Week 5 2013

Tendring Topics.......on Line

‘The Isle of Avalon’ – in north-east Essex?

          Viewers of the tv serial Merlin will recall the penultimate scene in which the apparently mortally wounded King Arthur was being transported across a lake to the Isle of Avalon where, according to legend, hail, rain and snow are unknown and the wind never blows coldly.

             The Tendring District, of which Clacton-on-Sea is the biggest town, is hardly a second Avalon on the southern East Anglian coast.  We’re certainly not free of cold winds, though we prefer to think of them as ‘bracing breezes’!  There’s no doubt though that we do escape most of the extreme weather conditions that regularly afflict other less fortunate regions of England.   We had much more rain than usual during last year’s summer and autumn – but we had no floods like those elsewhere.  We did endure something of the cold snap that brought much of England to a standstill at the beginning of last week but, once again, we didn’t have such a heavy snowfall as elsewhere, nor did the snow lie on the ground for so long.

            Snow – falling snow and lying snow – is the one circumstance guaranteed to keep my ‘iron horse’ (my mobility scooter) in its stable.  It did so on Sunday 20^th January and again on Monday and Tuesday, 21^st and 22^nd  but that (so far!) is all.   In Clacton the snowfall began at about noon on Sunday and carried on continuously for several hours.  On Monday morning about 2in of snow was lying on gardens, highways and footpaths but it was slowly beginning to thaw.  There was rain on Monday night that didn’t freeze as it hit the ground and on Tuesday the thaw continued.   Not bad – compared with the way in which snow caused havoc elsewhere.

            Considering the fairly limited amount of snow that fell in our area, it does seem extraordinary that 14 schools in the Colchester area and 10 in the Tendring District closed on Monday 21^st January and others opened late on that day.  Iain Wicks, Essex Development Manager for the Federation of Small Businesses felt that these schools had let parents down.  He is quoted as saying ‘It seems after the first flake of snow, some schools hit the self-destruct button’.  In my own-school days in Ipswich in the 1930s I don’t recall my school ever closing because of snow.  Nor do I recall my sons’ schools in Clacton during the 1960s ever closing for that cause, though there were some pretty severe winters during those decades.

            It is suggested that circumstances are different now because many children live further from their schools.  That may be so – but between 1931 and 1937 when I was at secondary school, I used to cycle three miles each way to and from school daily.  The reason most frequently cited for school closure is ‘health and safety’, giving the impression that some bureaucrat (probably in Brussels!) sends out a directive demanding school closure if there is snow on the ground.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The decision to close a school or to keep it open is that of the head teacher. A possible reason for closure can be the head teacher’s not unreasonable fear that if a child falls and suffers an injury in a frozen playground, the parents will sue for damages and if a teacher does the same thing he or she will also sue!

        
               In my day it was accepted that accidents did sometimes happen, and that if anyone was to blame it was the victim, who should have taken more care.  This isn’t so today.  Watch daytime commercial tv.  You won’t have to wait long before a benign gentleman (or lady) will appear on the screen to advise anyone who has ‘had an accident that wasn’t their fault’ to contact so-and-so specialist solicitors who will pursue their claim for damages. Furthermore, they assure affected viewers, ‘you’ll receive every penny of the damages awarded, because the person or organisation from whom you are claiming will have to the pay the legal costs’.   The implication is that there is no such thing as a genuine accident.  Someone or some organisation is always to blame and they are going to have to pay damages.  No wonder some head teachers decide to play safe and close the school rather than risk an accident and an expensive damages claim!

            A less worthy – and perhaps more probable – reason why a head teacher might decide to close a school is the dreaded School League Table.  A snowy day will mean that some children will genuinely find it difficult to get to school.  Others will welcome the snow as an excuse for playing truant.  Genuine and non-genuine absentees will all be regarded as truants – and the number of truancies is an important factor in determining a school’s position on that Table. A school that is closed can have no truancies!

            It is possible to understand the motives of head teachers who close their schools when there is snow.   It is rather less easy to understand the Railway Company’s action in cancelling trains running to and from Clacton for no other reason than the threat of snow!  On Monday 14^th January, six days before Clacton had its snowfall, a 30 mph speed limit was imposed on a number of trains leaving the station and others were cancelled, leaving commuters in the lurch. This was because although there was no snow in Clacton there was snowfall in other areas through which trains might have to pass. ‘There were flurries of snow in Colchester and Norwich had several inches’.

            It seems that these measures were taken ‘to reduce the risk of snow being sucked into the trains electric motors and damaging them’.  Is cancelling train journeys or slowing them to a snail’s pace really the best or only way to prevent this?   Perhaps the now-privately-run railway companies should consult those who run the Trans-Siberian Railway. This carries passengers and goods across part of northern Europe and the whole width of the continent of Asia from Moscow to the Pacific coast, summer and winter alike.   Electrification began in the early days of the USSR in the 1920s and the last steam engine was pensioned off in the mid-1980s.  I can’t believe that a little snow on that line brings their trains to a halt!

'The Shape of Things to Come'*

            No-one spelt out to me my duties and objectives when I was appointed as Tendring District Council’s first Public Relations Officer in 1973.   It was clear to me though that I should endeavour to persuade the general public to identify themselves with the new Council.   They, the electorate, had voted for the council’s members to be their representatives.  It followed that the council’s successes (and no doubt occasional failures) were their own successes and failures, not those of some remote and alien body, known to them chiefly as a sender of rate demands! 

