Week 18 2013

Tendring Topics……..on Line

County Council Elections

            I have always believed that local government officers (and civil servants) should be prepared to give of their best in pursuing the policies, whatever they may be, of the authority that employs them and should refrain from playing any active part in local or national politics.  Although for most of my life my political outlook has been ‘leftish’ I have had no problem working for Conservative controlled councils and have always felt that I should not seek membership of any political party.

            That changed when I took early retirement in 1980.   I joined the Labour Party which at that time seemed the party with which I felt the greatest empathy.  Since I had both knowledge and experience of the ways in which local government functions, and had become an experienced writer and public speaker, I put my name forward as a potential candidate for election as a Labour candidate to the district or county council.   I had a very friendly interview with ‘party bosses’ in Chelmsford and was accepted as a potential candidate.  Fortunately perhaps, there were then no local elections in the immediate future.

            Hardly had I returned home than I began to have misgivings.  Would I really manage to toe the Party line as would certainly be expected?  Had I a thick enough skin to laugh off all the insults to which I knew all politicians, local and national, are subjected?   I had recently been commissioned to write a weekly ‘chat and comment column’ Tendring Topics for the local free newspaper, the Coastal Express.  Wouldn’t I be better able to use that column to further the causes in which I really believed, if I had no party ties?   Would I feel able to criticise the Labour Party (as I knew I would sometimes want to!) without being considered disloyal?

            I withdrew my application for candidature, though I remained a member of the Labour Party until Tony Blair and New Labour made the Party ‘electable’ and – in my opinion – less worth electing!

   

        

This blog is to be published on 30^th April, just two days before the current County Council Election.  For my Clacton North Division there are Conservative, Labour, ‘Tendring First’, Lib.Dem., Green Party, and UKIP candidates.  In recent blogs I have made it clear that I certainly couldn’t possibly vote for either the Conservative or the UKIP candidate.  The policies of the Green Party attract me but I know perfectly well that, under the first-past-the-post electoral system, a vote for their candidate would be a vote wasted. After giving the matter a good deal of thought I have decided that my vote will go to the Labour Candidate Samantha Atkinson.  Her election leaflet (on which she is portrayed with a friendly smile!) is attractive and doesn’t make extravagant promises.  She appears genuinely to have the interests of us Clactonians at heart.   I think too, that she is  the candidate most likely to deny electoral victory either to UKIP  or to  the Conservative Party that currently dominates the County Council. That was the Party that elected, and for many years supported, Lord Hanningfield as the Council’s political   leader!

Debt……or Deficit?

According to Wikipedia (the handy source of all knowledge for laptop users!) even top politicians sometimes get confused about the difference between the National Debt and the Deficit that the government is determined to reduce.   The National Debt is the total sum of money that the government owes – mostly to pension funds and savers in our own country but some to overseas sources.  It is an enormous sum but its significance depends to a great extent on its percentage of the GDP (gross domestic product, or the total value of the country’s production or services during any particular year).  By that criterion  the UKs National Debt is large but by no means as large as many other countries.  The Internet yields the information that in 2011 the UK’s National Debt was 68 percent of GDP while Japan’s was 180 percent and the USA’s 100 percent.  In the immediate aftermath of World War II our National Debt in terms of percentage of GDP was over twice what it is today.

            The Deficit, on the other hand, is the difference between the Government’s expenditure in any one year, and its income in that same year.  Mr Micawber, in Dickens’ novel David Copperfield  summed up the effect of this on a domestic scale like this, ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness.  Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and sixpence, result misery’.   Comparing domestic finances with those of the nation can be misleading, but an annual deficit inevitably means an annual increase in the National Debt – and cannot be allowed to continue.  Not just one, but several international credit agencies have now downgraded the UK’s ‘Triple A’ credit rating.  This means that it won’t be long before a higher rate of interest is charged on loans to the UK – and we shall be even deeper in debt!

            There are three main ways in which the deficit can be reduced; by cutting public expenditure, by increasing taxation, and by stimulating the economy to create more jobs. That would mean more money coming in from taxation and less spent on social security benefits.

            The Government has so far attempted only one of them seriously – and the effect has been to make matters worse instead of better.  They have desperately tried to reduce public expenditure by sacking thousands of public servants, both in the civil service, in the local government services, in the NHS and (with the exception of the totally useless Trident ‘independent deterrent’) in the Armed Forces.  This is resulting in an ever-growing army of unemployed, a run-down of public services and an increased demand on the depleted social services and for benefit payments.

            Their attempts to stimulate the economy seem so far to have had little, if any effect. They have managed to avoid an unprecedented ‘triple dip’ recession – but only just!  Many private contractors depend upon orders from public authorities, who have been starved of funds.  The attempt to encourage house building by helping would-be home buyers with their initial deposits is likely to drive up house prices and create a bubble similar to the one that preceded the current economic depression.  The sensible course of action would be to repeal the ‘right to buy’ (better named compel to sell) legislation and encourage local authorities to build homes for letting as they did successfully during the century before the advent of Thatcherism.

