Week 9 2113

Tendring Topics......on line

‘Arms and the Man’

            That is the title of one of George Bernard Shaw’s more light-hearted plays, but ‘the arms’ that I have in mind are the weapons of death that, even as I write, are killing men, women and children in Syria and elsewhere and during the past century have killed millions of men, women and children world-wide.  ‘The man’ is our Prime Minister, David Cameron.

            He has recently been in India, furthering trade with that rapidly growing potential consumer of the products of British industry.  It was his second visit there in the past three years, his earlier one having been in July 2010.  Since then he has paid similar visits to Egypt and Kuwait, Saudi Arabia (on two occasions), Indonesia, Japan, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Brazil, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

            Furthering British trade relations is obviously a very worthy activity though some may wonder if affairs at home in Britain are really running so smoothly that our Prime Minister can afford frequent absences on trade missions.  What is concerning is the fact that much of the commercial activity that he is so eager to promote is that of the arms trade – a trade that many of us regard as being as undesirable as the slave trade and that, like the slave trade, is destined to become  one of the darker aspects of our nation’s history.  This interest of the Prime Minister was noted particularly during the ‘Arab spring’ when he toured the Middle East in the company of arms salesmen who regarded the turmoil in the region as a unique sales opportunity.  How those salesmen must have rejoiced earlier at the bloody break-up of the former Jugoslavia.  Quite apart from the deadly weapons required at the time, its outcome was the creation of five potential customers instead of just one!

            Howard Wheeldon, Director of Policy for ADS, a ‘defence’ trade organisation is reported as saying, ‘The PM has done a fantastic job.   He has picked up the value of defence to the national economy.  Other PMs haven’t necessarily’.  No doubt; but the promotion of arms sales surely can’t have a very high priority on the Prime Minister’s ‘job description’.

            In fact, the British arms trade does very well by global standards.  The USA is the world’s biggest arms exporter with 35 percent of the market share.  The UK comes next with a 15 percent share, narrowly in front of both Russia and France. It is not a statistic in which I take any pride.

            It may be argued that every country has a right to self-defence.  Trouble arises only when weapons fall into the wrong hands.  Much the same argument has been put forward in the USA about gun control.  ‘The only way to foil the activities of  bad guys with guns is to make sure that the good guys are well armed’.

 Internationally, how do we tell the ‘good guys’ from the bad?  And how do we ensure that they remain ‘good? I am sure that when the French sold Exocet Missiles to the Argentineans they hadn’t intended them to be used against the British in the Falklands.  When the USA and the UK covertly armed the Mojihadin in Afghanistan to support them in their guerrilla war against the USSR they hadn’t intended to put weapons into the hands of those who, a few decades later, would be using them to kill British and American troops.  It would surprise me if British made weapons are not being used by both sides in the current bloody conflict in Syria.

            I look forward to the day when the success of the arms trade is a distant memory and we are better known for our tractors, our dams, our bridges and our medical and surgical expertise than for our tanks and guns, our bombers, our jet fighters and our death-dealing missiles.

An elderly ‘Essex boy’!

          It might have been thought that someone who had had to serve only nine weeks of a nine months sentence for serious fraud, and had heard that there was to be no further investigation into his expensive activities as former Leader of Essex County Council, would have thanked his lucky stars for his good fortune and have kept a very low profile, at least for a year or two.

           

But that was not Lord Hanningfield’s way.  He sued Essex Police for wrongful arrest and trespass and has been awarded £3,500 in damages. Only a month or two ago we had learned that, as the fraud for which he had been convicted had been much greater than had originally been realized, he would have to pay back a further £37.000 under the Proceeds of Crime Act, or return to gaol for a further term.  We were told at the time that as he was by no means a wealthy man this might compel him  to sell his bungalow and ‘take up the tenancy of a Council House’. (Did he really imagine he'd qualify for one?)   Under the circumstances he might have been expected to add that £3,500 to his meagre savings, but not so.  He is ‘still working to raise that £37,000’ and is donating the £3,500 to a cancer charity!