        
            Although, during the seven years that I was the Council’s PRO I had my small successes and managed, on the whole, to present a positive  picture of the Council and its activities to the local and regional press  radio and tv, I can’t really claim  to have succeeded in gaining that objective. Despite my efforts the electorate continued to regard the council with suspicion – as ‘them and us’.

            Magnify that situation a few hundred  times and you have something like the way in which much of the public regards the European Union.  From most of the national press you would never dream that the United Kingdom was actually a substantial and very influential member of the EU and that this membership had been confirmed by a referendum in the 1970s.  The United Kingdom is represented at every level in the Union and our representatives’ opinions are respected even on matters concerning the Eurozone of which, by our own government’s choice, we are not members.

            Furthermore, the European Union has its own parliament which, since it is elected by a system of proportional representation, is more truly representative of the electorate than our national parliament.  It even has members from Britain’s UKIP whose main, if not sole, policy is to abolish all European Union institutions!  It is surely extraordinary that those who protest most strongly about the activities of the European Commission, because it is not directly elected and is therefore ‘undemocratic’, are also the most determined to deny additional power to the European Parliament that unquestionably is a democratic institution.

            Over and over again we see the EU being presented as an alien and hostile organisation with which we are eternally in a state of ‘cold war’, instead of as respected international organisation of which we are an influential member.

            Now the whole matter is to be settled – at some time in the future!   If the Conservative Party wins the next election and David Cameron is still leader, he will negotiate with other members of the EU to try to ‘repatriate’ to the United Kingdom some of the powers currently vested in the EU (I hope that they won’t prove to be powers that curb the money-manipulators who brought the world into its current sorry state, and the powers that protect the jobs and safety of working people!)   Having successfully done that, he will invite the British public to vote whether to stay in or get out of the EU.  He himself will then support continued membership of the emasculated EU that he will have created.

It is unlikely that I shall still be around to see Mr Cameron face that very first hurdle; winning the election. I certainly don’t expect – or hope – to live to see the fruition of his plans.  What I would like to happen is really of no interest because there is no way in which I can affect the outcome.  I am happy though to place on record what I think could happen as the future unfolds.

            During the next few decades countries of the European Union are likely to draw closer together both economically and politically. They will eventually become a Federation like the USA, with clearly defined Federal Functions and State Functions – saving millions of Euros by transferring many of the present powers and functions of the various national governments to democratically elected local authoriries (real localisation in fact) and transferring others (overall economic planning, foreign affairs and defence for instance) to the new Federal Government formed from a proportionately elected European Parliament.  These will be among the factors that hasten European economic recovery.   The Euro will recover its value (already at the end of January 2013 it was  gaining in value against the pound sterling) and all members of the EU will adopt the Euro as their currency.  The EU (renamed the European Federation or EUROFA) will then be able to co-operate, negotiate and, where appropriate, compete with the USA and the world’s emerging economies on equal terms, and without the dead hand of the UK continually impeding progress.

            In the UK a triumphant Conservative/UKIP coalition will hold an in/out referendum on membership of the EU and will decide to withdraw its membership. Scenes of widespread national rejoicing in England will be followed by Scotland’s declaration of independence from the UK and its application for membership of the by-then-established EUROFA.  The USA will transfer its ‘special relationship’ from the now-reduced UK to EUROFA.  World markets – China, India, the USA, Latin America – will find trading with a united Europe having a single currency and a unified economic policy simpler and more straightforward than with the previous proliferation of nation-states and currencies.  They probably won’t even notice that there is another once-powerful country that has voluntarily put itself outside Federal Europe’s frontiers, clamouring for their attention.

In Britain our great-great grandchildren will live to regret the way that their parents and grandparents voted in that second referendum – and a movement urging yet another referendum (‘Why should we suffer as a result of a stupid referendum held way back in 2018 – or whenever’) would be launched.

            It’s not a very enticing prospect for us Brits.  Never mind.  I am sure that the leader writers of the Express, Mail and Sun would offer quite different possible futures.  Only time will reveal which of us was right.  It is quite likely that none of us will be.  It is a far from remote possibility that accelerating climate change, still denied by some, will make nonsense of all our current hopes and fears.   In any case, who in 1921 the year in which I was born, or indeed in 1945 at the end of World War II, could possibly have foreseen what our country, Europe and the world would be like in AD 2013?

* 'The Shape of Things to Come' was a work of Science Fiction, written by H.G.Wells and published in the early 1930s..  It purported to forecast the history of the world from the late 1930s to the beginning of the 21st Century.  Parts of it were remarkably accurate.  He forecast the outbreak of World War II in 1940 over a border dispute between Germany and Poland about Danzig and the Polish Corridor, but was wildly out in many of his later surmises.  Fortunately perhaps, although we travel forward in space we travel backwards through time and can only see what is already behind us.  I don't suppose that my, or anyone else's, attempted glance into the future is any more accurate than that of H.G.Wells.

Week 4 2013

Tendring Topics......on line

‘When will they ever learn?’

          This was the refrain of a protest song ‘Where have all the flowers gone’, written by Pete Seeger in the 1950s and sung by the author and by, among others, Joan Baez and Marlene Dietrich.  Type that title into Google and you can read all about it – and hear it sung on YouTube by its author!

          When will we ever learn?   It might have been thought that we Brits have had a surfeit of military adventures in North Africa and the Middle East.  It was, no doubt, an achievement to have toppled Saddam Hussein - but at what a terrible cost! Iraq was laid waste, its infrastructure and public services destroyed.   Tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed and many thousands more maimed and permanently disabled.   And, of course, there were scores of British and American dead and wounded. What's more, our illegal intervention provided El Qaeda with a powerful recruitment incentive.

