Week 49 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

Be careful what you wish for!

          Do you remember how recently it was that we were all worried about Britain’s devastating drought?   Not much more than six months ago we were warned about the dreadful effects of a drier than usual autumn and winter.   It would, we were told, take weeks of steady rain to replenish reservoirs, fill rivers and bring underground water supplies to their normal levels. Quite early in the spring the use of hose-pipes for watering domestic gardens or washing the family car was banned in a great many areas.   We all yearned for soft refreshing rain.  In churches and places of worship throughout the UK rain was the object of many a heartfelt prayer.

            Oh dear!  What happened was like one of those fairy stories in which a wish is granted by an apparently benevolent witch.   The wish is fulfilled but with consequences that had not been foreseen.

            We had our rain, buckets of it, throughout a thoroughly wet summer.  Rivers filled and overflowed. Homes were flooded. For a brief period in some areas there were simultaneously hose pipe bans and floods!  Soon though the Water Authorities realized that they had, in a few weeks, received several normal months’ worth of rain.  Hose pipe bans were lifted and the faithful began to pray for a dry and sunny late-summer and autumn so that, at Harvest Thanksgiving services they could sing confidently, ‘All is safely gathered in, ‘ere the winter storms begin!’

But in many parts of the UK all was not safely gathered in, or at least harvest time had not brought the abundant crops for which farmers and gardeners had hoped. Autumn brought more heavy rain and now – at the beginning of winter – we have been having yet more.  Once again there have been flooded homes in the West Country, in Yorkshire and in the North-East. Some unfortunates have had their homes flooded three times in as many months.  This south-eastern corner of East Anglia, although having much more rain than usual, has escaped the floods.  Our Essex Sunshine Coast really is a good place to live!

New Year’s Day 1979. My motor caravan outside my bungalow in Dudley Road, Clacton. I hope that we don’t get a repeat of the weather!

What next?  As I type these words the sky has cleared but the temperature has dropped several degrees and the immediate weather forecast is ‘dry - but much colder!’   Oh dear, I do hope we don’t get standing snow.  It is the one circumstance guaranteed to keep my mobility scooter in its shed (or, as I prefer to put it, my ‘iron horse in its stable’!) and leave me house-bound!

I have distrusted forecasts of any kind on the front page of the Daily Express ever since in 1938 and early 1939 when their headline assured us that ‘There will be no war this year, nor next year either!’  In 2011 they kept up the tradition by forecasting icy weather just before that Indian Summer in October.  I have an uncomfortable feeling though that this year, as they forecast a bitterly cold and ice-bound winter – they may be right!

The Government - and the Press

I sometimes think that politicians must be made of sterner stuff than the rest of us.  During the past year we have seen disastrous failures in Government functions that, had I been the senior politician responsible for the department concerned, I would have felt demanded my immediate resignation.  However, the politicians concerned have simply shrugged their shoulders, blamed the disaster on the civil servants involved, assured the public that ‘lessons have been learned’ and carried on as though nothing had happened.

Reaction to the phone hacking and corruption scandal that has engulfed the press, the police and the politicians during the past year has been somewhat similar. All the press have been tainted but at the centre of the scandal was News International, a news media empire ruled by Rupert Murdoch, Australian by birth and a citizen of the USA by adoption.   Successive British Prime Ministers have courted his favour and that of his lieutenants in the hope of ensuring favourable headlines in the Sun, the News of the World and other publications under his control.   This hope was not unjustified.  ‘It was us wot done it!’ boasted the Sun after one of Mrs Thatcher’s electoral victories.

I have long believed that New Labour with its rejection of democratic socialism and traditional Labour Values and, in government, its willing acceptance of the leadership of the most right-wing American President of the last century, was created for no other reason than to persuade Rupert Murdoch to switch his media Empire’s political allegiance from the Conservative to the Labour Party and thus  make Tony Blair’s emasculated party ‘electable’.

