Week 1 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Seeing the Old Year out and the New Year in!

            I wish all blog readers a very Happy New Year of peace and hope.  2013 was, so the top politicians will undoubtedly say, the year in which the UK finally began its recovery from the financial crisis that has been crippling us.  The political leaders of the government lose no opportunity of blaming the crisis on the profligacy of its predecessors. However the recently retired Governor of the Bank of England, who was surely in the best position to know, made it clear that it was in fact the greed and incompetence of the Bankers (political supporters of the present government) that was responsible.

            I think that he was probably correct – but that doesn’t mean that the previous government was blameless.  They should have spotted what was happening and re-introduced the curbs and restrictions on the bankers that had been abolished by their predecessors to free them for their task of wealth creation.  In fact it freed them to feather their own nests and to ruin the country.  An earlier Labour Prime Minister is said to have been ‘dazzled by duchesses’.  Tony Blair and his associates were blinded by billionaires!

            It certainly is good news that economic recovery is beginning, that output is increasing and that there are fewer unemployed.  It’s a pretty hollow recovery though when thousands of those who are in work are also officially ‘in poverty’, when money-lenders and the gambling ‘industry’  are thriving, thousands are homeless, and the fastest growing activity in England’s green and pleasant land is the establishment of food banks where charitable giving prevents the poor from actually starving to death, and ‘Crisis at Christmas’ takes a few hundred rough sleepers off the streets and – for a couple of days – gives them a tantalising glimpse of something approaching normality. 

            It seems quite likely that there will have been a ‘consumer boom’ in the few weeks running up to Christmas with tills in the local shops ringing merrily and ‘on line’ shopping flourishing as never before.  How much of that mini-boom has been funded by borrowed money – credit cards stretched to their maximum and pay-day loans making sure that the kids weren’t disappointed on Christmas morning and that there was plenty on the table later in the day?  The next few weeks will be the time of reckoning when creditors will demand that those debts be repaid – with interest.  For many it will be a far from happy New Year.

            I believe that our country will never truly prosper until it has narrowed the ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the poor; until the proportion of the income of the wealthy that is paid in income tax is the equivalent of the proportion of their income paid by the poor in indirect taxation – VAT and customs duties.  Until that happens it is simply untrue to claim that the ‘benefit system’ means that the poor are being subsidised by the wealthy.  On the contrary it is the pennies of the poor that make it possible for the wealthy to live in luxury.

            I am fully convinced that the government’s principal source of revenue should be an income tax set at a percentage  of each citizen’s gross income, before he or she has a chance to siphon it off into offshore tax havens or ‘charitable trusts’.

            There’s nothing particularly revolutionary in the idea that taxation should be by a percentage of income rather than a fixed sum.  The medieval church demanded ‘one tenth’ (a tithe) of its members’ income.  That’s probably why tithes were so unpopular with land owners and prosperous farmers!  In the public services, and I think in much of the private sector too, pay rises are a percentage of the employee’s current pay.   That’s how it is that, certainly in local government, a chief executive may claim proudly that his two percent pay rise was exactly the same as that of the most humble clerk.  Two percent of £100,000 is a considerable sum of money. Two percent of the minimum wage is a pittance.

            If pay rises are given in percentages, thus widening the gap between poor and wealthy with every pay increase, why should not income tax be levied on exactly the same principal to narrow that gap?   

Four times is more than coincidence!

            I am not a James Bond fan.  I have never read a James Bond novel, nor have I ever watched a James Bond film.  However there can be few of us who don’t know that James Bond prefers his cocktails ‘shaken but not stirred’ (can anyone really tell the difference?).   Perhaps slightly less well known is his comment when misfortunes befall him that ‘Once is happenchance, twice could be coincidence, but three times means enemy action’.

            Well, during December 2013 we have, not just  three but four times, experienced winter storms that have swept in from the Atlantic with 60, 70, 80 mph gusts of wind that have uprooted trees, brought down power lines cutting off electricity supplies, turned over high-sided vehicles and damaged buildings.  Torrential rain has brought flooding (some householders have had their homes flooded again and again) and the storm that occurred during the first week of December was accompanied by a tidal surge of the same magnitude as the one in 1953 that had brought death and devastation to many communities along the east coast.  The fact that there were no fatal casualties this time is attributable to improved sea defences, the efficiency of local authorities in evacuating threatened areas and providing temporary accommodation for those displaced, and above all perhaps, to the accuracy of the Meteorological Office’s weather forecasts.

            Four damaging storms in one month in temperate Britain (a phenomenon that has never occurred before in my nearly 93 years) - and the winter of 2013/2014 has only just begun!  Surely that – coupled with unseasonable hurricanes and snow storms in the USA, uncontrollable bush fires in an even-hotter-than-usual Australian summer, and the most destructive cyclone ever recorded devastating the Philippines, should  be enough to make even the most stubborn sceptic (our own Clacton MP for instance) accept that potentially catastrophic climate change is taking place and should be the very first concern of every government in the world!

A Family Christmas Celebration            

               

                                   Christmas Family Lunch – Double Tree Hotel, Cambridge, 25.12.2013

My family and I were extremely lucky over the Christmas period. A damaging storm kept me awake most of the night before Christmas Eve. By morning the wind had dropped and in the early afternoon my elder son drove me to Cambridge where I stayed, with eight members of my immediate family, in the Double Tree Hotel beside the River Cam.  Christmas Day was calm and sunny.  We did a little tour of Cambridge’s grey-stone colleges and of the river on which, many years earlier, I had enjoyed punting.  We later had a convivial traditional Christmas lunch at the hotel.  Boxing Day morning was again calm and sunny and in the afternoon I was driven back to Clacton-on-Sea and home!  It had been a very happy family occasion.

Heather and I punting on the Cam in the summer of 1975.  Just to remind blog readers – and myself  – that I haven’t always been a decrepit old man!