 The war against Saddam is over but Iraq is far from being a country at peace with itself.  The sectarian hatred and violence that we continue to see in Belfast, is trivial compared with that between Iraq's Sunni and Shia Muslims.   In the north of the country the Kurds yearn to be part of an independent Kurdistan incorporating the Kurdish minorities in Turkey and Iran. Members of Iraq’s Christian community, under Saddam Hussein a free and influential minority, are now subject to violent persecution and physical attack. Those who can get out are doing so.  Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, Christians, identified with ‘interfering infidels from the west intent on destroying our religion and historic culture’, are suffering increasing persecution from militant Islamists.  A worker at the Algerian gas plant caught up in last week’s terrorist attack and hostage taking, told us on tv that he had explained to the terrorists who had captured him that he was an Algerian and  Muslim.   ‘You’ll come to no harm’, his captors had assured him. ‘We’re after these crusaders!’

British, American and other NATO forces have been engaged in Afghanistan for a decade.  We are constantly being told how this that or the other area, that two years earlier was ruled by the Taliban, is now under the control of the Afghan government and its NATO allies.  Yet the Taliban still remains capable of launching attacks within Kabul itself and there have been an increasing number – 60 last year – of allied soldiers killed by members of the Afghan forces whom they have been training.  Within a couple of years all NATO combat forces will have been withdrawn and it is confidently believed that the forces of the Afghan government will by then be capable of engaging the Taliban fighters themselves.  They may have the capability will they, I wonder, have the inclination?  Does the ordinary Afghan soldier or peasant really see much difference between NATO forces and the forces of the Soviet Union that, a decade or so ago, the Taliban and other insurgents (with the covert support of the UK and the USA!) managed to oust?

Syria, like Iraq, once had a thriving Christian minority that worshipped freely and without fear.  Now, identified with the tyrannical regime that had allowed them to survive, they find themselves under attack from the rebel forces that we and our allies recognise as Syria’s legitimate government.   Can it really be the intention of ‘the West’ to cleanse the Middle East of Christian minorities and to support governments of militant Islamists from whence recruits for Al Qaeda and similar terrorist organisations spring?   Whatever our intentions may be, that is the effect our actions are having.

Now the French are sending troops to Mali, a former French colony that is under attack from Islamist Arabs in the north of the country supported by Algerian jihadists and armed former supporters of Colonel Gaddafi who have found their way into Mali from Libya*.  The UK is helping transport troops and supplies but is not (so far!) otherwise playing an active part in the conflict.  The French troops, supporting Malian government forces, are expected to make short work of the rebels.  So, of course, were the allied forces in Afghanistan.  They have been there for ten years – and they’re not out yet!

Isn’t it time that we in ‘the west’ paused and gave a little more thought to whom we are supporting, whom we are opposing – and why we are doing either?   The British National Party is totally abhorrent to me and I am reluctant to give the slightest credence to any of its declared policies.  I do think though that their demand that we should withdraw our troops without delay from any country where the majority of the population is Muslim is worth consideration.  Is our military presence wanted there by most of the ordinary people?  Is it harming or helping minorities holding another religious faith? Is it discouraging terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda, or is it encouraging recruitment for them?  Is it closing – or widening – existing sectarian and/or ethnic divisions? Whatever our hopes or intentions for those countries may be, are they really worth even a single human life?

*Was the terrorist attack and subsequent hostage situation on the gas installation in the remotest part of Algeria a consequence of that French action?  The experts insist that it was a well-planned attack that couldn’t possibly have been organised on the spur of the moment.   I think it possible that the attack had been planned to take place  some time in the future but that the French action had provided a useful propaganda reason for bring it forward.

‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be…..’

                   Such was the advice that, in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Polonius  gave to his son Laertes before he set sail for England.  This suggests to me that even in Shakespeare’s time, England was known as a country in which it was all too easy to fall into the hands of the moneylenders.  It certainly is today – and I’m not referring to ‘the deficit’ and the national debt that worries politicians so much.  I am talking about the burden of personal debt carried by far too many of my fellow Brits.   It is a burden that leads to domestic violence, breaks up marriages, renders families and individuals homeless, can motivate criminal activities and  can lead to suicide.

 The local daily Gazette records that research has found that in the first fortnight of 2013, seventeen percent of us were still paying off bills incurred before Christmas 2011!  Richard Aldridge, Chief Executive of Colchester’s Citizens Advice Bureau told a reporter that he wasn’t surprised by that figure. He said that, ‘Last year Colchester CAB debt specialists helped clients to write off more than £3.6 million.  The average debt was about £8,000.   One of the highest debts was more than £200,000 – and that was excluding a mortgage loan’.

            National figures reveal that one in five consumers started the New Year with more than £5,000 credit card debt and one in seven people in the east of England  struggles to keep up rent or mortgage payments.   Mr Aldridge warns (as I have done in this blog) that the increasingly popular ‘pay day loans’ are  a short-term fix and that interest can get racked up to ridiculous levels, as much as 4,000 per cent a year!   The CAB helps people to understand their income and expenditure and to look at priority debts such a keeping a roof over their heads and paying fuel bills.  ‘We know the situation is going to get worse when welfare benefits change in April.  The sooner the CAB is contacted the sooner there can be help to resolve the crisis.  There is no magic wand, but help is at hand’.

