Week 12 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

Lies, Damned Lies…….and Statistics!

          I don’t think that I have been alone in finding some of the regularly appearing national statistics very puzzling.   The United Kingdom’s economic situation clearly isn’t improving.   It seems likely that instead of climbing out of the ‘double-dip’ recession into which we fell a few months ago, we are heading for an unprecedented ‘triple-dip’.  The value of the pound sterling is falling against that of the American dollar and the once-derided euro, but this doesn’t so far appear to have helped our exporters.

Yet, at the same time we learn that the number of people in work is rising and the number of unemployed steadily falling.  It is true that the unemployment figure for our own Tendring District continues to rise but perhaps there are local reasons that account for this.  Nationally the employment situation has unquestionably been improving.

A partial explanation is to be found in figures recently released by Manpower UK Ltd a commercial employment agency with offices nation-wide.  As a result of the incompetent (or could it be plain dishonest?) activities of the Banks that the government is so eager not to offend, a large number of short-term temporary jobs have recently become available in the ‘financial sector’.

Remember the banks wrongful selling of ‘protection insurance’ to tens of thousands of their customers who neither needed nor wanted it?   That little mishap cost the banks £10 billion in compensation and they have had to take on 20,000 temporary staff to cope with the claims.  Then there was the Libor (fiddling the bank rate) scandal.  That cost Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland £300 million and also gave rise to temporary job vacancies on a scale sufficient to skew the statistics.  It appears that a substantial part of the fall in unemployment isn’t the result of a thrusting and entrepreneurial financial sector finding ‘fresh worlds to conquer’, but of its creating mammoth messes that required temporary extra staff to clear up.  

            Manpower UK Ltd also revealed that many public authorities had been over-enthusiastic in discarding staff to meet central government’s demands for ever-greater austerity cuts.  These authorities (local government, the NHS and so on) have statutory duties to perform which they cannot do without sufficient trained and experienced staff.  They are now having to find and recruit fresh staff to carry out those essential duties.

            This too, may present unexpected difficulties.  In order to reduce staff levels as painlessly as possible, many authorities invited voluntary redundancies.  It was an opportunity that some senior professional officers seized with both hands.   They knew that, in the private sector, their skills and experience could command higher salaries than most public servants can ever hope to enjoy.  What’s more, private sector employment would free them from the constant jibes of an irresponsible press and ignorant politicians.  Finding suitable replacements for them is not an easy task.  In the fantasy world in which top politicians dwell, a man (or woman) may be in charge of the nation’s health one week and then, on a Prime Minister’s whim, in charge of foreign affairs or immigration control the next.  In the real world of the hospital, the town hall, the school or the police station it isn’t quite so easy to fill posts demanding professional skill and experience.

UKIP on the march?

          Could the Eastleigh bye-election mark a significant turning point in British electoral history?  The big surprise was not the fact that the Lib.Dem. candidate won despite scandal about two of its formerly leading politicians that had made the tabloid headlines during the week.   Eastleigh had, after all, been regarded until quite recently as a very safe Lib.Dem. seat.   What was surprising was that UKIP came a good second, beating the Conservative candidate (whom many had been expecting to win) into third and the Labour candidate into fourth place.

            Not long ago UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) had been regarded as a fringe Party whose membership, according to David Cameron, were mostly nutters and closet racists.  Those of us with long memories recalled that in Germany, at a time of general disillusion with mainstream politics, Adolf Hitler had transformed a similar small fringe Party into a powerful political force that, for   a blood-soaked decade and a half, threatened to engulf not only Germany but the whole of Europe.   Britain in 2013 is going through a similar period of disillusion with mainstream politics. Is it just possible that UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage, could perform a similar, though of course very British, miracle?

            Nigel Farage, aged 48 and therefore young for a professional politician, seems to be the epitome of the popular chap who enjoys a pint or two and a fag, and is the life and soul of the pub lounge on a Saturday night; the sort of bloke who has no time at all for politically correct language (and demonstrates this freely!) or for any sort of regulation that prevents chaps like him (red-blooded British and proud of it) from enjoying themselves in any way they like. Nor does he have any time for the machinations of traditional politician of any persuasion.

            But Mr Farage is a lot more than that.  The typical pub lounge hero would be a bit contemptuous of women, patronisingly regarding them as being provided for his service and entertainment.  That’s not Nigel Farage.  He doesn’t make the mistake of underestimating the role of women in politics.  His candidate for the Eastleigh bye-election was Diane James, a very impressive contestant who came a creditable second in what had been a very safe Lib.Dem. constituency.  UKIP has a number of capable women members who, I have little doubt, will play an important part in the Party’s future.