I can’t forget though that while we were enjoying ourselves in a comfortable hotel and returning to our warm and comfortable homes, thousands of fellow Brits were, some for the second or third time, refugees from flooded homes or were trying to survive a miserable Christmas in icy cold homes with no electric power for lighting, heating or cooking.

            It is surely time for our politicians to stop worrying about what may happen in the future and concentrate on the climatic disaster that is threatening us - and the whole world -  now!

           

             

Week 52 2013

                   Tendring Topics……..on line

The Grandparents of Jesus

Some twelve years ago my wife Heather and I wrote ten monologues purporting to be by witnesses of the birth of Jesus and its aftermath.  Since then they have been used in church and Quaker events and some of them have been published in The Friend, the Quaker weekly journal. Sadly Heather died in 2006.  She and I had been married for sixty years and had grandchildren of our own.

Below are our ideas of the recollections of Jesus’ grandparents which I thought might be appropriate for the ‘Christmas Edition’ of Tendring Topics….on line to be published on the internet on Christmas Eve 2013. I wish a Happy Christmas and a New Year of Peace and Hope to all blog readers!

                                                                                        

                                                         Heather and I

The Grandmother’s Tale
                          

There is no mention of Mary’s parents in the four Gospels.  Tradition, and at least one apocryphal gospel, name them as Joachim and Anne or Hanna, so that is what Heather and I did.


 'Joachim, that’s my husband, always insists that sufficient faith, hope and love will see you through any crisis.  That may well be so.  Neither of us has ever been short of love but I do know that we have needed every ounce of all the faith and hope that we could muster to see us through the last six years.

We never did see that angelic visitor!  Our Mary saw the angel all right. I have no doubt about that now.  So did Joseph, thank God. Mary tells us that the angel also appeared to some shepherds in the hills above Bethlehem when the baby was born, and later warned her and Joseph to flee to Egypt with baby Jesus to escape that wicked King Herod’s wrath.

 If only that angel had called on us – how much heartache, mistrust and desperate worry we would have been spared!  Joachim says that we may have been left out to test our faith.  It certainly did that!


 Can you imagine how we felt when Mary – then just sixteen! – calmly announced that she was pregnant.  What’s more, she insisted that her fiancé Joseph wasn’t responsible (if he had been, it would have saddened us, but would at least have been understandable).  Her son, so she said, would be the child of God’s Holy Spirit, and would prove to be the long-awaited Messiah, the salvation of Israel.


 Well, Mary had always been a thoroughly truthful girl, but we simply didn’t believe her.  If she had been your teenage daughter, would you have?  We knew, of course, that God’s holy messengers did sometimes visit humankind, but surely not to an ordinary Galilean girl like Mary; certainly not to a small out-of-the-way place like Nazareth.


  Despite Mary’s assurances I suspected Joseph.  We sent for him right away but it was quite obvious from his astonishment and dismay that he was entirely innocent.  He was broken-hearted poor chap.  He’d have liked to have believed Mary’s story but – like us – he just couldn’t.  He was keen though to save her from shame and disgrace.  Would it be possible, he wondered, for her to be sent off to a distant relative to have her baby?  We’d all have to sleep on it.


  Sleep!  Neither Joachim nor I had much sleep that night – nor, I imagine, did poor Mary sent off to her room in disgrace.  I’m ashamed to say that my first thought was how I’d manage to face Naomi, Rebecca, straight-laced Susannah, and my other friends and neighbours when they knew.  Goodness knows, I’d had sneers enough over the fact that I had been able to give Joachim only one child – but I had managed to hold my head high over that.  This would be far, far worse.


 I was inclined to blame poor Joachim for our troubles.  He’d always been something of a radical and had given Mary a lot of ideas that I thought were quite unsuitable for a young girl in her station in life.  He remained silent, utterly dejected. I knew that he could hardly believe that our Mary was capable of wrong-doing.


  We dozed off just before dawn but were awakened by a hammering on the outer door.  It was Joseph – a transformed Joseph.  He wanted to beg Mary’s forgiveness for not having believed her.  He too had had an angelic visitation in the night which had left him in no doubt about her virtue and truthfulness.  When could he and Mary be married?


That changed the situation entirely!  I was still inclined to be a bit suspicious.  Joachim though had no doubts whatsoever and was absolutely delighted.  He was looking forward to his grandson – the Messiah – raising a mighty army and freeing Israel from foreign bondage.


  We held a family council and decided that the best thing that could be done would be to send Mary off to stay with her cousin Elizabeth.  She too was preparing for an unexpected baby but, of course, she had been married, and childless, for years.   While there, she and Joseph would be quietly married (not the kind of wedding that I had hoped for, but that couldn’t be helped) and, in due course, they would return to Nazareth as a married couple.


   And that’s what happened.  There may have been a few sideways looks from some of the neighbours when Joseph and Mary returned as man and wife – but no-one made any open comment.

  Then, of course, came the next bombshell.  Caesar declared that everyone must return to his hometown to be counted for tax purposes.  Joachim was furious.  Rome interfering again with our way of life! Nazareth was our home but Joseph had originally come from Bethlehem – way down south near Jerusalem – and that’s where he and Mary, now heavily pregnant, had to go.

  We watched them, with their donkey, trudge down the south road towards Jerusalem until they were dots on the horizon and finally vanished from our sight.   And that was the last we were to see of them for five long years.


 

  Yes, for five long years we had no firm news of Joseph and our Mary.  We didn’t even know whether they were alive or dead or whether Mary had had her baby.  If only that angel had called to reassure us during that dreadful time!


 There were lots of rumours, of course.  A neighbour who had to go to Jerusalem to be counted said that he had heard that Mary had had a fine baby boy – and that the birth had taken place in a cattle shed of all places. I didn’t believe that for one minute. There were stories of heavenly visions being seen near Bethlehem at the time that we knew the baby was due.  Then we heard the dreadful news that that wicked Herod (he was worse than the Romans!) had sent his soldiers to slaughter all young babies born in and around Bethlehem.  Some though, it was said, had escaped. We clung to our hope.


