Week No 41 2012

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

‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat………’

            It might have been thought that we had seen and heard the last of Lord Hanningfield.   After almost a decade served as leader of Essex County Council he was discovered to have been fiddling his expenses as a member of the House of Lords, claiming expenses for overnight stays in London when actually he had been driven to his home in West Hanningfield by his Essex County Council funded car and driver!  On one occasion he claimed for an overnight stay in London when he was actually on a flight to India at County Council expense!  In 2011 he was found guilty of having stolen £13,379 by fraud and received the very lenient sentence of nine months in prison – the lowest sentence of any imposed as a result of the Parliamentary expenses scandal.  Alone of those convicted of fraud during that investigation, he showed no contrition and, while not contesting the facts, clearly considered himself to be innocent. ‘I did just the same as hundreds of other Peers’, he claimed.

            Extremely lucky in the length of his sentence he was even luckier in being discharged, for reasons beyond my understanding, after serving only nine weeks of it. In due course he again took his seat in the House of Lords (I know of no better reason for the urgency of reform of the ‘Upper House’!) where he now considered himself to be an authority on the penal system!

            But Nemesis awaited him.   It appears that the £13,379 for which he served his brief sentence was only a fraction of the sum that he had really stolen from the public purse. Further investigations had revealed that he may have helped himself to over £67,000 of taxpayers’ money.  Now Southwark Crown Court has given him the option of repaying a further £37,158 within the next six months or of going back to prison for a further 15 months.

            Lord Hanningfield’s lawyer Mr Mark Spragg is quoted as saying, ‘He’s appalled.  He’s not a wealthy man.  His only asset is his house.  He may have to sell it and have a council house’.  Mr Spragg is unduly optimistic on his client’s behalf.  He clearly does not keep up with the news.

            I have never seen Lord Hanningfield’s bungalow home in West Hanningfield but I would be extremely surprised if when sold it failed to realise many times the £37,158 that his lordship has to raise to stay out of gaol.   Even in the more relaxed days in which I was Clacton’s Housing Manager a homeless single man of 72 would have had pretty low priority as a council housing applicant. Today, thanks to the policies of the political party in which when in opposition Lord Hanningfield was a ‘shadow minister’, a single homeless man of 72 in possession (even after paying the money he owes!) of what all other housing applicants would consider to be a vast fortune, would have no chance whatsoever!

            Nor would the raising of that £37,158 necessarily see the end of Lord Hanningfield’s troubles.  So far, only his misuse of public funds as a member of the House of Lords has been brought into the cruel light of day.  His possible misuse of funds under his control in his capacity of Leader of Essex County Council is currently still under police investigation.  I think that other county councillors and, possibly, senior member of the County Council staff may also be awaiting the outcome of that investigation with some trepidation.   Surely those who knew or suspected that they were accepting hospitality provided by misappropriated funds would be in much the same position as receivers of stolen goods.

‘One Nation’ Britain!

            It was a brilliant slogan for Ed Miliband to adopt for his (if I may coin a phrase) ‘Even-Newer-Labour’.  Easily remembered, it recalls the national unity displayed in support of the recent Olympic Games, it outbids the government’s quite obviously false claim that ‘we’re all in this together’,  and since it is a phrase coined by Benjamin Disraeli founder of the modern Conservative Party, it makes a bid for the Conservative voter.

            It is worth remembering that Disraeli began his political career as a Radical, one of the ‘loony lefties’ of his day, and a supporter of the Chartists who, outrageously in the early 19^th Century, demanded among other things payment of MPs and universal voting rights for all adult males. He was a successful author. The two nations portrayed in his novel ‘Sybil’ or ‘The Two Nations’, published in 1845, were the nations of the rich and the poor.  He obviously had observed at first hand the appalling living conditions of the industrial poor in the early part of the 19^th century, and he described them in graphic detail.  His description is, in fact, remarkably similar to that in Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, also published in 1845, and written by Frederick Engels, joint founder with Karl Marx, of the Communist Party!

            By 1845 Disraeli had become a Conservative MP.  The political scene in Britain at that time was very different from that which prevailed throughout the twentieth century and that of today.   Core support for the Conservative Party came from the landed gentry and the aristocracy, their tenants and dependents.   Support for the Liberal Party came not from working people (they couldn’t vote so no-one bothered much about them!) but from the new-rich factory and shop owners whom Disraeli may have seen as responsible for the plight of the industrial poor.  It is possible that he had a romantic notion of the landed gentry and nobility freeing the urban poor from the clutch of the materialistic ‘worshippers of Mammon’ who owned England’s ‘dark, satanic mills’ and the slum-towns surrounding them.  As the years passed, Disraeli’s dream of ‘one nation’ seems to have faded.  The pursuit of imperial glory took its place.  He became a personal friend of Queen Victoria whom he persuaded to accept the grandiose title of Empress of India.

            Is Ed Miliband destined to revive the dream of One Nation?   It will take more than just stirring words and inspiring speeches to do so.  Britain’s poor today, thank God, do not live in the squalid poverty that they did nearly two centuries ago, but the gap between the nation of the poor and the nation of the wealthy is as wide as ever. It has in fact widened during the past twenty years, which include a decade of New Labour government.  Until he actively promotes and pursues practical measures to narrow that gap he has no more right to claim that the Labour Party  stands for One Nation than his opponents have to claim that ‘we’re all in this together’, and to speak for the whole nation of the population of the United Kingdom.