            Lord Hanningfield (who was plain Paul White, an Essex pig farmer, before Tony Blair arranged for him to be ennobled on Margaret Thatcher’s recommendation) says that one chapter of his life is now over and he wants to get on serving the people of Essex.  ‘I’ll mainly be working in the House of Lords and I’m already taking up some issues’.

            How strange that the government and members of the House of Commons should be so strongly opposed to convicted criminals being permitted to vote in elections for those who make our laws – but are apparently quite happy for a convicted criminal, who has not yet ‘paid his debt to Society’ (he still owes us £37,000 or a further spell in gaol!) and as far as I know has uttered not a single word of apology or contrition, to play a part in the House of Lords in making those laws!

            We used to hear a great deal about ‘Essex girls’ and their characteristics.  Lord Hanningfield is surely an elderly ‘Essex boy’ to match any of them!

           

              The Assassins

          It is said that at the beginning of the Battle of Waterloo it was reported to the Duke of Wellington that the commander of one of the British cannon had Napoleon himself squarely in his sights.   Should he give the order to fire?  ‘Certainly not’, replied Wellington, ‘We are soldiers – not assassins’.  Yet had he given the order to fire it is at least possible that thousands of British and French lives would have been spared.

            That, I suppose, is always the justification advanced for assassination.  A particular individual is the enemy of the State/the Party/Democracy/the Faith/ the Revolution, or whatever else is considered most important at that time and in that place.  The violent erasure of just one life, it may be claimed, would save thousands of others.  In the nineteenth century a Russian nobleman said of his country that its system of government was ‘despotism tempered by assassination’.

            The present Russian government may well have been responsible for the assassination in London in 2006 of Alexander Litvinenko, a former member of the KGB and of its successor, who had defected to MI6, becoming a double agent working for British Intelligence. It wouldn’t be particularly surprising if he were regarded as a threat to his former employers (much as Burgess and Maclean, who defected to Russia, were regarded in Britain) and orders given for his elimination.  It was an assassination that has soured Anglo-Russian relations to this day.

            British-Israeli relations were similarly soured by the assassination of Mahmoud al Mabhooh, a Hamas activist, in Dubai in 2010 by agents of Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service.  The assassins used forged British passports to get near to their victim, again provoking British official condemnation.  Such assassinations, we may think, are the sort of conduct that we expect from Russians and folk from the Middle East – but are far below the standard of the United Kingdom and our allies.

            But are they? Whoever murdered Alexander Litvinenko and those who murdered Mahmoud al Mabhooh at least put their own lives at risk and in danger when they carried out their criminal actions.   We can hardly say the same about those in the USA who control drones (unmanned aircraft) to fly over enemy – or sometimes nominally allied – countries, seeking out individuals considered to be a threat to the USA as targets for the launch of their death-dealing missiles.  ‘Smart’ as these drones and their deadly cargo undoubtedly are, they are not quite smart enough to distinguish between individual friends and foes. From 2006 to 2009 between 750 and 1,000 people were assassinated by drones in Pakistan, of whom it is reckoned that 66 to 68 percent were Taliban activists and between 31 and 33 percent innocent civilians.

            I understand that the UK also uses drones but that, at present, their use is restricted to military targets in Afghanistan.  We do, of course, support the activities of our American allies.   There was a time, not so very long ago, when American courts refused to extradite suspected, and in some cases tried and sentenced, IRA murderers to the UK.  There’s no doubt what the American reaction would have been had we then sent drones to pick out and ‘neutralise’ those enemies of our country and its people - especially if a few innocent American civilian deaths occurred as ‘collateral damage!'    Do not do unto others what you would hate them - or anyone else - to do unto you!

           

           

             

            

Week 8 2013

Tendring Topics....on Line

'Horses for Courses' - but preferably not on the menu!

          The current scandal about horse meat having been substituted for beef in meat products on sale in a number of Britain’s supermarkets took me back in memory to the days, half a century ago, when I was employed as a Public Health Inspector and food inspector by the then Clacton Urban District Council.