 A travelling carpet seller from Egypt said that he had seen, and had spoken to, a Jewish refugee couple about Mary and Joseph’s age with a young child.  He couldn’t remember their names but his story raised our spirits.


 Then came the news of Herod’s death and finally, just two months ago, trudging down that same road along which they had departed, came Joseph with our Mary  and our new five-year old grandson Jesus.  They had prospered in Egypt and all three were fine and well.


  Words can’t express our relief and delight that they had been returned to us safe and sound.  Every day we thank God for his great mercy towards us.  All grandparents dote on their grandchildren but, however many we may have, Jesus will always be very special to us.


  Joachim is quite convinced that he’ll grow up to be a great military leader who’ll sweep away the Romans and restore the land of Israel to its people.  Somehow though – I doubt it.  I think that God may have other plans for him.



The Grandfather’s Tale

Joachim’s experience of the Nativity of Christ was, of course, exactly the same as Anne’s.  However, Heather and I were grandparents ourselves and we felt that the reactions of the grandfather might well be very different from those of the grandmother.  And so, as you’ll read, they were. 

    If you have ever had a teenage daughter, and especially if she is or was a well-loved only child, you’ll have an inkling of what Anne and I felt when we learned that our sixteen year old daughter Mary was pregnant – and that the father wasn’t Joseph, to whom she was engaged to be married.  It will only be an inkling though unless, of course, you too live in a society in which stoning to death is the statutory penalty for what would have been called adultery.


 We were devastated – and so was Joseph, the prosperous local builder to whom she had been betrothed.  The few minutes in which we broke the news to him seemed to add twenty years to his age.  He genuinely loved our Mary and didn’t want to see her publicly shamed, let alone punished with death.  We just couldn’t accept Mary’s story that she was guiltless; that one of God’s holy angels had told her that her child was to be the long-awaited Messiah, the saviour of Israel. I even wondered for a moment if it could be a cruel joke aimed particularly at me – everyone knew how I longed for the coming of the Messiah to free us from Roman rule.         


The next morning saw our despair change to elation.  Mary’s story had been true.  Joseph too, had been visited by the angel, who had told him the same story.   He had been commissioned by the Almighty to guard and watch over the young mother with her holy child.

  

Anne was still a bit doubtful, but for me everything clicked into place.  I realized why it was that our Mary had been chosen for this honour.  As she was our only child and it had seemed unlikely that Anne would have another, I had tried to educate her and bring her up as though she were a boy.  Mary had all the womanly skills of course – Anne had seen to that –but I had also given her a thorough grounding in the Holy Scriptures and in the literature, history and aspirations of the people of Israel.



 She was even something of a poet herself. Have you read the poem that she wrote to thank God for the great honour he had conferred on her by choosing her to give birth to the Messiah:  ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour’? I’ve no doubt at all that it was I who inspired those bits about putting down the mighty from their seat and exalting the humble and meek; filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich empty away. She was obviously the right girl – the only possible girl in the whole land of Israel – to bear and bring up the Messiah we all awaited.


 We bundled her off to her cousin Elizabeth and she and Joseph were quietly married.  Then they settled down again in Nazareth where they prepared for the coming of Mary’s holy child.


I might have guessed that Rome would put its oar in and try to wreck everything!  In order to wring our hard-earned money out of us more efficiently, they decided to hold a census.  Everyone had to return to his home town to be registered.  Anne and I come of families that have lived in Nazareth for generations but Joseph, poor fellow, came from Bethlehem, way down in the south.  It was there, together with our Mary, that he had to go to register.


 I railed against the wickedness of Rome and swore that my grandson would avenge this affront to his parents – but it was all no good.  They had to go. When Anne and I watched them head southwards, little did we dream that we wouldn’t see them again for over five long years.


 Those years seemed to be unending.  Hope and love kept Anne going but I had a firm conviction that God would never let his chosen one suffer permanent ill.  Against all the odds I remained firm in my faith that one day they would come home again, safe and sound.


 And, as you know, my faith was justified.  Mary and Joseph came home safely with Jesus, our new grandson – the child destined to be the hope of Israel.  They have shared all their adventures with us.  We know how our grandson, God’s Messiah, was born in a stable of all places.  We were told of the homage of the shepherds and of the Magi with their wonderful gifts.  We shuddered when we heard of Herod’s treachery (the puppets of Rome are even worse than Rome itself!) and of the headlong flight into Egypt where, thanks to God, they prospered until news of Herod’s death had meant that they could safely return to their own land.


 Our grandson Jesus is now nearly six years old – strong, active and intelligent.  He has a great future. Mary and Anne don’t agree with me – and Joseph is inclined to take their side – but I have no doubt that in fifteen or perhaps even ten years time (how old was David when he slew Goliath?) he’ll raise a great army, sweep the Romans from our shores and punish the miserable collaborators who have supported them.  I’m looking forward to seeing him, ‘put down the mighty from their seat, and exalt the humble and meek’

.

Week 51 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

Sauce for the goose – workhouse gruel for the gander!

            It was ironic that the news that members of parliament were to get an eleven percent rise in their salaries after the next general election, broke on the same day that we learned that thirteen million of our fellow countrymen and women are living in poverty.  What’s more most of them aren’t skivers and layabouts who enjoy living on state benefits, nor even honest willing-to-work unemployed people making every effort to get a job.  Over 50 percent, something like six million people who are officially ‘in poverty’ are also in work.  Some of them are in part time jobs, others on zero time contracts that mean they are expected to be constantly available for work but their ‘employers’ are under no obligation to provide it for them or to pay them a ‘retainer’ for time when they are through no fault of their own, idle.  Yet others are on the minimum wage with no possibility of an increase and no other source of income.