          Meanwhile the Government, that never lets us forget about national debt, seems able to regard  remarkably philosophically. debts incurred by hundreds of thousands of British citizens.   For the past two years the number of applicants for places in Universities has fallen sharply.  The reasons are painfully obvious; the huge burden of debt with which graduates are burdened and the difficulty they have in finding appropriate employment.   A government spokesperson says plaintively that, ‘They don’t seem to realize that they have to pay nothing up front and that they only have to start reducing that debt when they’re in a well-paid job’.  I can well imagine that that kind of argument might satisfy the thoroughly irresponsible and the ‘shirkers and scroungers’ about whom we read in the national press.  It doesn’t appeal to people who, like me, were brought up with a horror of debt and who try to live within their means, avoiding it at all costs.  Had students depended on loans instead of means-tested grants in the early 1970s, we would certainly not have encouraged our elder son to become an undergraduate at Cambridge.  It is all very well to say that graduates don’t have to begin repaying their loans until they are in a well-paid job; that is just when responsible graduates want to start buying a home in which to settle and raise a family. For many of them that student loan debt is likely to be hanging over their heads for the remainder of their working lives.

            Then there’s this urge – encouraged by the government and by the popular press – to buy your own home.  All young couples in a stable relationship (oh dear – only a few years ago I would have written ‘all young married couples’!) are assumed to want to ‘get their feet on the home ownership ladder’.  I have just heard on a commercial radio station a property developer urging that ‘with interest rates at a record low level, now is the time to buy!’    Interest rates undoubtedly are at a very low level but house prices aren’t.   Nor are the deposits required by banks or building societies before granting a mortgage loan.  Furthermore few working people nowadays are in a position  to say with confidence that they’ll  be able to keep up the mortgage repayments for the twenty or thirty years that will elapse before they hold the deeds of their home. It is only then that they will be truly home owners, and not just home buyers liable to be rendered homeless if they default on those mortgage repayments.

            Napoleon is said to have remarked with contempt that ‘the English are a nation of shop keepers’.   We’re certainly not that these days.  The most profitable shops are part of nation-wide or international enterprises, probably with their headquarters and their controlling ownership overseas.  What we are nowadays is a nation of debtors and – increasingly – a nation of debtors who are not only unable to repay their debts, but even to pay the interest on them.

           

           

Week 3 2013

Tendring Topics....on Line

Helping to ‘Save the Planet’…….and make a profit!

            It isn’t all that often that the most responsible course of action, the course of action that ultimately benefits our fellow men and women, is also the most financially profitable one.  This has recently happened in Colchester though and is extremely satisfying to all who are concerned about the need to reduce and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and those who believe, as I do, in the value of local government.

            Two years ago, in 2011, Colchester Borough Council hired the Breyer Group to install photo-voltaic panels on 850 houses managed by Colchester Borough Homes, thus using the sun’s rays to generate electricity to power those homes and to feed any surplus back into the national grid.  I have little doubt that, at the time they faced – and faced down – criticism from Climate Change Deniers and those who are convinced that all attempts to use renewable sources of energy are devilish schemes dreamed up by ‘Brussels’ to impoverish us Brits and to line the pockets of ‘foreign’ investors.

            Now the scheme is bearing fruit and confounding its critics.  Tenants get between £100 and £150 off their electricity bills each year and Colchester Council gets a share of the tariff paid by the National Grid.   Councillor Paul Smith, the Council’s financial supremo, recently reported that he had received the first cheque from the Electricity Authority.   It was for the first three-quarters of 2012 and amounted to £60,000.  He believes that over the 25 year period of the contract, the scheme will net more than £2 million for the Council.

            Solar power is worth having.  My own very modest solar water heating system demonstrates that very effectively.  From March through to October, if there are between six and seven hours of sunshine, my single solar panel will supply all my hot water needs for the next twenty-four hours.  When there is less than that, and even during the winter months, an hour or two’s sunshine will preheat the water flowing into my boiler to 20 or 30 degrees, thus reducing the amount of gas needed to raise the temperature of the water in my storage cylinder to the required level.

Empowering Head Teachers

          The government encourages local schools to ‘cast off the fetters’ of the local education authority and become free schools or academies, deciding on their own curricula and purchasing their own text books, teaching aids and so on.  ‘They know what they want far better than some bureaucrat employed by the County Council does!’

            Quite so, but head teachers are skilled at teaching, not at buying equipment.  It is unreasonable to expect them to be also wise and responsible purchasers, able to spot the unreliable supplier and the glib but dodgy sales representative.  A month or so ago BBC’s Panorama tv programme featured head teachers who had been brought to nervous breakdown, resignation from their posts, and the verge of suicide because they had failed in a task for which they had never been trained and had allowed con men to sell them substandard equipment.    Typically they had been offered, and had paid for, computers for every pupil at what was ‘an offer they couldn’t refuse’ price only to find interminable delays in delivery, that they had bought substandard equipment that couldn’t be made to work or broke down soon after being delivered, or wasn’t sufficiently sturdy to stand up to use (and misuse) by exuberant pre-teenagers.

            The ‘pen-pushers at the County Hall’, with long experience of bulk purchase, would probably have been able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, the genuine from the phoney.  Those though, are not the skills imparted at Teachers’ Training Colleges.  Head Teachers can’t be expected to have them.

 

            Something of the sort seems to have happened just outside our area.  Honywood Community Science School, in Coggeshall, became an academy in May 2011 gaining independence – and an extra £200,000 added to its annual budget.  In October each of the 1,200 pupils was given a £400 iPad tablet.   There is no suggestion that these were in any way faulty but they were, by their nature, fragile.  Within a year 489 (40% of the total) had been damaged beyond repair and had to be replaced.