                         Perhaps this photo isn't quite fair to Tesco. They were neither the first nor the worst.           

 Our main concern in the realm of food inspection was the prevention of food poisoning or food-borne infectious diseases.  We carried out post mortem inspections of food animals, particularly cattle and pigs, at local slaughter houses (a job highly likely to turn omnivores into vegetarians!) inspected food shops and their wares, and when considered necessary, took samples of food items intended for sale, for chemical or bacteriological examination.

            We also engaged in work which nowadays, I think, would be that of the Consumer Protection Officer.  We inspected food offered or intended for sale to make sure that it was what it was declared to be;  that customers were buying food ‘of the nature, quality or substance’ that the retailer claimed.  In the pre-war and immediate post-war years many foods were sold ‘loose’, not pre-packed as most are today and there was much more scope for an unscrupulous retailer to, for instance, water down milk, substitute margarine for butter, adulterate sugar or flour and make ‘pork’ sausages with minced beef and an excessive amount of breadcrumb filler.

            DNA was, of course, unheard of in those days and identification much more basic.  I think it would have been perfectly possible for processed horseflesh to have been substituted for beef.  However there was then little if any demand for mass produced processed meat.  Butchers made their own pork or beef sausages, brawn and other meat products to supply their own customers. I doubt if there was any widespread fraud on the scale that there appears to be today.

           

            In any event it was the retailers who were held to be responsible for the food they sold and for its labelling.   Retailers had to suffer any penalty when claims that they had made for the food they sold proved to be fraudulent.  This surely should be the position today. In the ‘60s and earlier this could occasionally result in a perceived injustice where a small retailer had been deceived by a smooth-tongued salesman. This isn’t the case today.  Those retailers involved in the horse meat scandal are giant supermarkets who could have, had they wished, taken regular samples of the products of their suppliers and had them analysed in commercial laboratory*.

            All of the above is, of course, assuming that the law today is much the same as it was back in the 1960s and before.  It is quite possible that sometime between Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron, it has been decided that the consumer protection laws to which I have referred have been scrapped as being ‘Fuddy-duddy red tape, probably dreamed up by some bureaucrat in Brussels, that stifles enterprise, initiative and profit-making’

*  It seemed for a while that the horsemeat scandal was going to provide yet another stick with which the Europhobes could strike Europe and the EU.  ‘It’s those depraved foreigners across the Channel who eat horse meat.  It’s all part of a plot hatched in Brussels.  Ban all imports of meat from the EU.  That’ll be tit for tat for when they banned our meat exports because of mad cow disease!’   It must have come as quite a blow when British slaughter-houses and meat processing plant became involved.

‘It’s not winning that’s important…..

          …….It’s taking part’.   That was once the British attitude to sport.  I remember, perhaps twenty years ago, reading an article in which the author wrote rather  scornfully of American and Soviet athletes who were interested only in winning medals and trophies – so unlike we Brits who ran, jumped, swam and engaged in competitive games for the pleasure of the activity itself, not in the hope of winning.   Edwardian poet Sir Henry Newbolt summed it up in a few lines of his poem Vitai Lampada:

And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat, 

Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, 

But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote 

"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

             All of that seems to have changed.  Britain’s athletes did very well indeed in last year’s London Olympics.  They gained international acclaim and a crop of medals – gold, silver and bronze in many, but not all, of the sporting competitions.  It might have been thought that for the next Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, extra effort and extra funding would have been put into those sports at which we had done rather less well, in an effort to encourage and perhaps raise the standard of those competitors.

            Not a bit of it – forget all that stuff about it being the taking part that is important.  Britain wants more gold medals. Extra official funding has gone to the sports at which we have done well, in the hope that next time our competitors will do just as well, or even better. Tough luck on the 'also rans'.  We’re backing known winners, not potential losers.  

            IT seems that we’re just as obsessed with medals and trophies as ‘those Yanks’ or ‘those Ruskies’

 ‘Making the Sick Sicker!’