            It would be nice to think that the government that is eager to keep its promise that no-one on benefit must be better off than those working, would take steps to raise the income of those six million people ‘the working poor’.  I fear though that they are rather more likely to fulfil their promise by cutting benefits even further.  Perhaps it’s all part of a long-term strategy.  There’s no hope of Britain competing effectively on a global market until our workers are content with the wages paid for the same jobs in Bangladesh, India and Brazil – and prepared to put up with the same standard of health care, housing and transport as exists in those countries.

            That is, I think, why some politicians and newspaper proprietors are so eager to depart from the European Union and its health and safety and other Europe-wide regulations that protect working people’s safety and prevent their exploitation.  Once they’ve ‘broken off the shackles of Europe’ they’ll be free to chip away at the Public Health Acts, the Housing Acts and the Factory Acts and ‘make Britain great again’ like it was the early Victorian age when little children and women worked 12 to 14 hour days in factories and mines, for a pittance. It gave children valuable work experience and taught them the values of obedience and punctuality and was an early example of eliminating sex discrimination, until liberal do-gooders forbade it all and laid the foundations of the nanny-state! Within half a century we could restore those ‘traditional values’, effectively deter immigration, and create a truly competitive business-friendly Britain.   I thank God that I won’t live to see it!

            The eleven percent pay rise for Members of Parliament has been deplored by the leaders of all three of the main political parties (they can see there would be no votes in it!) but sadly there is, so they say, not a thing they can do about it.  They have given the power to an independent body and have no power to change it.  That, I am quite sure, is rubbish!  Parliament gave that power to an independent body and they can, if they have the will to do so, claim it back again.  There are a substantial number of existing MPs who feel they deserve every penny of that pay increase and a few, presumably in safe seats, who are prepared to say so.  One I heard trot out that old ever-ready excuse for paying ridiculously high salaries to those who are already wealthy.  ‘If you want the best candidates you have to offer them the best salaries’.  I think that that is rubbish too. MPs are already well paid, have long holidays and generous expenses (even if, due to the greed of some MPs, they now have to account for every penny of them!)  I have no doubt that some MPs do work hard, genuinely  have their constituents’ concerns at heart and earn every penny of their pay  - but so do nurses, ambulance drivers, air traffic controllers and a great many others.  We need the best postmen, the best bus drivers and the best refuse collectors.   We get them to work by threatening them with unemployment if they don’t.  Why should things be different at the other end of the salary scale?  If you offer ridiculously high salaries you don’t necessarily get the best – but you will attract those who are interested only in the salary and don’t give two hoots about how they earn it

            I was pleased to see that both Bob Russell, Lib.Dem. M.P. for Colchester and Douglas Carswell, our Clacton Conservative M.P, oppose the recommended pay rise.  Douglas Carswell described it as offensive, absurd and uncalled for.  However I don’t think that Tim Young, Clacton’s prospective Labour Candidate was very clever in suggesting that Mr Carswell should donate his pay rise to charity.  The proposed MPs’ pay rise isn’t scheduled to take place until after the next General Election.   Has Mr Young already given up hope that he will win the election and that it would therefore be he and not Mr Carswell who would have to make the decision?

               With a Prime Minister and Chancellor so enthusiastic for the free market and eager to reduce that deficit even though it means making difficult decisions, I am surprised that they haven’t thought of letting market forces decide. Try halving MPs present pay.  They‘d survive well enough on £35,000 a year (about £673 a week) plus their present generous expenses. My guess is that there would still be plenty of candidates at the next election. Predominant among them would be those who really want to serve the public and are not just in it for the prestige and the money.   

It's greed makes the world go round!’

        Boris Johnson, London’s always-in-the-headlines mayor, claimed as much in his recent Margaret Thatcher Memorial Address.  It is, he said, greed and envy that motivate those who operate successfully in the ‘free market economy’ that everyone (except perhaps a few starry eyed idealists and some closet-Marxists!) realizes is the best possible economic system for a civilised society.  We should celebrate and be grateful for those who become billionaires.  We should welcome the enormous gap between rich and poor though he did, rather reluctantly, concede that in Britain today that gap was perhaps just a shade too great. Think of the vast sums of money that the rich pay in taxes, he said, and be thankful.   I recall once again Jesus’s parable of the ‘widow’s mite’.  The wealthy Pharisees paid large sums into the Temple Treasury but those large sums were a small fraction of their total wealth.  The poor widow’s mite was everything she possessed.

           I was more impressed with an article I read recently in the Church Times, not a publication usually associated with wild and irresponsible journalism. The author claimed that if the seriously wealthy were to be content with £100,000 a year (that’s not far short of £2,000 a week) it would be possible for four million more people to enjoy a salary of £25,000.   Furthermore he stated that the top fifth of income tax payers actually pay less in total than the bottom fifth.  I believe that reducing that yawning gap between the wealthiest and the poorest in society should be a top priority  of any responsible government. Not just the poorest, but all of us, would benefit!

             

            

Week 50 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

An Unappreciated ‘Gift horse’

          The sage advice, ‘Never look a gift-horse in the mouth’, came to my mind when I read in the Clacton Gazette the scathing criticisms of the ‘paltry’ little Christmas Tree that was, in the first instance, installed on ‘Christmas Tree Island’  in Clacton-on-Sea’s town centre this year.  It was only fifteen feet high and there’s no doubt that it did seem very small in that central position.  However it had been donated to the town by the Federation of Small Businesses, an organisation that Tendring Council would surely wish to support, and similar trees had apparently been donated to other towns where they had been gratefully welcomed.

            Fifteen Feet (over twice the height of even the tallest man!) isn’t such a very small Christmas Tree in most situations.   I’d have thought that directly it had been received the council should have realized it was too small for ‘Christmas Tree Island’. They should have thanked the Federation for their gift and explained that in the traditional situation it would have been dwarfed by its surroundings.  It had therefore been decided to place it in the foyer of Clacton Town Hall where it would be seen to full advantage by the Town Hall’s many visitors*.  A fifteen foot tree certainly wouldn’t look small and paltry there.