            It has been in the field of taxation that the government’s actions have been particularly perverse.  An increase in VAT added to already rising inflation (oh yes, of course – inflation is yet another, thoroughly bad, way of reducing the deficit!) and the Chancellor seems to have gone out of his way to reduce his revenue from income tax – the only tax that relates directly to ability to pay, and which has never brought anyone to starvation or homelessness.

            Raising the level at which income tax becomes payable takes thousands of people out of income tax altogether.  I believe this is a mistake.  It perpetuates the myth that there are hard-working beings called ‘tax payers’ who keep a non tax-paying underclass in idleness.   We are all tax-payers and those who only pay VAT, customs duties on cigarettes and the occasional drink, and buy lottery tickets in the vain hope of winning a fortune, probably hand to the government a higher proportion of their meagre earnings than many of those of us who are fortunate enough to be liable for income tax.

            It is sometimes overlooked too, that raising the lower threshold of income tax doesn’t just help the poorest – it reduces the amount of income tax paid right through the system. As for the Chancellor’s actually reducing the highest rate of income tax; quite apart from the obvious unfairness of rewarding the wealthy at a time when the poor are being penalised, it seems incredible that this should have been done at a time of national financial crisis. A correspondent tells me that the revenue lost by that hand-out to those with an income of over £150,000 a year will be twice as much as that likely to be saved by the ‘bedroom tax’ on those in Council and Housing Association homes.

            The same correspondent points out that a great many wages are at or very close to the minimum wage of about £15,000 a year and that the average salary is about £26,000.   ‘Why on earth then’, he asks, ‘is the threshold for ‘very high earners’ liable for the highest rate of income tax, set as high as £150,000?   Surely few people would have considered £100,000 unreasonable – and I personally would have set it at £80,000, or about three times the average wage’.

             Would the only possible alternative to this government do much better? Possibly they wouldn’t – but perhaps there’s some comfort in the thought that they could hardly do any worse!

The Money Fiddlers!

          It seems that when, in my blog last week I suggested that the modern equivalent of Old King Cole’s ‘fiddlers three’ were the money fiddlers who advise their wealthy clients how best to avoid paying income and corporation tax without breaking the law, I was being inadvertently and quite accidentally topical.  I had no idea that the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee had been considering that very issue and was about to make public some very disturbing conclusions.

            It seems that there are nowadays not three, but four, major firms of accountants in operation in this country that, among other services, advise their clients on means of legal tax avoidance.  They are Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, and Pricewaterhouse Coopers.  Between them they employ 9,000 staff and make a profit of £2 billion a year in the UK and £25 billion a year globally.

            Parliament’s all-party PAC (Public Accounts Committee) discovered that financial experts from these commercial organisations have been seconded to HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) to assist in the drafting of legislation to prevent tax avoidance – and are then in a position to point out to their real employers the loopholes that will enable them to circumvent that legislation!   Margaret Hodge, Committee Chairman, says that it is as though poachers have become gamekeepers and are then using the ‘inside knowledge’ they have obtained to poach more successfully.

            Margaret Hodge is, of course, a Labour MP and might be expected to be critical of a system introduced by the government.  Richard Bacon though, is a Conservative MP serving on the PAC.  He is reported as saying, ‘The United Kingdom’s Tax Authority is outmanned and outgunned by the four big accountancy firms.  Their resources far outstrip those of the taxman, but they also help HMRC to draft tax legislation.  The big four know exactly where the loopholes in the tax system are to be found because they helped to create them.

             There is nothing that I can usefully add to that.

And the Good News is……..

            ………..that the amount of violent crime in the United Kingdom has fallen substantially during the past decade.   The murder rate has been almost halved from 1.90 per 100,000 population to 1 per 100,000 and violent crime generally has fallen from 1,255 to 933 per 100,000 though, in the county of Essex, our own Tendring District comes second only to Southend-on-Sea in having the most violent crime!.

          An ageing population may be among the factors responsible for this general improvement (we nonagenarians do tend to be non-violent!)  However I believe that the development of DNA identification and the ubiquitous CCTV cameras in town centres and large retail outlets have reduced the chances of the criminal ‘getting away with it and that, rather than the severity of the punishment is  surely the most effective deterrent to crime.

            How ironic that the knowledge that ‘Big Brother is watching you’, one of the most sinister features of George Orwell's. 1984 should prove to be a blessing in 2013!

           

           

            

Week 17 2013

Tendring Topics……….on Line

A Very Public Funeral

          ‘Speak no ill of the dead’, my mother used to say.  De mortuis nil nisi bonum, (of the dead say nothing but good) means much the same thing for those who wish to display their knowledge of Latin.  It has probably been this thought that has made me refrain from comment about the death of Baroness Thatcher and about her very public (and very expensive) funeral last Wednesday (17^th April)

            I’m certainly not going to add to the fulsome praise that has been lavished upon her during the past two weeks (you’d never dream that it was not Dennis Skinner, George Galloway, Glenda Jackson  or their like who put an end to her political career, but grandees of her own party!) but, on the other hand, I wouldn’t wish to descend to personal abuse or even personal criticism.  She was a very able and remarkable woman of strong and determined views and, as the UKs first woman Prime Minister, she set an example that all of her successors have tried to follow.  The fact that I consider her views mistaken and her example a bad one is beside the point.   I did warm to her just a little in the distress she displayed when her son Mark (now, thanks to mum, Sir Mark Thatcher Bart.) was missing for a few days in the Sahara desert while taking part in a motor rally.