          This was the headline under which, a fortnight ago, I wrote in this blog about the activities of Atos  the private firm who were assessing the work potential of those who were claiming Disability Living Allowance – and the way in which false assessments were making genuinely disabled people ill and even resulting in suicides. Here’s what I wrote:

Private Eye reports that:  ‘Plans include withdrawing benefit if an assessor decides that a claimant’s ability to work could be improved by aids, such as guide dogs, walking sticks or prosthetic limbs – whether or not the claimant has access to them or can use them. Atos assessors already have the power to carry out an ‘imaginary wheelchair test’ by which they decide that a person could work if they used a wheelchair – even if they do not have one.  Under the changes, due to take place without public debate, people will also lose benefit if the assessor decides that adjustments could be made for them in the workplace – whether or not those changes have been made.’

          Way back in the 1950s, when I first began freelance writing, I was told that a picture can often make a point more tellingly than a thousand words. I have often wished that I had the sketching skills to illustrate the thoughts that I have expressed in words. A Quaker friend of mine has demonstrated the truth of that with a cartoon copied from another Facebook page.   Here it is. It makes its point much more effectively than my words could hope to and was well worth passing on. Many thanks!

When did it happen!

            I was listening to a discussion on the tv.  The government had decided to make child-care services more easily available by increasing the maximum number of under-fives with whom a carer  is permitted to cope.  It would be OK, a government spokesperson insisted, because they would have to be better qualified child-carers.  They would, for instance, be required have good GCSEs in English and Maths.

            Well, I can see that a child carer ought not to be illiterate – even if it is only so as to be able to read the instructions on any equipment that is used or on any medication that may have to be dispensed.  And the carer ought obviously to be capable of counting all of his or her charges, to make sure none is missing.  I don’t really see though how literacy and numeracy would make the carer better able to deal with a four year old bully, three year old tantrums or a two-year old showing symptoms that could be – just could be – those of meningitis.

            And then it struck me how totally unreal (and how sinister!) this discussion would have sounded during at least the first thirty years of my life.  Then it had been taken for granted that the best person to care for a young child was his or her mother. Professionally trained Health Visitors visited and advised young mums on bringing up  their children safely and in what was then considered to be the best practice.  Not even George Orwell in his 1984 had anticipated children being cared for by anyone other than their mothers during the first few years of their lives.

            There were professional child-carers of course.  They worked in orphanages and children’s homes where unfortunate children who had no parents, or whose parents were incapable of caring for them, were brought up.   We all pitied such children and put our hands in our pockets to give them what support we could.

In those days responsible young men didn’t get married and have children (in that order of course!)  until their income was sufficient to support a wife and family.  Before giving their consent Victorian and Edwardian fathers are said to have asked prospective sons-in-law, ‘Are you in a position to support my daughter in the manner to which she has become accustomed?’ My future father-in-law certainly didn’t put it like that (nor would he have had a final veto!) but I am sure that he and my future wife's mother did give some thought to my ‘prospects’ before they gave us their blessing.

            Nowadays – although everyone is much better off than we were then – it is taken for granted that a couple can’t hope to live together in comfort, never mind have children, on just one income.  Both must be in full-time work and must share the tasks of home-making.  There will inevitably need to be provision for maternity leave but the young mother is expected to get back to the office desk, or the supermarket check-out or whatever, the moment  child care can be arranged.

            The results are plain to see – casual promiscuous sex, broken marriages and other relationships, under-age mums, an increasing number of abortions, juvenile crime.  The future seemed so full of hope and promise in those first few years after World War II.  Where and when did it all go so wrong? 

Week 7 2013

Tendring Topics.....on line

‘Minute Particulars’

          .

William Blake, author of the poem and hymn Jerusalem remarked that those who wish to do good to their fellow men and women should do so ‘in minute particulars’.  Blake had no time at all for those with grandiose schemes for all mankind

.In Old Road a few hundred yards from the entrance to Morrison’sSupermarket. I took this photograph eighteen months ago. Nothing has been done since


I am not at all sure that Blake was right about that.   There certainly are times when it is necessary to take the longer and wider view. However I think of his words when I hear top politicians announcing reconstruction of the motorway network and the building of new railway lines that will make it possible for us to save an hour on the journey from London to Glasgow, while at the same time local roads and streets are potholed, and the pavements that we use every day are cracking and crumbling beneath our feet.