            Head Teacher Simon Mason told the Gazette that the high breakage rate had been due to inadequate protection cases and says that the number of broken iPads has fallen significantly since the cases were replaced. Presumably when he ordered the iPads in the first instance he had also chosen their cases?  He is reported as saying, ‘The tablet is integral to Honeywood’s focus on independent pupil-led learning.   Pupils are encouraged to find their own ways to learn and present their work, and the teacher’s role is to facilitate rather than direct’.

            Goodness, that’s impressive.  If I were a parent seeking a good secondary school for my offspring, those two sentences alone would be enough to persuade me to look elsewhere!

            Peter Inson, retired former headmaster living in East Mersea believes that giving gadgets to children free is an ill-advised idea.   The Gazette also reports him as saying, ‘I am not a technophobe, but I would be concerned about what pupils are using them for. An iPad gives them instant access to the internet’.

            Surely teachers, whether ‘head’ or assistant, are best engaged in doing what they are trained to do – teaching (even perhaps ‘directing’!) children and leave purchasing to those who can claim expertise in that field; ‘those bureaucrats at County Hall’ for instance.

What’s a job worth?

          That question is prompted by the news that members of the House of Commons have recently been asked to reveal, in guaranteed anonymity, what they feel their salaries ought to be.   A comfortable majority replied that they felt they deserved a 32 percent rise.

            This surely demonstrates, what some of us have suspected for some time, that members of parliament live in a different world from most of their constituents.  MPs currently receive an annual salary in excess of £65,000 a year and enjoy long holidays, generous expense allowances (even nowadays when it is much more difficult to fiddle them!) and quite a few worth-while perks; lots of free lunches and dinners for instance and, for those who nod, cheer and jeer ‘in the House’ at the right moments and troop dutifully into the division lobby when required, overseas trips to exciting and exotic places at the tax-payers’ expense.  Most of the rest of us, I think, would feel that they are doing quite nicely.

            A Conservative MP (but it could have just as easily been one from Labour or the Lib.Dems) when asked to comment on tv, declared that many MPs could earn twice as much outside parliament but gave it all up to serve poor suffering humanity.  He may have brought some of his tv viewers to tears with his portrayal of an MP’s wife explaining to the children on Christmas Eve that Santa Claus wouldn’t be visiting them this year because their daddy had nobly chosen to serve the community instead of concentrating on making more and even more money.

            I wonder that no-one has thought of relying on the market forces that rule most aspects of our lives these days, to determine the proper level of MPs salaries.   While there are at least two or three applicants on the short list for each vacancy that occurs (and many more hopeful applicants have been eliminated by the local political parties long before the election) salaries are obviously generous enough to attract them.   Now that we’re ‘all in this together’, cutting MPs and Ministers’ salaries and allowances might be among the hard and painful decisions that should be made.    So far, those who have made such decisions have had to endure very little personal hardship and even less pain.

The Danish Example

          If anyone had told me eighteen months ago that I would be hooked on a tv (BBC4) who-done-it with a sub-plot about the election of the Mayor of Copenhagen, with the leading actor a dour woman detective on the brink of middle age and with the dialogue in Danish but with English subtitles, I would have thought they were mad. If they went on to say that I would be at least equally captivated by a tv serial in the same  language about a Danish woman prime minister and her problems in holding together a fragile coalition while coping with her conscience and problems within her own family, I’d have really thought they should be sectioned!

            Yet I have been entranced by three series (I thought that the first was the best) of ‘The Killing’, featuring Sara Lund, the unsmiling cardigan-wearing Copenhagen woman detective, and am currently hooked on the second series of Borgen, in which likeable Birgitte Nyburg, Denmark’s fictional Prime Minister, struggles with her conscience, an unruly coalition government, and her family problems.   We have also had The Bridge in which a particularly gruesome murder which left the victim at the midpoint of the international bridge joining Denmark and Sweden, is solved by co-operation between Swedish aspergic woman detective Saga Noren and a male Danish detective from Copenhagen.  Although The Bridge held me, I couldn’t warm to Saga Noren as I had to Sara Lund!

            I wasn’r alone in my enthusiasm for these Scandinavian dramas.   Readers’ letters in the Radio Times and elsewhere in the national press make it clear that this enthusiasm is widespread throughout the UK particularly among viewers who have had a surfeit of inane quizzes, ‘reality’ programmes, cookery programmes, celebrity worship, and wealthy people seeking an ‘escape to the country’..

            These Danish offerings seem too to have an edge on most British crime and political dramas.  I have felt ‘at home’ among the characters and in the landscape.  It’s not surprising perhaps.  The Danish landscape is similar to that of Essex and Suffolk and most of us, particularly those who are natives of eastern England, certainly have Danish ancestors!  In Borgen, the political drama currently broadcast on Saturday evenings, there's a fragile coalition government struggling with its finances.  The fact that this (taking place against a background of power struggles and domestic upheaval) holds the attention and interest of viewers, is a tribute to the skill of the producers and script-writers.

            These tv dramas have aroused British public interest in the country that produced them and have inspired a number of feature articles on Denmark in the popular press. We were once, admittedly a thousand years ago, united.  Like us the Danes have a constitutional monarchy.  Like us they are members of the European Union but have their own currency and not the Euro.  There though the similarity ends.