            I have never for one moment hesitated to comment on and criticise the policies that she pursued so relentlessly. Only the week before her death, when I was unaware that she was even seriously ill, I wrote in this blog at some length about the ethics of compelling local authorities to sell off at bargain-basement prices houses that their predecessors had provided for the benefit of the people of their areas.  And I outlined the malign results countrywide of this successful attempt to widen political support.

            I have commented critically on her attitude towards European Union, her mass privatisations of public services, her widening the gap between the richest and the poorest in our society, her close association with Rupert Murdoch, a foreign media millionaire, in his conflict with British Trade Unions,  her friendship with General Pinochet, Chile's brutal fascist dictator, and her connivance with his escape from justice.

            One cannot but admire her resolution in recovering the Falklands after the Argentine invasion. However it should be remembered that she was the head of a government that had left the islands defenceless against such an attack, the last vestige of a British naval presence having been removed shortly before the invasion.  Patrolling Trident submarines (our ‘ultimate deterrent’) had not the slightest effect upon the Argentines, as they have had no deterrent effect upon any act of aggression that has occurred since World War II.  Might not the permanent presence in Port Stanley of an adequate British garrison been a more effective deterrent and possibly have saved a great deal of money and many British and Argentine lives?   

            Shakespeare got it right when he put into Mark Anthony’s mouth, ‘The evil that men do lives after them.  The good is oft interred with their bones’.  It doesn’t apply only to men.

The County Council Elections

Broken and dangerous paving stones in Agincourt Road, Clacton-on-Sea  

I have written several times in this blog about the dire state of Clacton’s pavements.   There are broken and uneven paving stones and kerbs in street after street away from the actual town centre.   They shake up the ancient bones of mobility scooter users like me.  They’re a danger to all pedestrians after dark and they’re a peril to those with impaired vision at any time of the day or night.

            I last wrote about them only six or eight weeks ago and was astonished, and very pleased a fortnight later to see the County Council’s contractors hard at work in Clacton’s Old Road near the Waterglade business park repairing one of the stretches of footpath about which I had complained.   Since then I have spotted other footpaths being repaired and have noticed that at least some of the potholes in the middle of roads, that had existed for years, have been filled in.

  

The relaid footpath in Clacton's Old Road.
             

Why, I wondered, is all this happening just now?  Had the county council (who are the highway authority) suddenly discovered a few thousand pounds that they hadn’t known they possessed?  All became clear when I realized that there is to be a County Council election on 2nd May.  Existing members of the County Council  had no doubt urged their contractors to get on with the job in the hope of encouraging residents to use their votes for candidates of their party.  I'm afraid they realized the importance of those repairs a bit too late to attract my vote.

         I certainly intend to use that vote in the County Council election  So far I have had election literature from the Labour, Conservative and 'Tendring First' candidates.  I understand that UKIP are contesting every county council seat in Essex.  I certainly won't vote for their candidate and, although I have nothing against the Conservative Candidate, I can't possibly vote for a member of the political group who elected and supported Lord Hanningfield as County Council Leader, who have neglected the maintenance of Clacton's roads and footpaths, who have closed, despite wide public protest, a recycling and refuse site in St. Osyth, resulting in fly tipping and congestion in Clacton's Rush Green Road site, and more recently have first closed Colchester High Street to traffic and then, just when members of the public were getting used to the closure, cancelled it - presumably because they could see it was losing them votes.   

'LEADER SLAMS BISHOP REMARKS'

          The above announcement, accompanied by a picture of the Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford (a diocese that includes Clacton-on-Sea and the Tendring District) greeted readers of the Clacton Gazette last week.  The ‘Leader’ of the headline is Councillor Peter Halliday, recently elected as political ‘Leader’ of the Tendring District Council.  Another smaller headline declared Church told not to interfere as benefits reforms hit Clacton hardest.   What, I wondered, could the Bishop possibly have said to upset the Council’s leader?  Had he insulted the Council in some way or made light of our current economic problems?  

He had, as might have been expected, done nothing of the sort.  The Bishop had expressed concern at the revelation in a recent report, that poor residents in the Tendring District are likely to feel the impact of the government’s welfare reforms more than those of most other districts.   It might have been expected that that would be a concern shared by Tendring Council and its political leader.   It appeared that working-age benefit claimants in Tendring will lose £620 a year by 2014/15 because of the reforms.  Those in the City of London will lose an average of just £180.

The Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell is quoted as saying that he wanted to voice his concern about the injustice that had been revealed.   ‘Although some reform of the welfare system is necessary, I cannot turn a blind eye to the injustice that it is the poorest people in our poorest communities who will be paying the price of the current welfare reforms.  Of course benefits should not be paid to those who don’t need them or to anyone who is claiming them falsely.  But in a time of austerity there is actually a greater need to support the poor and to ensure that everyone in society bears the costs  of any reductions, especially those who are better able to afford it’.  That sounds eminently reasonable to me, especially in the light of recent figures showing that 3,480 people in Tendring are claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance – 4.5 percent of the working-age population.