            I am glad to learn that the Council raised enough money to obtain the kind of tree that we would all like to see in the town centre.  Here it is; the splendid new tree ready for the lights to be switched on!   Consultants Mott MacDonald who have been working on the council’s coast protection project donated £785 towards it and is says much for the spirit of goodwill of the Federation of Small Businesses that they also donated £200.

            A happy ending!   It’s easy to be wise after the event but I can’t help feeling that the Council might have handled the matter a little more tactfully and the Clacton Gazette might have refrained from publishing quite so many scathing comments about the original ‘gift horse’.

*I’ve no idea if that is what the Council will do with it, but it seems a good idea.

 A Maelstrom of Migrants?

On New Year’s Day 2014 (just over three weeks from the date this blog is published) the flood-gates will open and migrants from Bulgaria and Romania will be free to come to the UK and seek employment.  Will there be, as some sections of the press and some politicians prophecy (and perhaps secretly hope!), a flood of them, all seeking our jobs, our homes, our health service and social benefits?

Why is it, one wonders, that so many migrants some with traditions and cultures totally different from ours, seem so eager to travel not just from Europe but from the four corners of the world, to make their home here in Britain.  It certainly isn’t because they know they can be sure of a warm welcome.   Nor, I think, is it to take advantage of our National Health Service, and  it’s certainly  not the generous way we treat our unemployed and make sure that everyone in the UK has a roof over his or her head!

I think that one of the big attractions of the UK is our English Language.  In virtually every country in the world English (usually, I fear, American English!) is taught in schools.  It has become an international  language.  Young people from every country in the world have learned enough English at least to communicate with others and read the public notices and the newspaper headlines.  They know that that will help them find accommodation and work.  Some probably speak fluent and grammatical English, better than at least some British school-leavers who tend to use text-speak and to be incapable of composing a sentence without inserting ‘like’ into it and concluding with,’Know what I mean?’   A young Pole or Indian who speaks correct and clear English is clearly more likely to get a job in a shop, a restaurant or any business dealing directly with the public, than a Briton who is semi-literate and inarticulate

I won’t know, and the news-hounds of the Mail, the Express, the Sun and the Telegraph won’t know either for a few weeks whether the English language will have the same attraction to migrants from Bulgaria and Romania as it has to those from, for instance, Poland and Pakistan.  I am inclined to think not.  Romania is to some extent an anomaly in eastern Europe – its language derives largely from Latin (no doubt the result of Roman colonisation two millennia ago!) whereas the languages of its neighbours, Bulgaria, Serbia and Slovakia all resemble Russian and have a Slavonic source.   There are already many Romanian migrants in western Europe. They are not living in the UK but have settled in Italy and Spain, where the languages sound and look familiar and are easier for them to learn.  It is at least possible that new Romanian migrants will do the same.

As for the Bulgarians, their language not only resembles Russian in its vocabulary and grammar but is written in the Russian (Cyrillic) script.  In Britain they wouldn’t even understand public signs.  Perhaps some of those who have learned English will come here.  I think it likely though that many will try to settle in another EU country with a Slavonic language like the Czech Republic or Poland.  Public notices, road signs and press headlines would look different but the words on them would at least sound familiar and probably have a familiar meaning.

Will language decide whether that flow of immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria in the New Year is a trickle or a deluge?  We’ll all have to wait and see.

‘Education, Education, Education’

Tony Blair declared before his successful election in 1997 that those three words spelt out his three top priorities in government.  He even managed to introduce them into a Russian tv soap opera while on a visit to that country!  An international nation-by-nation survey  of  success in three important aspects of education; literacy, mathematics and sciences has recently  revealed that the UK has slipped back. We are no longer in the ‘top twenty’.  It seems that Tony Blair’s period in office, followed by that of the Conservative/Lib.Dem. coalition has been far from successful in furthering those educational priorities.   Among those whose results were better than ours were several far-eastern countries notably South Korea and, in Europe, Finland.

Our Education Secretary, Michael Gove, certainly tries!  Sadly, most of his ideas are met with derision or strong opposition by the teaching profession.  He has been accused of trying to put the clock back. Surely, if some aspects of education in the past were better and more successful than those currently practised, that may well be the best course of action.

8 and 9 year-olds in Springfield Elementary School, Ipswich in 1930

 I am the little boy with glasses by the head-master’s right knee!

 He would like to replace the assessment of a pupil’s progress by ‘course work’, by relying – as in the past – on the results of written examinations.  I am sure that he is right.  I use the Google search engine continuously to make sure that I spell names correctly, get dates right and that anything else that I write is as accurate as I can make it.   It occurs to me that if, when I was at school in the early 1930s, we’d had laptops giving access to a such a search engine I could have used it to get full marks for most of my homework without actually learning anything whatsoever as I did so!

A class photo from an elementary school in the Forest Gate area in the early 1930s. Heather Gilbert, my future wife, is the little girl in the back row, second from the right.

In the ‘bad old days’ of selective education a child’s future was, so they say, decided by his or her performance in just one exam, the 11-plus, which decided whether they went to a grammar school or remained in a secondary modern.  In the 1930s it was by no means as simple and straightforward as that.  I have never understood how it was I found myself transferred from an ‘elementary school’ to a ‘grammar school’ at the age of ten. Perhaps someone had made a mistake.   It certainly wasn’t because I was a child prodigy – I wasn’t!  Heather Gilbert, my future wife, had a very different experience.  Illness prevented her from taking the 11-plus (we called it the ‘scholarship exam’, in those days)  However it was decided that she was a late developer and she was transferred from her elementary school to Wanstead County High School at the age of 13.  She soon caught up with the others.  The system really was flexible. No-one’s future was fixed inexorably at the age of eleven.