            Whereas the UK has the widest gap between the very rich and the very poor of any developed and democratic European country, Denmark has already achieved what I (a voice crying in the wilderness!) have been advocating in this blog for several years; one of the narrowest gaps between rich and poor in the civilised world.  One article that I read commented with amazement that a Danish solicitor’s income is only twice that of his office cleaner.   And why should it be more than that – they have similar needs, both work hard at their particular task and while the solicitor’s work is interesting and challenging, that of the cleaner is tiring, boring and repetitive?.  The solicitor’s education and training took much longer than the cleaner’s but in Denmark university education is free (as it was in the UK before the advent of the Thatcher/Blair axis!) and there are generous grants for students.  In the UK it has been conceded that it is not unreasonable for the pay of the most senior positions in the public service to be limited to no more than ten times that of the most humble worker. That surely is still a ridiculously high differential -  but in the private sector the idea that there should be any such relationship whatsoever  produces outrage!

            Denmark has, by our standards, a very high rate of income tax but it seems that the Danes pay it happily, believing it is used in the national interest and not for such stupid, extravagant and totally counter-productive purposes as maintaining a fleet of nuclear submarines patrolling the high seas and failing to deter either terrorists or ‘rogue states’ from their nefarious activities.

            There’s a lot that our politicians and business men and women, as well as our tv programme producers, could learn from our Danish cousins and EU partners.  I wish that I thought there was the slightest chance of their being prepared to do so!

              

         

 

           

Week 2 2013

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Half the Human Race.

          The appalling gang-rape and murder of a young woman medical student, travelling with her fiancé on a public bus in India’s capital has produced both local and international protest. While this outrage was taking place the bus is said to have passed several police check-points.  Subsequent events suggest that the Delhi Police show much more enthusiasm for restraining public demonstrations at this atrocity than for preventing such incidents from taking place

            The blatant way in which this young woman was attacked, tortured, violated and then thrown naked from the bus onto the highway, ensured that it made the headlines world-wide.  Many similar, if less public, outrages against women occur in India and other parts of the world daily and are too common to attract more than local media interest. Only last week the Clacton Gazette reported an attack on a young woman and her attempted rape less than half a mile from my home and outside the primary school attended many years ago by my two sons.  Nor are such attacks on women and girls necessarily of a directly sexual nature.  Only weeks earlier an attempt was made, again on a bus but in Pakistan, to murder a girl in her mid teens for her courageous campaigning for the right of girls to enjoy the same educational opportunities as boys. Fortunately, and almost miraculously, this young lady survived the attack and has been discharged from hospital, though she will have to return for further major surgery.  She lives to fight another day for the right of members of her sex to a proper education.

            There is little doubt that a great many such offences against women and girls spring from a conviction, particularly prevalent in the Middle East, that women are an inferior sex created for no other purpose than the service and entertainment of men.  I once heard a supporter of this attitude explaining on tv that it was quite wrong for westerners to suggest that he and many of his compatriots and co-religionists held women in low regard.   On the contrary, he insisted, the women of their households were regarded as their most precious possessions and – like all precious possessions – were kept away from prying eyes and potential danger.  He was quite unable to see that to regard any fellow human as a possession, however highly prized, was in itself deeply offensive.

             Well-meaning people may hesitate to criticise or condemn such an attitude for fear of showing disrespect for a centuries-old culture and its traditions.  Respect has to be earned.   Past English culture and tradition  included burning heretics alive, bear-baiting and cock-fighting, hanging or transporting people to the colonies for trivial offences, torturing and hanging old women denounced as witches, and husbands  beating their wives, provided that they did so with a stick no thicker than a thumb! ! Although our country can’t yet claim to be completely free of bigotry, prejudice and the myth of male superiority, we may thank God that there were those of both sexes who showed no respect whatsoever for those old cultural traditions and who were prepared to oppose and eventually abolish them. 
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           An extreme example of the effects of an uncompromisingly male-dominated society is illustrated by recently published statistics relating to the position of women in Afghanistan.   87 percent of Afghan women are illiterate, one in every eleven Afghan women dies in childbirth and 70 percent are forced into arranged marriages.   I have no doubt at all that those disgraceful figures will become even worse in the next couple of years following the complete withdrawal of NATO troops.  My advice to Afghan women who have embraced western values is to get out while they are still able to do so!

Towards Anglo-German Understanding

            On my return to Clacton from celebrating my 90^th birthday with my family in Zittau Last year, I revised my previous self-published memoirs ‘Zittau…and I’, corrected a couple of errors and added a section about my birthday visit to the town and the warm welcome that my family and I had received there.   In January 2012 I self-published the result as ‘Zittau…..and I’ (2^nd Edition).  I gave copies to all my British friends and relations and sent copies to the new friends that I had made in Germany.

             Among my German friends ‘Zittau….and I’ proved gratifyingly popular.  The scholarly Dr Volker Dudeck is a distinguished historian, a Cultural Senator of the Federal State of Saxony and the former Direktor (Curator) of Zittau’s town museum.  He now devotes his retirement to the conservation and display of the Zittau Grossen Fastentuch  (Great Lenten Veil).  He was particularly enthusiastic.   He arranged for my booklet to be translated into German, secured the interest and support of the Mayor, (Oberbürgermeister Arnd Voight) and of other members of the Council, and members of the Fellowship of the Zittau Lenten Veils (of which I was made an Honorary Member in 2011), and arranged for the German version to be printed and published for sale in aid of the continued preservation and display of the Great Lenten Veil.