But Mr Halliday will have none of it. ‘Are these people the poorest in society or are the poorest people those who are going to work, being paid the minimum wage and just managing to keep their heads above water?’, he asks rhetorically..  Perhaps the Bishop would arrange for Mr Halliday’s local parish priest to take him to one side and explain the ways in which those people being paid the minimum wage are also penalised by the so-called reforms.  Perhaps too, Mr Halliday will tell those 3,480 unemployed local residents where they can find work – at even the minimum wage.

Peter Halliday says, ‘I’m concerned at the level of interference by the church about changes to welfare and this government’s policies.  Some of the actions of his own organisation need to be sorted out before worrying about what other people are doing’.   A spokesman for the Diocese of Chelmsford gave some examples of the way in which Britain’s Christian Churches ‘interfere’ in the lives of their disadvantaged fellow citizens; ‘Churches are communities made up of people who care for one another.  They set up support groups for people affected by problems so that they can share their experiences and address the challenges they are facing together.  They help people who are struggling with debt, they work with charities to help people who are worried about losing their homes, and they are involved in setting up and running food banks’.

Mr Halliday might care to find out what local churches are doing in Clacton and in the Tendring District generally - and perhaps join in.   He’ll find there’s plenty of work to be done but it differs from that of district councillors in that there’s no payment made for simply turning up at meetings – and volunteers for church activities can rarely claim even their out-of-pocket expenses. 

‘He called for his Fiddlers three’

         There is, of course, a kind of fiddling that doesn't involve the use of a violin! Nowadays, I suppose, Colchester’s legendary Old King Cole would have called for his financial advisers. There have always been people who enriched themselves unscrupulously but I believe that the situation worsened during the avaricious 1980s when Mrs Thatcher was PM.   That was the decade in which the market philosophy of ‘get as much as you can for as little as you can get away with’ really took hold.  Everything – and everyone had a price - and the Daily Telegraph (surely reckoned to be one of our more responsible broadsheets) published a  leading article ‘A Defence of Greed’.

            We hear, and read in sections of the popular press, a great deal about benefit fraudsters and those who use state ‘benefits’, not just as temporary help in an emergency, but as a preferred lifestyle.  It’s a pretty uncomfortable and squalid lifestyle though and I don’t believe as many embrace it from choice as some sections of the press and some politicians would like us to believe.

 Nor is it only the poor who are on the fiddle.  We haven’t forgotten the many ‘honourable members’ of the House of Commons and at least one ‘noble Lord’ who, despite receiving what most of us would regard as generous salaries, claimed fraudulent expenses.  A very few were prosecuted and gaoled but many got away with paying back the money that they had fraudulently claimed.  I have just read in the daily Gazette a report about our very own Lord Hanningfield (who did serve a very brief gaol sentence for his fraud).  In the first eight months of his return to the House of Lords after early discharge from gaol, this convicted criminal has claimed £21,000 for attendance and £1,736 in travel expenses for his attendance there - but there is no record of his having said a word or asked a single question  in the ‘Upper House’.  Nor is there any question of his having once again broken the law. He could certainly teach a lesson or two to small-scale benefit cheats!

            Then, of course, there are the seriously wealthy cosmopolitans with their tax havens, their charitable trusts and their phony charities. They keep a whole financial industry profitably engaged in advising them on avoiding the taxation that should be the responsibility and privilege of everyone who enjoys British citizenship, is permitted to reside here permanently, or who operates a business enterprise within our shores.

            Catch the little fish with their benefit fraud by all means – but don’t forget the big ones with their stashed-away millions, and their armies of ‘professional fiddlers’. They may be more difficult to hook, gaffe and land but they'll prove to be a far more profitable catch!

           

           

           

  

 

Week 16 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘Fifty-three quid a week!’

 I can remember a time when £53 a week would have seemed to me to be wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.   In the circles in which I moved in the 1930s anyone with an income of £5 a week or more was reckoned to be ‘well to do’.  My dad supported my mum and I on much less than a fiver a week, even counting in the weekly pension payment he received for his twenty-one years army service.

            Over eighty years later though, things have changed.  Such has been the progress of inflation that nowadays £53 a week is roughly the amount that someone who is unemployed can expect to get from the state in ‘benefit’. In contrast I’d be very surprised if the take-home pay of Mr Ian Duncan-Smith, Work and Pensions Minister is less than £150,000 a year or £2,800 a week - rather more each week than an unemployed man gets in a year!  He says though that he could live on £53 a week if compelled to do so – and has been challenged by his critics to prove it.