That ‘grammar school education’ that Heather and I both enjoyed was the first step in what is nowadays called ‘social mobility’.  It made it possible for us to move from the ‘aspiring working class’ to the very lowest fringes of the ‘lower middle class’.  That was thanks to ‘selective education’.  I think that my two sons were at the Clacton County High School when the school changed from ‘selective’ to ‘comprehensive’.  Comparing the number of CCHS pupils who go on to good universities today with those who did so in the early 1970s (in 1971 my elder son was one of four students who went on to Cambridge and I don’t think it was an exceptional year) I can only conclude that Clacton County High School is now failing its brightest pupils.  Since it is trying to cope with every level of intelligence and of eagerness to learn (or determination not to!) it is probably failing its less academic pupils too.  This is almost certainly happening all over the country – hence the results of that damning international survey.

There are of course still plenty of selective schools – they are the private ones ranging downwards from such famous institutions as Eton and Harrow.  They select their pupils not on the basis of ability and enthusiasm for learning (though most have a minimum standard – for which privately-run ‘prep schools’ prepare them)) but on the ability of the parents to pay the school fees!  It isn’t surprising that they out-perform state comprehensives at preparing students for universities and ‘white collar jobs’.  The result is that there are even fewer opportunities for social mobility today than there were from the 1930s to the ‘60s.  

Is that really what we want?

 

r

Week 49 2013

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘The signal fires of warning, they blaze, but none regard, And    so, through night to morning, the earth runs ruin-ward!’

          These lines, in a poem by A.E.Housman (1856 – 1936) seem strangely prophetic today. In recent months we have seen bush fires burning beyond control in an even-hotter-than-usual Australian summer; unseasonal snow storms in South Dakota burying, and killing, thousands of cattle in deep drifts; hurricanes devastating huge swathes of America’s mid-west in a month usually reckoned to be hurricane-free, and the most powerful cyclone ever recorded killing tens of thousands of men, women and children and rendering hundreds of thousands homeless in the Philippines. Even in the equable British Isles, normally free of the extreme weather conditions experienced in other less favoured parts of the world, we have had hurricane strength winds uprooting trees, damaging buildings and causing loss of life.

            These weather conditions came hot on the heels of the most serious and urgent warning yet from the world’s leading scientists that planet Earth is facing catastrophic climate change largely as a result of humankind’s own selfish activities.  There is urgent need to reduce and ultimately end the production of energy by the use of fossil fuels.  Their burning is one of principal sources of the greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere that are producing these disastrous weather phenomena.

            It wouldn’t be true to say that ‘none regard’ the warning signs of the ruin that the world is facing.  Some people take it very seriously indeed and even top politicians like to go through the motions of taking it seriously when they think there may be a few votes in it.   Remember David Cameron’s slogan at the time of the last General Election – ‘If you want green then vote blue!’ or words to that effect.  The government even took some steps in the right direction – encouraging the development of wind farms, subsidising the insulation of homes and the installation of new energy-saving boilers.  I took advantage of the scheme to have my roof space thoroughly insulated – and have felt the benefit of it.  To finance these schemes they took a relatively small portion of the profits of the energy companies.

            But, of course, energy companies – like all private firms – do not exist for the benefit of their customers but for that of their shareholders. They mustn’t be allowed to suffer.  ‘Healthy competition’ is supposed to be one of the great benefits of the free market economy.  It keeps prices down – so they say.  Strangely enough, despite free competition and the Prime Minister’s urging that we should all ‘shop around for the best tariff’ all the energy suppliers raise them by about the same amount within a period of months.  Now they are claiming that the high prices are largely the result of those ‘green taxes’ and the Prime Minister is talking about ‘rolling them back’, abandoning the grants and limiting the development of wind-farms and other sources of green energy.

            Blog readers are, I am sure, in no doubt about where I stand on this issue.  I believe very strongly that catastrophic climatic change is taking place, and that its progress is accelerating largely as a consequence of human activity.  A first responsibility of every government in the world should be to attempt to slow down and reverse that process.  You don’t have to believe me.  I am a very old man with – some may think – failing faculties and too vivid an imagination!   Below is an extract from an email received from a regular correspondent, a successful business man, who is even angrier than I am.  So he should be.  He is over thirty years younger than me.   Thanks to my age I am unlikely to experience the worst results of the folly and short-sightedness of the governments of the world (politicians rarely manage to see beyond the next election!) but he may  have to endure years of it!

This government just continues to get worse and worse. They are now considering dropping their Green commitment in order to reduce energy bills. I see Australia has voted in a right wing government and already announced plans to do just that. Every time I hear of an environmental disaster in the USA or Australia - and there have been plenty - I feel it serves them right and that actually many more are needed for them to wake up and respond accordingly.  But despite the hardships to some, as long as the good times roll on for the many, they just don't care.   That actually is the problem with democracy, decisions reflect the selfishness of the majority.

The arrogant dismissal of scientific evidence by Ministers who know very little about anything is breathtaking. You will see on the BBC News web site that less than a quarter of the marine conservation areas proposed by the Government's own scientists have been agreed by ministers who said that the "scientific evidence just doesn't stack up" - presumably words fed to them by the fishing lobby. They have the same attitude with recommendations to tax fizzy drinks and use the money to subsidise school meals, to introduce a minimum price for alcohol and removing cigarette displays in shops. In each case the scientific advice given to the Government has been cautious and considered, and made by experts who have no financial investment in their recommendations, but the Government prefers to believe "industry representatives" who are following in the path of the smoking lobby, and have a massive financial investment in stopping any change.

A Nation in Debt!

National economic recovery is on the way. Politicians are cautiously optimistic.  Unemployment has dropped to 7.6 percent and the Governor of the Bank of England has said that he will consider raising interest rates if and when this figure falls to 7 percent.   This, I heard a financial expert declare on tv, would be bad news for ‘home owners’.