 They certainly are here in Clacton-on-Sea and I don’t suppose for a moment that the situation is materially different in many other towns   Outrage expressed in the correspondence columns of local newspapers as cars were damaged and accidents caused by potholed roads, has led to at least the worst of the potholes being filled and repaired by the County Council, though many still remain.

            The same cannot be said for the pavements.  Those, like me, who rely on an electric mobility scooter to go shopping, visit friends and, in Clacton  to visit the sea-front and the cliff gardens when the weather is warm and sunny, are acutely conscious of the state of the town’s pavements. Our ancient bones are jolted by every broken  paving stone and uneven surface. These are also a danger to all pedestrians after dark and to those with impaired vision at any time.

In Agincourt Road, not far from my home.  The uneven and broken paving stones are an obvious danger to pedestrians after dark and to those with impaired vision at any time.

In the town centre – in Pier Avenue and Station Road – the pavements have fairly recently been re-laid. They are safe for pedestrians and are a pleasure for us motor-scooterists to drive over.  Move into Old Road, just yards from the town centre or any of our urban side roads and you will find a very different situation.  These two pictures, taken of paths that I traverse regularly, tell their own story.

            I very much hope that no-one trips, falls and is seriously injured by these broken and neglected footpaths.   If anyone does, I suggest that they contact one of the no-win no-fee lawyers who advertise on daytime commercial tv and press for maximum compensation – not just for themselves but to encourage the County Council to give the repair of these broken down and dangerous pavements the priority that this service, for which we pay in our Council Tax, deserves.

Sacred (sea) Cows

            Since 1980 Britain’s armed forces have been involved in the Falklands War against Argentina, two Gulf Wars (the second involving the invasion and occupation of Iraq),  military actions in Sierra Leone and in Kosovo, a still on-going war in Afghanistan, a successful action against the Gaddafi regime in Libya, and peripheral (so far) action in support of the French in Mali.  The Army, the Navy and the RAF have all been involved in these actions that have cost millions of pounds and hundreds of British lives.

            There is no certainty that there won’t be similar calls on the armed forces in the near future.  We can certainly not claim to have been victorious in Afghanistan, Much of Libya appears to be a no-go area for Britons despite our active support for the successful revolutionary cause there.  Already our involvement in Mali has developed from the loan of a couple of cargo planes to help with the French intervention, to providing ground troops to help train the Malian Army. Is that to be the extent of Britain’s involvement – I wonder?   In Syria we are giving humanitarian and diplomatic support to the rebel forces (including fanatical jihadist fighters who are threatening us elsewhere!) trying to overthrow the existing government while  Foreign Minister William Hague  makes belligerent noises from the sidelines.  Oh yes – and in the background there is Iran which may or may not be developing nuclear weapons and which may be involved in armed conflict with Israel (which everybody pretends not to know does possess nuclear weapons!) at any moment.

            Despite all this the Government is including the armed forces in its austerity programme.  Currently the UK has no aircraft carriers (a ‘weapon of war’ that could have humanitarian uses) and battle-weary soldiers returning from Afghanistan are as likely as not to receive their redundancy notices as they ‘Stand Easy!’ and ‘Fall Out!’ after their triumphal homecoming parade!

            The Trident nuclear submarine fleet has escaped the cuts that affect every other area of the armed forces.  These are the United Kingdom’s own weapons of mass destruction; our own Sacred (sea) Cows!  They alone have been spared the cuts and – as it happens – they alone have not been involved in any way in the wars and rumours of wars that have cost so many British lives and so many billions of pounds during the past three decades.