            I think it probable that he could manage it, almost certainly for a week and possibly for several weeks.  It wouldn’t be a fair test though because all the time Mr Duncan-Smith would be well aware that the discomfort and deprivation – even hunger – that he’d be feeling, was only temporary.  He would know that in a week or two things would be back to normal.  He’d be back to his comfortable home and life-style and his no-doubt ample and well-balanced diet.  What’s more, he would have proved to his own satisfaction, if to no-one else, that he could endure without complaint exactly the same hardships as those constantly moaning plebs.

I have never tried to live on the equivalent of £53 a week.  I think though that during the winter of 1942/1943 in a large concentration camp for other-rank PoWs in northern Italy (Campo Concentramento Prigioneri di Guerra No. 73) I did experience and survive conditions that were  as bad as any poverty experienced in this country, at least in the 20^th and present century.  We were ill-clad.  We were cold.  We were louse-infested. We were constantly hungry.  We had a small maize-flour loaf (scarcely larger than a bread roll) between two of us each day, plus about a pint of a thin rice or macaroni soup in which there would sometimes be shreds of an unidentifiable meat.  The Red Cross Parcels sent from England, whose contents (powdered milk, tin of spam, butter, biscuits, coffee or tea) kept us alive, turned up only spasmodically.

There were 5,000 of us in the camp.  Rarely a week passed by without one of  us dying of a hunger-related illness. A mate and I had the opportunity of having our photos taken and sent home to our parents.  My mother glanced at mine and tore it up.  She couldn’t bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow I had become.

Most of us survived because we had one thing that many of today’s benefit claimants lack and that Mr Ian Duncan-Smith would have in abundance if he ever did put his boast to the test.   That was the hope of better things to come.   Most of us PoWs, certainly all those who lived to go home, had the firm conviction that the war would end – that year, the next year, perhaps the year after – and that we would go home again to England to be with those we loved.  We even dared to hope that when the war was over we’d play a part in creating a fairer, peaceful, more equal United Kingdom that would set an example to a war-weary world.

Our hopes sustained us and half our hopes were realized.  The war did end and we did get home again.  We have though conspicuously failed ‘to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’.  In 1944 not even the most incorrigible pessimist among us would have imagined that nearly seventy years later there would be wars and rumours of wars worldwide, and that in our own country there would be hunger, homelessness and unemployment, with the poor and disadvantaged depending on soup runs and food banks for survival.

‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’, insisted poet Alexander Pope.  According to St Paul, Hope,  Faith and Love, are the qualities that endure when everything else has failed.  Sadly, in the United Kingdom today, hope appears to be fighting a losing battle against despair.

Postscript

          It seems that if, as I suggested above, Government Minister Ian Duncan-Smith does have an income of ‘only’ £150,000 a year, he is pretty poorly paid by ‘top people’ standards. 

            You’ll remember that in the general banking collapse that triggered our current economic crisis and age of austerity (yes, as the Governor of the Bank of England has told us again and again, it was  the banks that dug the hole in which we find ourselves!)  one of the first to fall and one that fell the furthest, was HBOS (Halifax/Bank of Scotland).    Thousands of share-holders (including me, though fortunately on only a small scale!) saw the value of their shares tumble - and the government bailed the bank out with millions of pounds of our money.

            A House of Commons Committee investigating the whole sorry business has identified three top officials of HBOS as primarily responsible and suggested that they should never again be allowed to hold a directorship in any company.  One of the culprits, Sir James Crosby, the former Chief Executive of HBOS has bowed to public opinion and has, as the newspapers put it, fallen on his sword.   He suggests that he should be deprived of the knighthood bestowed on him by a once-grateful government and agrees that he should relinquish about a quarter of his pension.

            That ‘sword’ must surely have been one of those collapsing ones sometimes used in costume dramas on stage or tv.  The pension on which he will have to struggle along after this generous act of contrition will be a mere £400,000 a year!  That, I think, works out at over £76,923 a week, which makes Ian Duncan-Smith’s estimated £2,800 a week income look pretty paltry!  If a Chief Executive who admits responsibility for the failure of a bank that cost taxpayers and shareholders millions of pounds can walk away with a pension of £400,000 a year, what on earth do the top people of successful banks expect to get on retirement?  ‘We’re all in this together!’    You must be joking.

‘What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?’

            This was the caption on one of World War I’s most successful recruitment posters. It portrayed an earnest little boy asking his still-young father, after the war-to-end-wars had come to an end, what part he had played in it. He was clearly hoping to hear stories of valour and heroism.   My dad had been a regular soldier and served throughout World War I in France, Egypt and Salonica.   As a child, I took all that for granted and asked very few questions about his military past.  Among his campaign medals, that he brought out and polished for each ‘Armistice Day’ (11^th November), was a French 'Medaille d’Honneur with crossed swords', accompanied by a splendid certificate signed by the President of France.   I now deeply regret that I never asked him how he had earned that, surely unusual, honour.   For the benefit of my own sons and grandchildren (and any great grandchildren I may one day have!) I have written a fairly detailed account of my own totally undistinguished military career from the beginning of World War II till April 1946, almost a year after its end.