I am a home owner and I can assert unequivocally that that is nonsense.  My mortgage was long ago paid off and the deeds of my bungalow are in the strong room of my solicitor, not in that of the Building Society that long ago had lent my wife and I the money to buy our home.  I now have money invested in that building society.  Year by year, as inflation has increased and interest rates remained frozen, that money has steadily lost its value.  I and other ‘savers’ have been helping to fund the loans of the home buyers encouraged by the government to ‘get their feet on the property ladder’  If interest rates go up there is a chance that those savings will hold their value – perhaps even increase it.  For debt-free home owners and savers like me an increased interest rate would be very good  news indeed.

For home buyers (I think it is a cruel deception, encouraging a false sense of security, to refer to them as ‘home owners’) the situation is very different.   Interest repayment rates are at an all-time low but, to discourage irresponsible debts, banks and building societies have been insisting on deposits of as much as 25 percent of the purchase price before making a mortgage loan.  The government is giving would-be home buyers a further loan (of our money!) to bring that deposit down to as little as five percent.

The result is that working couples are buying houses with borrowed money that needs the combined wages of both partners to service the repayments.  The loss or reduction of income of either partner, or an increase in the interest rates resulting in higher repayments, could spell disaster.  David Cameron has painted a glowing picture of the pride and satisfaction of the house-buyer holding, for the first time, the key of his own home!   He omitted to mention that it wouldn’t actually be ‘his own’ until he has made that final mortgage payment.  Nor did he dwell on the shame, disappointment and despair that house-buyer will feel if, due to circumstances beyond his control, he is unable to keep up his mortgage payments and is made homeless.

You think it couldn’t happen?   That same ‘expert’ who said that an increase in interest rates would be bad news for home owners, went on to say that an increase of just one percent in the interest rate would result in 30,000 families, who had imagined they owned their homes, becoming homeless.  A report of the Centre for Social Justice says that nearly four million British families do not have enough savings to cover their rent or mortgage for more than a month, and that 26,000 UK households have been rendered homeless in the past five years as a result of rent or mortgage arrears, more than 5,000 of them during the past twelve months.

Mortgage debt is by no means the only debt burden that many of we Brits are bearing.   The Centre for Social Justice says that ‘average household debt, now stands at £54,000’, nearly twice the level of that same average just ten years ago.  That £54,000 is ‘the average debt’.   Since there must be quite a few who like me have no debts whatsoever there must be a very great number of households who owe considerable more than that!   The Centre’s report says that poor people are bearing the brunt of a ‘perfect storm’ of rising living costs, falling real wages, low savings and expensive credit. Households with total incomes in the lowest ten percent of the population have average debts greater than four times their annual income, with average debt repayments amounting to nearly half their gross monthly income. I think it likely that this Christmas – thanks to credit cards, store cards and payday loans – that burden of individual debt, already at an all-time high, will increase dramatically!

 The UK’s economic recovery is surely an empty triumph if it results in our country becoming a land of debtors.  Wasn’t it the late Lady Thatcher who famously claimed that there was ‘no such thing as society’ and declared that it was individuals and families who really matter?  How strange that Lady Thatcher’s political heirs should have managed, so it seems, to set the country (Society?) on the path to economic recovery - but at the cost of getting millions of individuals and families into unmanageable debt!

 

  

Week 48 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

Too near to home!

          A couple of weeks ago I remarked in this blog that we could all consider calmly and dispassionately failures of the NHS in London, Liverpool, Glasgow or other similarly distant regions.   The situation was very different when a local hospital – in our case the Colchester Hospital – was involved.  Its failures could, and possibly have, affected the lives and health of people we know, close friends and relatives, people who are very dear to us.  The NHS is not the only field of human activity in which a distant threat can seem much less real and much less sinister than those close at hand.  I have written on a number of occasions about the fact that the incidence of crime, which is becoming less in other parts of Essex is increasing in Clacton-on-Sea.  When I learned of a near-fatal knifing within sight of my Dudley Road bungalow, of a customer being attacked and robbed after drawing cash from his account at Magdalene Green Post Office (where I draw cash from my account from time to time!) and of a break-in just a few houses away from mine, I began to feel that Clacton’s crime-wave was getting uncomfortably close to my home. A fortnight ago a tiny ripple from that crime-wave penetrated it!

            It was Saturday night, the 9^th November. The next day would be Remembrance Sunday.  There were two paper poppies pinned to my jacket lapel – a white one expressing my support for peace campaigners world-wide, and a red one in memory of good friends and comrades killed in World War II, particularly perhaps the fifty who had been taken prisoner at Tobruk and were torpedoed by a British submarine while being transported to Italy.  I too had been captured at Tobruk, but  had been transported to Italy on a different ship and had lived to tell the tale.

I went to bed soon after 10.00 pm and was asleep within minutes.  At about midnight (I glanced at the clock as I got out of bed) I was awakened by my door bell ringing and an urgent knocking on the door.  I slipped on my dressing gown and  made my way to the front door.  ‘Who is it?’ I asked cautiously.  A young and rather tremulous female voice asked me to please open the door and let her in.  The owner of the voice sounded frightened and I opened the door.  Rather to my surprise three girls apparently about 15 or 16 (I am not much good at guessing ages) came thankfully in.  They were courteous, well-spoken and very grateful. They claimed to have been pursued by a group of drunken youths and were asking me for temporary refuge.

I asked them if they’d like me to call the Police.  Oh no, they said.  They thought that once they had been seen to enter a house the youths would go away.  They sat down in my sitting room.  One of them visited the bathroom and it struck me that they ought to contact their mums to let them know they were safe.  Put it down to my age that it didn’t even occur to me that at least one of those girls would almost certainly have been carrying a mobile phone!   One of them said that she would like that, so I gave her my cordless phone and she left the room so (in my innocence I thought!) that we wouldn’t hear the conversation with her no-doubt anxious and angry mum.  She returned after a few minutes very pleased with herself.  Her mum would pick them up and would be with them within minutes.  They would go out and meet her.  With profuse thanks, they made their departure.  I breathed a sigh of relief, went back to bed and – once again – was asleep within minutes.