As a result, Meine Begegnungen mit Zittau  (I was told that the English title made no sense when translated word for word into German)  was printed and published as a slim hard-back in December 2012.  I was delighted to receive copies just a week or so before Christmas; a very welcome Christmas Present!  It is printed on high quality paper with an introductory preface by Dr Dudeck. There are two black-and-white illustrations included within the text and. fourteen colour photographs illustrating my recent visits to Zittau form a supplement at the back.   These include a full-page picture of my welcome by Oberbürgermeister Arnd Voight on the occasion of my 90^th birthday!

The books are to be sold in aid of the continued preservation and presentation of Zittau’s Great Lenten Veil which has played an important part in my life during the past six years. Now permanently displayed in Zittau’s Museum/Church of the Holy Cross, it attracts some 30,000 visitors a year!

A pencil drawing of my late wife by grandson Christopher. It is one of the illustrations in the text of Meine Begegnungen mit Zittau.

At about the same time as Meine Begegnungen mit Zittau was being printed I had other heartening news from my good friend Ingrid Zeibig, originally from Zittau but now living and working in Bayreuth in Bavaria, and from Joyce Hartung, born and brought up in Sunderland but now married to a German and also  living in Bayreuth.

            Both are members of the Bayreuth Anglo-German Society and Joyce runs an ‘Improve your English’ course for members.   They have been using both my ‘Zittau and I’  (English version of course) and ‘In the Beginning’, ten monologues written by my late wife and myself that purport to be by witnesses of Jesus Christ’s Nativity and its aftermath, as text books in their English classes. Ingrid and Joyce both tell me that members of the Anglo-German Society have thoroughly enjoyed reading them.

            I like to think that the publication of Meine Begegnungen mit Zittau and the use of my own and my wife’s publications by the Anglo-German Society in Bayreuth are small steps towards greater Anglo-German understanding and are thus tiny steps - the 'minute particulars' commended by William Blake perhaps - toward world peace.

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Week 1 2013

Tendring Topics.......on Line

‘It was the best of times. It was the worst of times’

            So begins Charles Dickens ‘Tale of Two Cities’, referring to the end of the 1780s and beginning of the 1790s, a time in which hope at the beginning of the French Revolution ended in despair as it was succeeded by the ‘reign of terror’.

            In some respects the same could be said of the year that we have just left behind us.  It was the year of the London Olympics, an organisational triumph thanks at least partly to the public sector (the army and police) stepping in when a giant private sector organisation proved incapable of honouring its contract to provide security.  It was an unequivocal triumph for Britain’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes who collected an unprecedented haul of medals outstripping, per capita, giants like the USA and China.  Outside the Olympics there was the first ever triumph of a British cyclist in the international Tour de France and the first British victory for a very long time in the American Open Tennis Championship.

            The celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the 60^th year of her reign, was also deemed a success.  Certainly the members of the public were enthusiastic enough.  It was heart-warming to see the Queen’s subjects – white, black and every shade of brown – united in celebrating the Jubilee as well as in cheering on the British contestants in the Olympics.

            The weather, which was mercifully kind for the Oympics, did its best to dampen the Jubilee celebrations – and the weather has really given us the worst of times during 2012.  A wet late spring was followed by a wet summer and a wet autumn. Even now as we are gripped by winter, depressions  continue to sweep in from the Atlantic and again there is flooding to parts of Britain where, last year, some homes were flooded as often as three times in as many months.  Those of us living in southern East Anglia, once again spared the worst of the extreme weather, find it difficult to imagine the misery and despair of those whose homes are flooded again and again*.

            Yet many in Britain still refuse to accept the reality of global climate change. At international conferences delegates talk and talk and talk – and fail to take effective action!

            Then, there has been the political and economic situation.  Britain’s public services are being run down.  Public buildings and parks are neglected, highways pot-holed and the surfaces of footpaths broken and dangerous.  Services supporting the poor, the disabled, the very young and the very old, are slashed and financial support of the poor reduced.  A record number of home buyers who had imagined they were ‘home owners’ have been dispossessed and rendered homeless.  And there is no longer a widely available stock of Council houses available as a safety net.  In the 1950s and 1960s when we were still recovering from World War II, rough sleepers were rarely seen on Britain’s streets and street beggars virtually unknown.  Into what a ‘Brave New World’ we have been led by Margaret Thatcher and her successors and by Tony Blair’s New Labour!  It isn’t surprising that extremist groups like the BNP and UKIP are beginning to flourish and that young people, seeing neither possibility nor hope of a brighter future, are taking to all-night partying, booze and drugs to escape from ‘a present’ that is becoming unbearable.

            In recent weeks I have wished a great many people a Happy New Year!   That really was a triumph of optimism over probability.  Perhaps a Rather Happier New Year is the most that any of us can hope for.

*On new Year's Eve we were promised  sunnier, drier weather during the first fortnight of 2013
  I hope that the weather-experts are right!

‘Twas the week before Christmas’

…….and Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats decided that it was time that he distanced the policies of what was left of his party from those of his senior coalition partners, the Conservatives.  Perhaps, who knows, he would manage to breathe new life into a political body that, under his leadership, was showing every sign of being about to breathe its last.

            He certainly did so in a spectacular manner – by positioning himself on the right of the Conservatives!  The coalition had promised that pensioners’ benefits would remain sacrosanct, at least during the term of the present government.  Nick Clegg would like to break that promise.  It is, he said, quite absurd that  multimillionaires who happen to be of pensionable age, should be entitled to the same free NHS prescriptions, the same winter fuel allowance, the same free bus pass, and the same free tv licence, as the state pensioner with no other source of income.

