Tendring Topics……..on line
The Children of the Poor
In
the 1920s and 1930s an annual event in Ipswich
was ‘the Poor Children’s Outing’. The
rest of us would watch and wave as bunting decorated lorries drove out of town filled
with laughing, cheering and singing children (no-one bothered much about health
and safety in those days!) on their way to some rural, or perhaps seaside,
destination where they’d enjoy a big, generous tea, lots of fun, entertainment
and games, before being driven home again, still laughing and singing in the
evening.
My
dad (a former Regimental Sergeant Major of the RAVC) who was clerk, veterinary
nurse, dispenser and general dogsbody to a local vet, was once deeply offended
when a well-meaning client offered him a ticket for the Poor Children’s Outing
for me. Goodness – we weren’t ‘poor’;
not in that sense anyway. There was
always food on the table, I was always adequately clad and I went to a
secondary school, leaving school to go to work at 16 instead of 14 like most of
my contemporaries. We weren’t poor! I realize now though that it was only my
father’s modest army pension that kept us above the poverty line.
Clacton and
the other towns on the Tendring
Coast
It therefore came as something as a shock
when the local Clacton Gazette carried
the headline One in Three Clacton kids live in Poverty, and I heard on a
tv news programme that, in BBC’s Look
East Region, the Tendring District is one of those with most child poverty,
defined as children in households with less than 60 percent of the average
national income. The same issue of the Gazette
recorded that although nationally we have had reports of a steady reduction
of the number of unemployed, in our area the reverse has happened. In January we had almost 3,500
unemployed and the number had risen during each of the preceding five months.
Every Sunday
morning as I attend Meeting for Worship at the Quaker Meeting House in Clacton ’s Granville
Road I receive another salutary reminder of the
poverty in our midst. In the entrance
lobby of our Meeting House is now a large cardboard box for the receipt of
canned or otherwise imperishable food destined for the Food Bank run by our
friends in the Salvation Army. When the
box is full our Warden takes its contents to the Salvation Army Citadel where
they are gratefully welcomed. I am sure
that we are not the only Christian body that supports the SA in this way.
But should the
feeding of the hungry be left to charitable giving? Is it not the responsibility of the State to
ensure that none of its citizens needs to starve? In the House of Lords the Right Reverend Tim
Stevens, Bishop of Leicester expressed this concern in a recent debate. He feels that we are moving towards a
situation in which visits to a food bank are no longer seen as an emergency
response to an economic crisis but as an integral part of the Welfare State.
That was
certainly not my intention when in 1945 I voted, with tens of thousands of
other returning ex-servicemen and our wives or girl-friends, to establish the
Welfare State sketched out by Lord Beveridge at the end of World War II. In that year of victory and peace not even in
my worst nightmares did I imagine that nearly 70 years later thousands of homeless
men and women would be sleeping rough in shop doorways and alleys in Britain’s
cities, that there would be beggars on our streets and that the poor would be
relying on soup kitchens and food banks to fill their empty bellies.
Successive
Prime Ministers; Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron
have all contributed to an achievement that, just a few years ago, few of us
would have thought remotely possible. They have managed to make the era of Ted
Heath and Harold Wilson seem like a Golden Age!
‘If
you knows of a better ‘ole – go to it!’
Four or five years ago,
if I had been asked what Triple A or AAA meant I would have probably guessed
that it must be the title of a Western ‘soap’ on tv, probably set in Montana or
Wyoming in the latter half of the 19th Century. Every week we’d see the ‘boys of the Triple A ranch’, dealing with hostile Indians,
rustlers, crooked land-owners or whatever.
The Triple A would, of course,
be the brand AAA burnt onto the hide
of each one of their ‘shorthorns out on
the range’.
Now, of course, I
know better. A Triple A rating is the mark of a sound and reliable borrower of
money, a borrower who can be depended upon to repay his debts promptly and with
all the interest due on them. If such
ratings were accorded to individuals (and, who knows, perhaps they are) I would
certainly expect to be awarded one. I know this because over and over again our
Prime Minister, David Cameron, and our Chancellor of the Exchequer have
stressed that, thanks to their wise and prudent handling of Britain ’s economy the United Kingdom held a Triple A rating of credit
worthiness. This meant that we could
borrow money at the lowest possible interest rate. They intended to keep it
that way. But they haven’t managed
it. Because the British economy has
suffered a double dip recession and shows little sign of recovery, an
international credit agency has downgraded our credit rating by one notch. This hasn’t yet had much impact on us except
that the pound sterling has lost some of its value (have you noticed on the
radio and tv news bulletins that the Euro, which a month or two ago was worth
only 82p is now up to 86p and climbing).