David Cameron followed in Tony Blair’s footsteps, appointing Andy Coulson, one of Rupert Murdoch’s former lieutenants as his personal spin-doctor and becoming a close friend of News International’s Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks. Both these former employees of News International now face criminal charges in connection with alleged phone hacking and other scandals related to press abuse of its powers.

The Leveson enquiry investigated objectively and comprehensively the whole range of Press Activities, interviewing Rupert Murdoch and his senior lieutenants and former lieutenants,  Prime Minister David Cameron, Tony Blair and a great many others. David Cameron told victims of the phone hacking and other abuses of press freedom, that he would accept the verdict of the Leveson Enquiry in full, ‘unless it was completely bonkers’. As part of the verdict would inevitably criticise the Prime Minister himself for the closeness of his relationship with members of the News International organisation, I would have thought that his best course of action would have been to accept Lord Leveson’s verdict and recommendations in full, hurry through any legislation that might be necessary to implement those recommendations, and hope that the electorate would soon forget the whole sorry affair.

But that isn’t going to happen.  David Cameron has evidently forgotten his pledge to News International’s victims. While accepting Lord Leveson’s insistence on the need to have a strong and wholly independent (both of politicians and of those involved in the press) body to regulate press behaviour, he is strongly opposed to that body having the statutory underpinning needed to enforce its decisions.

The reason for this, so it is said, is to protect the freedom of the press – a future government might use any such legislation as a springboard to curb press freedom.  What total rubbish!   Does Mr Cameron really imagine that a government of the future determined to muzzle the press would give two hoots about decisions that might have been made a decade or so earlier?  Can you imagine Hitler, in 1936, having the least interest in whatever a democratic German government had decided in the 1920s?    In any case, how ‘free’ is a press where editorial policy and political direction of a large part of it are dictated by a cosmopolitan multi-millionaire with no roots here and owing no loyalty to this country, its culture and its institutions?

Until we give more thought to the ownership of the press we should worry less about having a government-controlled press and worry rather more about having a press-controlled government constantly ‘adjusting’ its policies in the hope of gaining a few more votes at by-elections as a result of positive headlines in the tabloids and the support of the press moguls!

Robin Hoods – in reverse

There is no field in which the members of the government have revealed what are, I fear, their true colours than that of housing.  It is there that their Robin Hood in Reverse policy of robbing the poor to benefit the rich is most clearly exposed.

In order to level off to some extent the difference between the proportion of their incomes that poor and very wealthy people pay in taxation, it has been suggested that there should be extra higher bands of Council Tax liability and/or an extra ‘mansion tax’ paid by those whose homes are valued at over £2 million.

Both ideas have been vetoed by David Cameron.  He really doesn’t think that those who have worked hard and saved all their lives for their homes, should be penalised for doing so. How many people who live in homes worth over £2 million acquired them by working and saving hard all through their lives?   You’d need to enjoy a salary of £50,000 every year for 40 years to earn £2 million, never mind save it!

When considering housing at the other end of the social scale, government attitudes are very different.  Council tenants, and tenants in receipt of Housing Benefit, are to be charged a ‘bedroom tax’ for every empty bedroom. No, they are not allowed to have a spare bedroom for occasional visitors. Those financially squeezed Daily Mail readers can’t be expected to subsidise the hospitality of ‘benefit scroungers’.

Never mind the fact that some of those tenants will be old people who have paid taxes all their working lives and are struggling to live on the state pension plus any benefits to which they may be entitled.   Others will be employed, but on or near the minimum wage.  They need the housing benefit, not for themselves, but to add to the wealth of rapacious landlords.  Nobody, says the government, will have to pay the bedroom tax.  There is the choice of moving into smaller accommodation (if they can find any) or taking in a lodger.

            A listener to the BBC’s Breakfast Programme, when hearing about the proposed ‘Bedroom Tax’, enquired how many spare bedrooms there might be at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country home, which is also publicly owned.