Some thoughts on Education

A fortnight ago I gave a qualified welcome in this blog to Education Secretary Gove’s idea of a Baccalaureate examination, closely resembling the ‘Matric’ exam I had taken in 1937, to replace the GCSE examinations that had, in many people’s eyes, become discredited.   I think perhaps that I should give a similarly cautious welcome to Ed Miliband’s suggested Technical Baccalaureate that would test candidates in their knowledge and experience of technical subjects.  I think that he had a quite separate examination in mind but it occurs to me that the scope of Mr Gove’s ‘academic’ Baccalaureate could be extended to include technical subjects.   Mathematics and English would remain compulsory subjects in the joint examination since it is really impossible to study seriously any other subject, academic or technical, without them.  They could perhaps be the only compulsory subjects, but to pass the examination candidates would need to secure a pass mark in them and in at least three other subjects.  Some technical fields are so wide that they might need to be divided into two or more sections, each one of which would count as a ‘subject’ for the examination.

I think that it is an idea worth considering.  I think too that we shouldn’t worry too much about children leaving school without any kind of exam certificate.  Prior to World War II the overwhelming majority of kids did just that – and some of them went on to become millionaires.  Many jobs do not demand paper qualifications.  Yet they may be jobs in which those that do them deservedly take pride, and that are more socially valuable than many more prestigious occupations.  If I were a potential employer I’d much prefer a note from a head teacher saying that the bearer was not a brilliant scholar but was hard working, conscientious and reliable, than that he had just about managed to scrape a pass mark in two or three GCSE subjects.  When everyone can gain some kind of educational certificate those certificates quickly lose their credibility.   As it says (or rather is sung) in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers , ‘When everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody!’

There is in any case a lot more to education than obtaining some sort of a qualification.  It would be nice to be able to think that all children leave school with something of the three ‘rs’ (reading, writing and arithmetic), something of the nature of science, and at least something of the world’s and their own country’s geography and colourful history. I believe that, for the most part, that was the position pre-World War II. It surely isn’t too much to ask for today, after at least eleven years full-time education

 The Dynamic (or should it be Disastrous?) Duo         

I sometimes wonder if our Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer (described by one of their supporters as ‘posh boys who don’t know the price of milk’) really inhabit the same world as I do. In rejecting the idea of a Mansion Tax, for instance, David Cameron says that he doesn’t feel that if someone has worked hard and saved to get the home he wants, he should be penalised for it.  For goodness sake! – nobody is thinking of extra taxes for the owner of a comfortable home with a double garage in a leafy suburb, or even of a ‘desirable residence with stabling and a half acre of land’ valued at about £500,000, of the kind that those participating in BBC tv’s Escape to the country’ usually find to be ‘not quite what we were looking for’.   The ‘mansions’ that proposers of this tax had in mind were those worth over £2 million – the sort of place, for instance, that might be occupied by the  chief executive of a large international corporation  who invited  prime ministers or other influential politicians to jolly Christmas Parties!

            Then there’s George Osborne warning us that, unless he can manage to squeeze a bit more out of the poor and disadvantaged we shall – for the first time in 200 years – have a situation in which children are worse off than their parents.  Now I fully accept that I was been better off in every way than my parents, and that my sons have been better off than me and have had opportunities that I never had.  I am very glad about that.  I cannot see though any way in which the next generation that includes my grandchildren, are anything but much worse off than their parents.  Their parents, if they aspired to university, had free tuition, and means-tested grants from their local authority on which to live while they studied for their degrees.   On completing their education they generally had no great difficulty finding suitable employment, they usually had no serious debts and were free to save up to get married and make a home.  By their time (unlike mine) it was usual for a wife to continue in work, at least until the first child of the marriage was born.  For some though, being a full-time wife, home-maker and mother was a possible and wholly acceptable option.

            The price of properties was still relatively low and there were plenty of houses to let at a reasonable rent (the noxious ‘right to buy’ legislation had yet to be enacted!)  Building Societies were eager to enrol house purchasers and were asking for deposits of no more than 10 or even 5 percent of the value of the property to credit-worthy applicants

How very different things are today!  Graduates leave university with a crippling debt that may hang over them for the whole of their working lives.  Young people, whether or not they have graduated, have the greatest difficulty in finding a job (both my grandsons, graduates with good honours degrees, went overseas – one to Europe and one to the Far East – to make their careers).   House prices have escalated, building societies and banks now demand enormous deposits before giving a mortgage, rents are also prohibitively high and only those who are abjectly poor can hope to get a short term tenancy (government policy demands that that’s all there are) of a council or housing association property.

As for marriage and the family (institutions that the government claims to value!) young wives nowadays are expected to be in full-time work up to the time that they give birth, and to start work again as soon as they can obtain all-day child care!    No wonder that few couples bother to marry, that we have an unprecedented number of teen-age pregnancies, an unprecedented number of abortions, and an unprecedented amount of youth crime, much of it violent.

How dare George Osborne claim that so far, each generation for the past 200 years has been better off than its predecessor!  For several years, thanks to policies that he has supported, Britain's young people have been worse off than their parents in virtually every possible way!

 I notice that he is going ‘to ask the wealthy to make a bigger contribution towards solving the nation’s problems. The rest of us don't get polite requests. We just get 'tax demands'! I wonder what he’ll do if they say NO!