This can be good news for British exporters since it means that their
prices are more competitive but, for the rest of us it means that imported
goods – from mainland Europe, the USA and the rest of the world –
will all be a little more expensive. I think
that most people, having learned that their credit rating had come down a notch
(from the level it held throughout the Labour years about which the government
has been so scathing!) would consider
the possibility that they were doing something wrong, and try to put it
right. But not Messrs Cameron and
Osborne; they believe that the loss of credit worthiness proves that their
policies are sound. We need more of the
same medicine. We must dig the hole into which they have pushed us even deeper.
I
am reminded of a well-known cartoon by Bruce Bairnsfather, the satirical
cartoonist of World War I. His famous
characters ‘Old Bill’, the walrus moustached old soldier and ‘Bert’, his
less-experienced mate, are crouched in a shell-hole in no-mans-land with shot
and shell whizzing just a few inches above their heads. ‘Old Bill’says, ‘Well, if yer knows of a better ‘ole – go to it’.
I think it
possible that, at the next General Election, a majority of voters may do just
that. I only hope that the holes they choose aren't labelled BNP or UKIP!
‘It’s
an ill wind that blows nobody any good
So says the
proverb and that is certainly true of the horsemeat scandal. One effect has been to increase the number of
people buying vegetarian ‘ready meals’ and vegetarian meat substitutes generally. Although I’m nor a strict vegetarian I
generally prefer vegetarian meals and am pleased to find that Morrison’s
in Clacton’s Old Road, where I do most of my shopping, have increased the range
of their vegetarian foods and have made sure that there are plenty of every
kind of non-meat dish always available for sale.
There’s an
increasingly wide range, and you don’t have to be a conscientious objector to
meat-eating (I’m not one of those myself!) to enjoy them. Newcomers to vegetarian dishes are likely to
enjoy Linda McCartney’s vegetarian sausages and country pies, and Morrison’s
own vegetarian cottage pies and vegetarian curries. There’s a far wider range than that but those
are just a few meals that I reckon always to have in my freezer. I don’t
possess a micro-wave but none of the above needs to be cooked for more
than 30 minutes at 200 degrees C. Oh
yes – and there’s one little tip that I have learned the hard way. If you have a ‘fan oven’ knock at least five
minutes off the cooking time recommended on the packet.
Finally – I
happen to shop at Morrisons. They’re
within easy mobility-scooter range of my home and I have found the staff
friendly and helpful. I am quite sure
though that other retailers have equally helpful staff and an equally appetising range of vegetarian
dishes.
The Bonus
Culture
‘Brussels’, so they say, has decided
that Bankers’ Bonuses should not exceed their annual salary except with the
specific agreement of shareholders. This
seems a modest enough idea, but at once our Prime Minister was up in arms declaring
his opposition, and endeavouring to give the impression that he is defending
Britain’s independence against the dictates of a sinister all-powerful clique
of ‘foreigners’ in Brussels, determined to undermine our national sovereignty.
It was, in
fact, the European Parliament – the voice of the European people on which the
UK is fully represented – who made what most of us surely feel is a very
reasonable demand on a group of people whose greed and incompetence were
responsible for the current international economic crisis. For months our top politicians of all
parties have been talking about introducing measures to control the activities
of the bankers and the ridiculously high monetary rewards that they award
themselves. Now the democratically
elected European Parliament (yes, it does happen to meet in Brussels ) has suggested one small step
towards that end – and this has been met with a howl of opposition from those
same politicians.
I would like
to see not just the limitation of bonuses but their abolition. We should all; road sweepers, dinner ladies,
factory workers, farm labourers, civil servants, school teachers and bankers,
receive a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.
We should all do our very best in the job that we are doing – and not
expect to receive an extra reward for doing our job well.
Doesn’t it
ever occur to any one that those who receive these huge bonuses don’t actually do anything to benefit their fellow men
and women? They don’t produce food or
clothing. They don’t build our homes or
our factories. They don’t make any practical contribution to the society in
which they live. Imagine being marooned on a fertile and temperate, but
uninhabited and totally undeveloped island in their company. You would surely be glad to swap a score of
them for just a couple of gardeners or carpenters complete with their tools, plus a few muscular and
willing labourers!
Top
bankers juggle money – lend it, borrow it, bet with it, and make sure that they
retain a substantial share of it. Past experience leads them to believe that
if, somewhere along the way, they accidentally lose a few millions of it, the
rest of us will ‘bail them out’. Money, whether pounds sterling, euros,
dollars, even gold bars (try making anything useful. as distinct from decorative, from gold!) has no value in itself. All those currencies only represent the
harvest of the soil and the products of other people’s labour.
I am quite
sure that this truth, which seems so obvious to me, will not be generally
accepted within my life-time. Perhaps
in some distant land centuries after the collapse of our civilisation, the
historians of a new age of freedom, equality and enlightenment will conclude that
it was our obsession with what we thought of as wealth that led to our
downfall.
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