            Some seven years ago two Ipswich ladies – a Mrs Diana Watts and a Mrs Jane Bradburn contacted me.  They had learned that I had served in the East Suffolk Territorial 67^th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery.   Their then-deceased dads had served as volunteers in the same regiment and they were researching the regiment’s history and the story of their fathers’ lives during the war years. I was happy to tell them about the two years we had spent in this country preparing to repel the enemy invasion that had then seemed inevitable. That immediate danger had receded and I told them about our voyage to Egypt in the New Zealand liner Rangitiki in August 1941, and our part in actions against the Germans and Italians in the Egyptian/Libyan frontier area from November of that year.  

The gun-crew of which I was a member, with our 6in howitzer, near Hellfire Pass, Christmas 1941

I am fourth from the right – wearing a woolly hat!

We had had our minor triumphs, taking part in the successful sieges and attacks on Bardia, Wadi Halfaya (‘Hellfire Pass’), Sollum and other German and Italian strong-points in the Libyan desert.   In mid-May 1942 the enemy forces, under General Irwin Rommel had launched a major attack.  After several weeks of almost continuous action we became part of the garrison of Tobruk – and were taken prisoner there when the town fell to the German Afrikakorps on 21^st June 1942.

After capture we were all separated but, with the assistance of friends that I had later made in Germany, I was able to help Diana Watts find and contact an Austrian family who had befriended her father in the turmoil at the end of the war.  Diana and Jane were indefatigable in their pursuit of the regiment's somewhat brief history. They managed to track down a number of survivors. They collected photographs and memorabilia.   They organised regimental reunions, and a photographic exhibition at the Ipswich Public Library.  They attracted the interest of the local press.  They welcomed some of the Regiment’s survivors (including me) as visitors to their homes.

           

          

  Sadly, Diana has died but Jane has carried on with their work, amassing a very considerable archive.

 At the Suffolk Record Office in Ipswich on Saturday 25^th May at 2.30 pm she hopes to share the results of her and Diana’s research with sons, daughters, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and friends interested in the wartime story of the men of a Suffolk Artillery Regiment.   Using first hand accounts from veterans and written records, Jane, who is an experienced and entertaining speaker, will tell their story. It is an occasion that shouldn’t be missed by anyone with a relative or friend who served in the 67^th!   The copy of the poster printed above gives details.

                                                                                     

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Week 15 2013

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new……’

So declared the dying King Arthur according to Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem The Passing of Arthur.  If there is any historical basis for the Arthurian legend, it is that Arthur was a Romanised Briton struggling to save a remnant of Roman civilisation in a country overrun by Anglo-Saxon barbarians.  Many decades were to pass and much blood shed before our land again became a civilised united kingdom comparable with the Britain of Roman times.

 There was a similar end of an old order and its replacement by the new just a week ago, on 1^st April.  The final nails were being hammered into the coffin of the caring welfare state established by my generation in the wake of World War II.  It was being replaced by a new brutal barbarism, devoted to the service and worship of its false god Mammon, to whom it is determined to sacrifice our poorest and most helpless citizens in the interest of a favoured minority.  It was on 1^st April (and how appropriated that it should have been on April Fools Day!) that the government’s austerity cuts, and the radical reconstruction of the NHS increasingly opening its doors to ‘the private sector’, came into force and the direction in which our country is being led became abundantly clear.

I have little doubt that many years and a great deal of suffering will have to be endured before we return to a Britain comparable with that of Clement Attlee, Harold MacMillan, Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, in which Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear for all our citizens were the objectives of all our political leaders no matter how different may have been their means of achieving them.

The Chancellor and his supporters claim that the government’s policies encourage those who work hard to support themselves and their families.  Yet two of the measures that came into force last week will penalise low-paid workers as much as, if not more than, the unemployed.   As a former local authority Housing Manager I find the new ‘bedroom tax’ particularly objectionable. Yes, I know that the government dislikes that designation but I’m afraid they’ll have to learn to live with it just as their predecessors had to live with the ‘poll tax’ that they found equally objectionable and that brought about their downfall.

The bedroom tax clearly labels tenants of ‘social housing’ (Councils and Housing Associations) as second class citizens.  Owner/occupiers can, of course, have as many bedrooms as they like and so can occupiers of publicly owned ‘tied houses’, provided they are posh enough.   Nobody asks how many spare bedrooms there may be at either 9 or 10 Downing Street or at Chequers. It is only Plebs who live in Council Houses who must pay extra – or get out – if they have a spare bedroom to accommodate an occasional guest, or a grown-up son or daughter who sometimes comes home to spend a weekend with  mum and dad.

They have got it all worked out.  Single or widowed, and married or ‘living together’ tenants with no children, need only one bedroom.  If they have one child, two of the same sex, or two of the opposite sex but under ten years old, they need only two bedrooms, and so on.  When I was Clacton’s Housing Manager we used to encourage elderly tenants whose children had left home, to move into smaller accommodation – and many of them did.  We never dreamed of compelling them or of penalising them if they failed to do so. Nor did we ever suggest that they should move into less roomy accommodation until we had such accommodation to offer them.  They may have lived in one of the Council’s houses but it was their home and the (Conservative) Council respected that.