            However I woke at about 2.30 am quite convinced that there had been something suspicious about the incident.  Almost immediately I noticed that my wallet that had been on the bedroom tallboy, was missing.  I searched the pockets in which I might, just possibly, have left it – though I didn’t think so.  No – it was gone.  There hadn’t been very much money in it – perhaps £20 or £30.  There was a book of stamps, my European Union Health Service card – and my VISA credit and debit cards!

            It was by then getting on for 3.00 am.  I belong to the Co-op Bank which, despite its recent troubles, maintains a 24 hour customer help service.  The assistant I contacted couldn’t have been more helpful.  He stopped at once the use of both cards and told me that my debit card had been used (certainly not by me) shortly after midnight.   The bank would refund the money drawn on that occasion.  New credit and debit cards would be issued within a few days – and so they were.

            On Sunday morning I had to decide whether or not to inform the police.  The loss of my credit and debit cards would cause me only in minor inconvenience for a few days.  The theft of the money was a different matter but I didn’t even know how much it was, and its loss certainly wouldn’t cause me serious hardship.

            In the end I decided that I would report the matter to the police in the hope of discouraging the perpetrator or perpetrators from repeating their act on someone less resilient, with fewer or no ‘emergency reserves’, and perhaps without a supportive family and friends.  Two very helpful and sympathetic detective-constables called to see me, had a friendly chat and took an official audio-and-video recorded statement from me.  Since, they have phoned me to report progress, which is considerable. I don’t think though it would be right for me to reveal the details.  What will come of it in the end?  I would like the person or persons guilty to be deterred from trying to repeat the act elsewhere.   I would not wish though to be the cause of a juvenile acquiring a criminal record that, in today’s economic climate, would make it unlikely that they would ever be able to find honest work.  For such a young person there might well be no future but one of crime and/or prostitution; not a fate I would wish on a juvenile (or on anyone else come to that!) however foolish or greedy they may have been.

Footnote

            Clacton’s Europhobic Climate-Change-Denying MP, Mr Douglas Carswell has given the Clacton Gazette his thoughts on the local crime prevention scene.  A week or so ago blog readers will recall that he was demanding a new style of policing for our town.  It would involve more ‘stop and search’ (though he didn’t make it clear what the police were supposed to be searching for) and ‘coming down hard on the bed-sit guys’.

           
                 His latest thoughts strike a more confident note. He says that the election of Nick Alston as Police and Crime Commissioner has had a major impact on policing in the town. ‘Because we now have a single individual we can hold to account we are starting to get a much more responsible style of policing.............because we have got a locally-elected commissioner, we have seen the police start to take knife crime seriously here, it is working’.  As far as Clacton, Mr Carswell’s constituency, is concerned, I would have thought that Mr Alston’s election has – if anything – had a negative effect.  Clacton’s crime rate has actually gone up during the year that has elapsed since his appointment.  If the government had really wanted local voices to be heard about the appointment of Chief Constables and local policing strategy, they could have instructed the local authority of each Police Area (usually the County or Unitary Authority Council) to appoint a small all-party committee to undertake that function.* This would thus have saved hundreds of thousands of pounds and ensured genuinely local democratic control of the police.

            The Clacton Gazette reports that Mr Carswell’s was one of the loudest voices calling for the introduction of the commissioner role in the first place  He first wrote a paper advocating locally elected police chiefs in 2001 – and now it is law.

            Mr Carswell comments that ‘There was a disappointingly low turnout for the election itself, but two out of every three people are now aware of the fact that there is a police commissioner.  I suspect that in a few years time when we next have an election for the role of police and crime commissioner there is going to be a massive turnout’  I find it rather extraordinary that, after all the publicity, one third of the electorate is not even aware that we have a crime commissioner!  In fact, at that election of a crime and police commissioner to which Mr Carswell refers, there was a record low turnout nationally, and the turnout in Essex was the lowest of the lot.  The only way we’ll get a ‘massive turnout’ in a future election is if the electorate is given the choice of voting for the scrapping of the whole daft ‘jobs for the boys’ business!

* Yesterday (25th November) I heard on the tv news that someone much more authoritative and with much greater knowledge of the situation than I have, is suggesting much the same thing.

The Co-operative Bank

            I first opened an account with the Co-op Bank in 1956 when I came to Clacton as a Public Health Inspector. The Public Health Department was at the rear of the Town Hall at one end of The Grove.   The Co-op Bank then had a branch office at the other end. That’s why I chose them. In fifty-seven years I have never had reason to regret that choice.  There is no longer a branch within easy reach but I can contact them easily by phone or by their website.  I can pay in cheques and draw out cash from my account at any post office.  They will arrange direct debits and similar regular payments, and their cheques can be used for payment for goods or services or as Christmas and birthday gifts to young relatives or friends.  That’s all I need.

            Now they are in trouble because someone was stupid enough to appoint a  Methodist Minister with no relevant banking experience as their chairman. Had he been a saintly Methodist Minister it would still have been stupid. It seems though that their choice, Rev. Paul Flowers, is very unlikely to be awarded a halo!

            However, I don’t see news pictures of depositors queuing up to withdraw their money, as they did from other banks a little while ago.  I haven’t heard a word of the government having to let the Co-op Bank have millions of pounds of our money to keep it afloat.  I don’t see senior officials of the bank departing with millions of pounds in ‘golden handshakes’.  Someone is trying to retrieve £30,000 from Rev. Paul Flowers, someone else £70,000.  Goodness, that’s petty cash in top banking circles.

            I think I’ll stick with the Co-op Bank.  I am confident that its troubles will pass.