 UKIP attracts supporters from across the political spectrum but is possibly most accurately regarded an alternative Conservative Party, well ‘to the right’ of the Party led by David Cameron.   UKIP is fervently nationalist. Its members believe that severing all links with the European Union will instantly solve most of Britain’s problems.  They urge a complete halt to immigration, in the first instance for five years. In other fields they pursue the objectives of the most right-wing members of the existing Conservative Party.  They want, so they say, a government of the British, by the British and for the British!

            Nigel Farage seems also to have acquired the knack of attracting the serial non-voter, the kind of man or woman who dislikes politics and will never trust politicians.  He gives the impression that he feels just the same as they do; that he is an anti-politics politician. Such people comprise a considerable slice of the electorate.   If he can persuade them to vote, his Party will do very well in the forthcoming County Council elections and, even more importantly, the European Parliament Elections next year.

            Another straw in the wind; it is reported that Mr Farage has recently dined with Rupert Murdoch.  Mr Murdoch can hardly be described as a ‘king-maker’ but, as his favourite newspaper boasted with an ‘It was us what done it’ headline after a Thatcher electoral victory, he has certainly been a ‘Prime Minister maker’ in the past – and may be again.   David Cameron’s extraordinary determination not to give any statutory authority to future press regulation (despite his earlier promise to introduce the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry in full ‘unless they were clearly bonkers’) suggests that, even after all the revelations relating to his seedy media empire, Rupert Murdoch is not without influence.  

            UKIP’s aim is claimed to be Independence for the UK.  It is stridently anti-European but, surprisingly perhaps, its publicity says not a word about the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA.  That unequal alliance has, with its US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, cost us billions of pounds and hundreds of British lives.  In the 1960s we had in Harold Wilson, a Prime Minister who kept us out of the United States’ Vietnam war.  There are, thank Heaven, no names of British service men or women on the war memorials to victims of that disastrous venture

            I do intend to vote in the Count Council and, if I’m still around, in the European Parliamentary elections.  I believe very strongly that the best future for the United Kingdom is as an important part of a Europe more closely united both politically and economically.  Within and as part of such a Union the UK could co-operate or, where necessary, compete on equal terms with the members of any economic or political bloc in the world.

            I won’t know for whom I shall vote until polling day is a great deal closer – but it’ll be for the candidate most likely to defeat the UKIP candidate and any other candidate who shares UKIP's views!

Three Score years and Ten – and Another Score…..or More!

          The Old Testament psalmist declared that the span of human life was seventy years; ‘three score years and ten’.  He went on to concede that some people made it to eighty (four score years) but suggested that this wasn’t really a good idea. These days though more and more of us are passing even that second milestone – and we’re creating problems for the younger generation.  We can’t work (I don’t think that writing his blog counts as work as I’m not paid for it) but we still eat and drink.  We still need warmth and shelter and some of us – because of the infirmities that come with old age – may need other, often expensive, care.

            We all get free prescriptions for those infirmities, together with free bus travel, a free tv licence and a winter fuel allowance that, for the over eighties, amounts to £300 a year.  Some of us, because of very limited mobility or some other affliction, receive an ‘Attendance Allowance’ amounting to about £40 a week.  Those who are bedridden or unable to walk at all receive a considerably larger Attendance Allowance.   These freebies, and the winter fuel allowance and attendance allowance all have to be paid for out of taxation and are available to all, the millionaire and the destitute.  Age and (for the Attendance Allowance) disability, are the only criteria.

            At 91 and with steadily decreasing mobility, I am eligible for all of those benefits except the higher rate of Attendance Allowance. I hope though that I’m not so self-centred as to be unable to see the injustice of it.  I am certainly not in the same financial need as much younger folk who are homeless, unemployed or trying to support a family in a low-paid job.   Means testing, suggested recently in the House of Lords, would be a clumsy and expensive means of solving the problem. It would also probably mean that some proud old people would rather suffer hardship than apply for what would appear to them to be ‘charity’, especially as it would mean revealing to some uncaring official the details of their finances.

            What would be reasonable and I think acceptable to most pensioners, would be to make all those benefits subject to income tax like any other income.  This would mean that really poor old people would receive the whole of their benefit while those, like myself, who are fortunate enough to be eligible for income tax, would pay back  some but not all of it.  Such a change would leave no-one hungry or homeless because the very nature of income tax is that it is levied only on those who can afford to pay it.   If, in fact, we had a properly graded income tax system the only ‘means test’ that anyone of us would ever need to face would be our income tax assessment!