Nowadays those who seek ‘social housing’ are not allowed the privilege of transforming their council houses into ‘their homes’.  Tenancies are all to be ‘short term’ and, unless they are prepared to pay extra for the privilege, they’re just offered minimal shelter from the elements. No, of course the local authority or housing association can’t be expected to have smaller accommodation for those who simply can’t pay that extra ‘bedroom tax’.  ‘They must find that for themselves – or sleep rough as many others have to.  The Salvation Army or some other lot of ‘do gooders’ will make sure that they don’t actually starve – and the weather will surely warm up eventually’.

Another measure that will affect the employed as much as the unemployed relates to Council Tax.  From last Monday thousands of disabled or otherwise disadvantaged house-holders will be liable to pay their full Council Tax for the first time.   This imposition of central government is particularly clever as Councils are permitted to continue any existing rebates provided they can make up the short-fall elsewhere.   Thus it will be local and not central government that gets the blame.

And the wider picture

            Just as the members of the government are penalising the poor for failing to move into non-existent smaller homes, they are penalising the unemployed for failing to take up non-existent jobs.   The cap on benefits and restriction of cost-of-living increases to one percent when inflation is over twice that rate are all justified as helping to break the ‘dependency culture’ and encourage the unemployed to work for their living.   The biggest and best encouragement that the poor can have is for there to be plenty of properly paid work for them to do.  Not until that situation exists is the government or the popular press entitled to denigrate the unemployed as ‘work-shy’. How extraordinary that those who believe that the poor can only be persuaded to work by holding over them the threat of homelessness and starvation, simultaneously believe that the very wealthy can only be persuaded to give of their best by the promise of substantial bribes,  euphemistically referred to as bonuses!

            I am glad to see the Christian Churches in this country united in their support of the poor.  Paul Morrison, public issues policy adviser of the Methodist Church told the BBC in a recent interview that the benefit cuts are a symptom of a popularly held belief that the poor ‘somehow deserve their poverty’.  Christian Churches accused politicians and the news media of promoting six myths about the poor:

They are lazy.   They are addicted to drink or drugs.   They are not really poor.  They cheat the system. They have an easy life.  They were the cause of the deficit.     These are false claims that all Christians have a duty to challenge.

An ‘Old Hand’ for a New Job!

In 1974 the Tendring District Council was newly formed from the amalgamation of Clacton, Frinton and Walton, and Brightlingsea Urban Districts, the Tendring Rural District and the Borough of Harwich.  As the new council’s first Public Relations Officer I soon realized that the councillors from Harwich, of whatever their political allegiance, exercised an authority and an influence well beyond their numbers on the new Council. 

That was nearly forty years ago but it seems probable that the recent victory of John Hawkins in a District Council by-election will continue and strengthen that tradition.   Mr Hawkins had been Chief Executive of the Tendring Council. He retired in 2010 after thirteen years in the Council’s top job.

During his election campaign as the Labour Candidate for the vacancy, he had said that he would use his knowledge and experience of local government within the Tendring District to give Harwich a strong voice on the council.  It was after my own retirement from the Council’s service that John Hawkins was appointed to the post of Chief Executive,  so I have never met him.  I wish him well though and I have little doubt that, now that parliamentary style politics have been introduced into the Council Chamber, his experienced voice will strengthen and hearten ‘the Opposition’.

‘Brain Upgrade’ needed?

Do you have a feeling of apprehension when you go to close down your computer and a notice appears on the screen urging you not to switch off because one or more updates are being installed?  The computer will switch itself off when the process is complete.

        I know that I do, because experience tells me that when I  switch on again, something (who knows what?) won’t be quite the same.  I know that whatever it is will make my computer more secure and/or more efficient.  It may also mean though that I will have to perform a familiar task in a different and unfamiliar way – and, at my age, I just don’t like change!

That’s why this cartoon, forwarded to me by my fifteen-years-younger-than-me sister-in-law, speaks to my condition (as we Quakers say)

           

Week 14 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

A Second ‘Mrs Thatcher’?

The ‘Right to Buy’   

According to some sections of the press the promise in the Chancellor’s Budget  that the government will step in to guarantee a large proportion of the deposit currently required by Banks and Building Societies before they will grant a mortgage for house purpose, will help thousands to realize their home ownership dreams.   In furthering the cause of home ownership for all it is, so they say, comparable with Mrs Thatcher’s bold move in offering the right to buy their homes (at bargain basement prices) to all Council House tenants.

            I certainly hope not. Right to buy was surely a flagrant (and sadly probably very effective) example of buying votes with other people’s money.  It was made worse by the fact that the ‘other people’ whose money bought those votes were far-sighted Borough or District Councils that had invested in Council dwellings to ensure (or so they thought!) that there would never be homelessness or overcrowding in their areas, and that local young people who weren’t sufficiently well off to buy their homes would be able to move into a rented houses in the vicinity of friends and family.   It was significant that there was never any suggestion that the right to buy should be extended to include tenants of privately owned properties. The owners of those properties were likely to be supporters of Mrs Thatcher’s Party!

