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