            Trident submarines, roaming the world’s oceans carrying their deadly arsenal, have prevented no act of aggression or terrorist act – and have cost no Middle Eastern or African Dictator  a moment’s peaceful sleep.  They are our ultimate deterrent – but they deterred neither the invasion of the Falklands by Argentina, nor that of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.   They didn’t prevent ‘nine eleven’ nor did they prevent the bomb outrages in London.  They inspire no terror in the hearts of the members of the Taliban.  They didn’t bother Colonel Gaddafi and they don’t worry either side in the civil war in Syria. This week they failed to deter North Koreans from testing their nuclear weapon!  They are, in fact, completely useless as a deterrent or as a weapon.   A deterrent only deters when the perpetrator of aggression believes that there in a serious chance of its being used.  They, and our government, are well aware that to release a nuclear weapon, whether by design or accident, could produce a chain reaction that would destroy countless millions of us and poison our world for centuries to come.  We hope that  they are not quite stupid enough to do that – Let us hope that nuclear weapons never fall into the hands of those, in Pakistan for instance, who are.

            I would like to see the day, prophesied nearly two centuries ago by Alfred Lord Tennyson, When the war drums throb no more, and the battle flags are furled, in the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World, but you don’t have to be a pacifist, a member of CND, or any kind of ban-the-bomb enthusiast, to see that preserving this useless and ridiculously expensive service in a violent world and in the midst of a programme of extreme austerity is utmost folly.

            Perhaps this is beginning to be realized.   Writing in The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, Ken Veitch a Cheshire Quaker, says that ‘Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury, has stated that Britain does not need to replace the Trident missile fleet with ‘like for like’ nuclear submarines that will cost the country billions of pounds at a time of national  austerity.’   He adds that senior officers in the army and air force have denounced Trident as an unaffordable irrelevance to the UK’s real security needs.  Opinion polls reveal that in the UK as a whole, over fifty percent of we Brits are opposed to Trident and that in Scotland, where the submarines are based, over seventy percent are opposed.

            ‘The cost of upgrading Trident has been put at about £97 billion for its projected life to the 2060s.  This would be a clear breach of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and would be likely to encourage other nations to base their ‘security’ on nuclear weaponry.

            Mohammed El Baradie, former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency commented that, ‘It is very hard to preach the virtues of non-smoking when you have a cigarette dangling from your lips and are about to buy a new pack’

It's a small, and very strange, world! 

This photo of mine, of a cable car making an ascent to the summit of the Muttersberg just outside Bludenz in Vorarlberg, Austria's western-most province, brought back memories of a happy camping holiday spent there many years ago. It was in 1971 and, for the first time, I was able to share driving the family car (a Ford Cortina Estate) with elder son Pete.

We set up our tents, a large frame tent for Heather and myself and for family meals, and a smaller sleeping tent for Pete and Andy our then-teenage sons, in the Grosswalsertal and drove out every day to explore the mountains and lakes of western Austria.

The cable car to the summit of the Muttersberg was, as you can see, quite small.  It accommodated ourselves and a very similar German family, mum and dad about the age of Heather and myself, with two children a year or two younger than our two sons.

Our camp in Vorarlberg, The car infront of our tent. The boys tent is the small one on the right

When I commented on the father's excellent command of English he explained that he had been a PoW in England for three years during World War II and had worked on a farm the whole time, learning English as he did so.   I replied that I too had been a prisoner of war for three years but had spent 18 months locked up in a large prisoner of war concentration camp in Italy and only eighteen months in a working camp in Germany.  Hence my German was far less fluent than his English.

I then asked what  ex-PoWs always ask a fellow former war prisoner, 'Where were you captured?'      He replied 'Tobruk', adding, in case I had never heard of the place 'that's in North Africa'.    I knew it all too well.   I had myself been captured there in June 1942 when Tobruk had fallen to the German Afrikakorps.  He had been captured towards the end of the same year after the defeat of the German and Italian armies at El Alamein. We had undoubtedly both taken part, on opposite sides, in the many tank-and-artillery engagements that had taken place in the desert to the south and west of Tobruk during the spring of that year.

