lowest of the low.   If she ever heard him say it again he’d be packed straight off to Bethnal Green and his mum and dad would be told why!  Goodness!  He certainly didn’t use it again, or at least not when my mum was around.

            This was in the early 1930s and I don’t recall often hearing that word again until I was in the army, nearly ten years later.  Even there it was used quite sparingly until I was a PoW when we really did have something to swear about.  I remember it particularly in Germany where we were working regularly both with German civilians, and with conscripted slave-workers from Russia, the Ukraine and other occupied countries.  They were fascinated by our bad language and our ready use of it, and would try with varying degrees of success to follow our bad example!  Perhaps, even as I type this, some very elderly Ivan or Natasha (well, I’m still around so why shouldn’t they be?) in St. Peterburg, or Odessa or Kiev, may have clumsily knocked over a glass of vodka and have used an expletive that, as they explain to their puzzled grandchildren, they learned from some Anglishky comrades way back in 1944!

            Here in England the use of that word is no longer limited to the lowest of the low’ as my mother had insisted it had been in 1932. You may well hear it if you walk behind any group of school children chatting to each other! It is to be found in the first line of a poem by a celebrated modern poet.  It was used very effectively in the acclaimed film The King’s Speech. It is used, as we now know, by ex-public-schoolboy cabinet ministers. It sometimes appears in the press and has lost much of its ability to shock. However, I am old fashioned enough to be able to declare confidently that you will never come across it in Tendring Topics…….on line! 

A Footnote

While I was writing the above I found myself thinking of my father.  He died suddenly of a coronary thrombosis in 1939 at the age of 57.  I was 18 and just in the army at the time.  My father had enlisted in the 17^th Lancers in 1901 when he was 18 and left the army as Regimental Sergeant-Major of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps in 1922 after having completed 21 years service.  At the time of his death he was employed as clerk, dispenser, veterinary nurse and general dogsbody to a local veterinary surgeon.

      As I wrote about the use of bad language by myself and others I realized, with some astonishment, that I had never at any time throughout my childhood and youth heard him swear or use any ‘bad language’. On reflection, I hope that as far as their childhood was concerned, my sons would say the same of me.  How about during the years since their childhood? .............. well they do read this blog, so I had better claim no more than that neither they, nor their mum, were ever either the cause or the  object of any verbal lapses that I may, very occasionally, have had!  

  

Above are pictures of my father - as a staff sergeant before his final promotion to Regimental Sergeant Major and, as I knew him best, a few years before his death.

A Promise Fulfilled (sort of!)

          When, earlier this year, Tendring District Council introduced its new refuse and recyclables collection scheme there was a storm of protest.  Apart from the fact that the new scheme demanded extra effort from householders, there were two main criticisms of the new system.

            One I wrote about in this blog a few weeks ago.  It was that with the new scheme only plastic bottles (milk bottles, cleaning fluid bottles and the like) were collected for recycling.  Plastic bags and wrapping and plastic food containers, that had been collected for recycling under the old regime, now had to be put into our black plastic bags for landfill.  That problem may be solved in a few years’ time when it is hoped that a new plastics sorting centre will be built in the south of the county.

The other criticism was that, presumably to save a few pounds, there were no lids provided for the red boxes intended for the reception of waste paper and cardboard for recycling.  We in Clacton may have the lowest rainfall in the UK but there are still occasions (particularly during this summer!) when the contents of the box could be reduced to a soggy mess.  We do have our fair share of ‘sea breezes’ and these are quite capable of scattering paper from the uncovered red boxes far and wide.

            The justification for this complaint was demonstrated on every breezy collection day, with paper litter bestrewing footpaths and nearby front gardens.  The council promised to do something about it.  And now they have, but in a way that explains my ‘sort of’ in the heading above.   They have obtained a supply of fitting plastic lids for the red paper-and-cardboard boxes but, presumably again to save themselves a few pounds, are not arranging for the refuse/salvage collectors to leave them with householders on their rounds.  The lids are available for householders to collect from centres in the district. We Clactonians can pick one up from the reception desk at Clacton Town Hall.

            That’s fine for car owner/drivers but what about the rest of us?  The lid will hardly go in a shopping basket and, although light enough in weight, isn’t the easiest thing to carry under one’s arm!  Were it not for my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) I would be housebound.  Would I be able somehow to load the lid onto it I wondered.   I asked an anonymous but helpful voice on the phone, ‘Has the council made provision for delivery of lids to the elderly and disabled?’   ‘Only to those who have already made arrangements for their refuse and salvage to be collected from outside their back door’, came the reply. That ruled me out! A kind neighbour puts my plastic sack and salvage boxes out every week.  I had friends whom I was sure would collect a lid for me if asked, but I don’t like taking advantage of their good nature unless absolutely compelled to do so.

            I drove my scooter to the Town Hall.  At the reception desk a very helpful young lady supplied me with a lid and even gave me a tip on how best to transport it (Clacton is a town of mobility scooters and I clearly wasn’t the first with the same problem!).  I got it home safely.

            So – I now have my full quota of refuse and recyclables collection equipment, and hope, with the help of my friendly neighbour, to have my black plastic bag for landfill, my food waste container (never much in that!) and either my red paper-and-cardboard box, or my green plastic-bottles-and-metal-can box at the entrance to my driveway ready for collection early on every Tuesday morning.