            And so, of course, it is.  But what should be the remedy?  Nick Clegg suggests means-testing these benefits.   I don’t think that that prospect would worry multi-millionaire pensioners in the very least.  How many of them bother with their free bus passes?  How many of them, in fact, ever get onto a bus?  Nor, I think, would any of them bother in the least about NHS prescriptions, winter fuel allowance and a free tv licence?   And how much money would the government save by excluding them from privileges that mean very little to them and so much to other old people?   My guess is, precious little.

            The government would get much more if the means testing were to be carried out further down the line to affect every pensioner having a source of income beyond  the state pension. That would raise more money but would also cause real hardship to a great many people, and that, I have little doubt is what would happen if means testing were to be introduced into entitlement for age-related benefits.

            I do have a modest income beyond my state pension.  I would not miss the free bus pass because I am no longer physically capable of mounting and travelling on a bus. I do though appreciate my winter fuel allowance, my free NHS prescriptions and my free tv licence.  So do many thousands of other pensioners in a similar position to me.  Were we to be means-tested out of our entitlement to them we would certainly make our anger very clear at the next general election!

            A fairer idea, to which I personally would have no objection, would be to continue with universal benefits but make them subject to income tax.   The really poor would then continue to get completely free benefits while those of us who are better off would pay back a proportion of the value of those benefits in tax, the wealthier among us paying the most and the least wealthy the least.

            Such a system could be further improved by radically changing our income tax system so that liability to pay is properly and proportionately graduated, making the multi-millionaire pay the same proportion of his income back in tax as do those in ‘the squeezed middle’ that we hear so much about and those, like myself, who are by no means wealthy but do pay income tax.  Just think how much simpler life would be for all of us if the only ‘means test’ we ever had to face was our income tax assessment!  Paying benefits to millionaires wouldn’t then matter in the least.  A fairer income tax system would mean that they wouldn’t be quite so wealthy and would also mean that most of those benefits would be paid back to the state in tax.

            No, it isn’t going to happen in my lifetime and probably not in the lifetime of any present blog reader.  I am sufficiently an optimist though, to believe that it will happen – though perhaps only in the very distant future.

‘Of Courtesy…..

          Wrote Hilaire Belloc, ‘……..It is much less, than courage of heart, or holiness – Yet, as I walk it seems to me, that the Grace of God is in Courtesy’.   And it seems to me as I go about my day to day affairs that courtesy, or what we used to call ‘common politeness,’ is in short supply – particularly among young people – at the beginning of the 21^st Century.

            For that reason I was very pleased to hear on the tv that one secondary school in Cornwall was giving its male pupils lessons in ‘good manners’. This was at the special request of the girl pupils who were, it must be supposed, shocked and embarrassed by the oafish behaviour of their male companions on social occasions.

Just eighteen

Fifteen - almost sixteen

            Lessons were being given on appropriate behaviour when escorting a lady to a restaurant for a meal, how to handle the table napkins (never, ever refer to them as serviettes!) and which knives, forks or spoons are to be used for which dishes.  All very well, of course, but I remember the occasion  when (aged just eighteen) I had first escorted my future wife (not quite sixteen) for a meal after we had watched Stage Coach, featuring a very young John Wayne, at a local cinema. It was to a fish restaurant attached to a nearby pub where we enjoyed fish and chips followed by ice cream!. We had no trouble whatsoever in sorting out the table napkins and the cutlery.  I do though remember my mum berating me afterwards for having taken a young and impressionable girl into licensed premises, though my  new girlfriend had drunk nothing stronger than lemonade while I, demonstrating my adolescent machismo (as much to the the waitress as to my companion!),  had ordered ‘a half of best bitter’.

            I hope that, as well as initiating those young Cornish lads into the niceties of dining out, they instructed them in such basics as saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ on the appropriate occasions, not appearing unkempt and unshaven at social events, giving way graciously when appropriate, offering one’s seat to ladies and the old and/or disabled, taking off one’s hat/cap/hood when entering a house, not interrupting someone else (however boring!), and learning that the  correct response to ‘How d' you do?’, is not a detailed description of your state of health, but a murmured ‘How d' you do?’ in reply, as you shake the proffered hand of friendship.  Oh yes – and how to converse without using bad language, text-speak, or interjecting ‘know what I mean?’ at the end of each sentence.

Shades of Meaning

            How strange it is that different people can give an entirely different interpretation of circumstances that most of us thought ‘spoke for themselves’.

            I remember a friend who was convinced that the parable of the widow’s mite meant that small donations, no matter from whom, to good causes were just as praise-worthy as large ones.  Then there was Mrs Thatcher’s interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan.   The important thing, she said, was that the good Samaritan had sufficient money to pay for the robbery victim’s board and lodging.

            The recent appalling mass murder of young children and their teachers in a New England primary school underlined to most of us the fact that in the USA far too many people own lethal weapons due to the laxity of the ‘gun laws’ there.  The American National Rifle Association drew almost exactly the opposite conclusion.  There weren’t enough guns in the hands of ‘the good guys’.  One of its members said that those who opposed teachers carrying hand guns in school ‘had blood on their hands’.  A spokesman for the Association urged that every school in the USA should have an armed guard to counter possible future attacks!

            Those comments reinforce my conviction that, despite the fact that the Americans speak a similar language to us, we Brits are culturally as well as geographically and historically, much closer to our mainland fellow-Europeans than to those with whom we are said to have a ‘special relationship’.   

           

             

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[edit]APenalising the Old