How extraordinary that this friendly middle-aged stranger and I should thirty years earlier have been in a distant barren and inhospitable land alien to both of us, where we had been trying (fortunately unsuccessfully) to kill each-other!

It really is a small - and very strange - world! 

Week 6 2013

Tendring Topics.......on line

April Fools!

 1^st April is traditionally the day on which we get surprises – many of them unpleasant ones.  Most will disappear though, as with a triumphant cry of ‘April Fool!’ the surprise is revealed to be a hoax.

            Sadly, there will be nothing good humoured or ephemeral about the unpleasant surprise that, for many of us, will be manifest from the first day of April this year*.  This is the day on which the government’s economic measures, designed – so they say – to reducing and ultimately eliminating that deficit about which we hear so much, begin to take effect.  The immediate effect will be to make the poorest and most vulnerable of our fellow countrymen and women even poorer and more disadvantaged than they are at present.

            From that day, there will be no Disability Living Allowance.  This will be replaced by a new allowance payable only to those who can demonstrate being capable of no work whatsoever.   Others will lose the £208 disability living allowance currently paid to them and go instead onto the £112 job seekers allowance payable only for as long as they are actively seeking any work of which they may be capable.

            Then there’s the ‘bedroom tax’ that will mean that families in social housing with a spare bedroom will have the choice of paying extra rent or of moving into smaller accommodation.  The poor are not permitted to have an unused bedroom for the occasional use of adult sons or daughters or other friends or relatives. They’re not really being offered much of a choice because there won’t be smaller accommodation available for them.

            And don’t let us forget that the government is withdrawing from local authorities the funding that made it possible for them to reduce or waive altogether Council Tax on properties occupied by the unemployed or the disabled.  I have just watched on tv an unemployed (but seeking employment) middle-aged woman in Cornwall in tears because she says that she is already living frugally to the very limit of her meagre income.  ‘How am I going to find the money for Council Tax;  by giving up heating….or eating?’

            But, of course, we don’t have to go to Cornwall to find examples of extreme hardship.   In Tendring, because benefits for the elderly have been ring-fenced and our district has a very high proportion of old people, the withdrawal of this funding will mean a loss to the Council of two million pounds!  The Clacton Gazette carries a report of a sixty-year old who has worked all his life but is now full-time carer to his stroke-stricken and disabled wife.  They have been exempt for Council Tax but have been told that they will now be expected to pay the full amount.  How are they to find it?   They are just one couple among thousands suffering similarly nationwide.

            In this instance the Government has been particularly clever/cunning (delete as preferred).  Local authorities don’t have to withdraw this subsidy on unemployed and disabled liability for Council Tax.  They needn’t do so if they can raise the money involved in other ways – by such means as cutting libraries or sports centre services, reducing the frequency of collection of refuse and recyclables, or postponing the repair of highways and footpaths.  This will cause antagonism between the working population and the unemployed and disabled, both of which groups will resent the exemption of us oldies from these austerity measures. And it will be local government, not national government that has to make the final decision.  Thus it will be ‘That lot in the Town Hall’ not ‘them in Westminster’ who will get the blame.

            Just to add insult to injury, 1^st April will also be the date on which the seriously wealthy – those with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year - will have their higher rate of income tax reduced!  We’re all in this together?  Now that is an April Fool hoax!

*I have just learned that our water and sewerage charges (from the privatised water companies) are to go up by an average of £13 per annum from April. This will mean nothing to the lucky minority who will be having their income tax reduced at the same time.  It won't mean very much to me.  But there are those for whom it will be the final straw that breaks the camel's back 

‘Making sick people sicker’

            A few weeks ago there was condemnation from both sides of the House of Commons of the way in which thousands of sick and disabled people had had their benefit axed after the private company Atos, that the government has employed to ‘weed out slackers and scroungers’, had wrongly found fit to work.   There had been a number of deaths, including suicides, by people who had been assessed as fit for work following what was described as ‘a demeaning process that was making sick people sicker’.

