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!