            Private Eye, a publication that probes deeply where others walk hastily by, has learned that, despite these revelations, the government has tabled amendments to the employment and support allowance legislation which academics and campaigners say will lead to even greater suffering by the genuinely ill. 

 Private Eye reports that:  ‘Plans include withdrawing benefit if an assessor decides that a claimant’s ability to work could be improved by aids, such as guide dogs, walking sticks or prosthetic limbs – whether or not the claimant has access to them or can use them. Atos assessors already have the power to carry out an ‘imaginary wheelchair test’ by which they decide that a person could work if they used a wheelchair – even if they do not have one.  Under the changes, due to take place without public debate, people will also lose benefit if the assessor decides that adjustments could be made for them in the workplace – whether or not those changes have been made.’

            MP Tom Greatrex is reported as saying, ‘The fact that people can be assessed as fit for work on the basis of an imaginary guide dog, without taking account of the availability of guide dogs and the time taken to train both dogs and users, highlights just how far the Department of Work and Pensions seems to be prepared to go to find people fit for work without the support they need to make work a reality’.

            All of the above reminds me that my blue ‘disabled parking’ badge (that I use infrequently and only when my sons or a friend give me a lift) expires in July.  I shall have to apply for it to be renewed. Previously they were prepared to take the word of my doctor that, to use today’s new-speak, my mobility was strictly limited. I understand that there are new, more stringent, eligibility criteria nowadays. I may have to appear before government employed assessors. I certainly don’t look forward to parading my disability before those who are employed to try to catch me out   I really can’t walk safely, even the shortest distance, without a stick – and I’m much happier when I have a companion to take my other arm, or there is some furniture or perhaps a railing, with which I can steady myself.  I hope that will satisfy the assessors.  If I have to be even worse than that to qualify for a blue badge there would really be no point in my having one – because there would be no way I could walk from the parked car to the shop, cinema or church that would have been my destination.

A Dubious Triumph

          Both my sons were pupils at Clacton County High School in the 1960s and early ‘70s.   One went on to Cambridge and graduated with a good degree.  The other decided not to seek university admission but to leave school at 16, take a job and study for a professional qualification in his spare time.  He did so very effectively, taking the two parts of the Institute of Housing’s examination for professional Housing Managers and passing both at his first attempt.  Both my sons have had satisfying and socially valuable working careers.

            Consequently I have always held Clacton County High School in warm regard and was delighted when, referring to the CCHS, the Clacton Gazette carried the headline Valuable triumph – School among the country’s top performers.

            Reading on however, I discovered that the CCHS wasn’t in the top flight of schools for its GCSE or ‘A’ level results but had achieved one of the highest ‘value added’ scores in the country.  Very creditable, of course, but it may say almost as much about the abysmal ignorance of some of the pupils when they came to the CCHS aged eleven as it does about the standard of education that they later achieved.

            The Gazette published ‘league tables’ showing the actual exam results of ten north-east Essex educational establishments.  No-one would expect Clacton’s Comprehensive Schools’ results to equal those of selective schools like Colchester Royal Grammar School and Colchester County High School for Girls – but it was disappointing to see them at the very bottom of the list!   Right at the bottom was Clacton Coastal Academy, formed by the amalgamation of Bishop’s Gate College and Colbayns High School.   Only 36 percent of their students taking GCSE’s achieved 5 A* to C Grades at GCSE or their equivalent, including English and Maths.  Next above them was the Clacton County High School with just 51 percent.

            Needless to say the Head-teachers of both schools cite the controversial changes in the marking of GCSE English exam papers during the year in explanation – but these changes surely affected Colne Community School, Brightlingsea (72 percent) and Tendring Technology College, Frinton (69 percent) as much as they did the Clacton Schools.

            It is certainly an achievement to have raised the standard of children of low achievement at primary school – but if this result was achieved by neglecting the encouragement and support of high flyers, and there must surely be some of these (as there were in 1970 when Clacton County High School sent no less than four of its sixth formers to Cambridge) it was a somewhat hollow triumph.