The Consequences of ‘Right to Buy’

           

As for the effects of right to buy; well, it certainly improved the fortunes of quite a few middle-aged people who seized the opportunity of, ‘helping poor old dad (or mum) buy his own home’, at a ridiculously low price. ‘At eighty-five he’d have never managed it on his own’,   Of course, they made sure that poor old dad left them the house when he departed.  They then sold it at its proper price immediately they were able to do so, making a very comfortable profit.

            Many urban council housing estates started degenerating into slums as the ‘best tenants’ bought ‘the best houses’, selling them at a profit when they could and moving on. Many other council tenants bought their homes and found that, even though the purchase price had been low, they were having difficulty keeping up the mortgage repayments, plus having to pay Rates (now Council Tax) and Water Rate and carry out regular painting and maintenance.

            It was though in rural village communities that the right to buy had its most malign effects. Council houses and bungalows in such areas tend to be built in small groups, infilling available space, and merging into the village scene.  These were quickly bought up by astute tenants, eventually either selling them or passing them on to their sons or daughters who had no trouble at all selling them on at inflated prices – in some cases as rural ‘second homes’.   Thus, councils were building no more houses to let and no longer had ‘casual vacancies’ as tenants died or moved away.   Young couples whose families had lived in village communities for generations, perhaps centuries, found themselves unable to make their homes there.  Meanwhile, house price inflation soared as ‘townees’, seeking second homes or rural homes from which to commute to the city, snapped up any rural property becoming vacant.  Village communities died and degenerated into dormitories for city workers as village shops, pubs and churches closed.

39 Byng Crescent, Thorpe-le-Soken. A rural council house where Heather and I were happy to live temporarily in 1955, and where our second son was born.                  

One of the more idiotic statements made by Ed Miliband as leader of the Labour Party was his apology for the Party’s opposition to right to buy, way back in the 1980s.  He should, on the contrary, have been apologising for the Party’s failure to repeal the legislation when, during the following decade, it had the opportunity to do so.

          Will George Osborne’s proposal to lend would-be house buyers a large proportion of their deposit, have the same disastrous results as Mrs Thatcher’s right to buy.  I hardly think so but, inspired by the same mirage of home ownership for all that blinded the Conservative government of the 1980s, it is likely to create disasters of its own.

House Purchase – then and now

           

Heather and I with our two young sons outside our bungalow in November 1957.  We had been home-buyers for just a year.    

Is this, for instance, a sensible time for anyone to be taking on a long-term loan for house purchase?   When, in 1956, my wife Heather and I began the purchase of the bungalow in which I am typing these words, I was thirty-five years old and a qualified Public Health Inspector with ten years experience.  I had just been appointed as a PHI by the then Clacton Urban District Council.  The mortgage loan was repayable over twenty-five years (in fact my spare-time freelance writing enabled us to pay it back in fifteen!) and I had every reason to believe that, unless I did something criminal or utterly stupid, I would stay in the same or similar employment for the whole of that time.

           

How many junior public officials nowadays can be confident of retaining their employment and being able to repay a similar loan over twenty-five years?  No job is really secure.  There’s no longer such a thing as a job for life.  During those pay-back years we would have described ourselves as home-owners. We weren’t really though.  Until we made that final payment and the Building Society returned to us the deeds of our bungalow, they were the true owners and we were only the home-buyers.  David Cameron has waxed lyrical about the pride and joy of receiving the house key and moving into your own home.  He’s right, of course. But he should also have given some thought to the shame, dismay and despair of being evicted from what you had thought was your own home, because – through no fault of your own – you could no longer keep up the mortgage payments.

            Then again, do you remember what triggered the current economic depression?   There was a housing boom.  House prices went up and up, way above the rate of general inflation.  Building Societies were eager to lend.  They no longer bothered about the credit-worthiness of applicants for a mortgage.  The steadily increasing price of houses made them believe that they were betting on a good thing even if the purchaser defaulted on his payments.  They were offering loans of 95 percent or 100 percent of the purchase price, sometimes throwing in an extra few hundred for moving-in expenses.   And then…….the bubble burst.  House prices dropped, Britain went into recession, and those loans were anything but secure.

‘What goes around comes around!’

            Banks and Building Societies had learned their lesson.  They weren’t going to be caught out like that again.   There were to be no more 95 and 100 percent mortgages. Deposits of 20 percent and more of the value of the house were demanded.  There was, and is, a housing shortage.  Unable to find the deposit, home-seekers looked to the rental market.  Social housing had become only for the virtually destitute. Private house owners put up their rents.  Not a penny of that Housing Benefit with which the government parts so reluctantly, stays with the actual recipients.  It goes straight into the pockets of rapacious landlords taking advantage of uncontrolled market forces.

            Now, thanks to this bright idea of clever Mr Osborne, the government is going to rush in where banks and building societies have learnt to tread with extreme care.  They are going to help by guaranteeing a large proportion of those high deposits.  Can they really not see that they are manoeuvring themselves into the same position that existed before the housing bubble burst?  The only difference is that it is the government’s money (our money!) that is being put at risk this time.

            The government’s offer will increase the number of potential home buyers –but there will, at least for some considerable time, be no corresponding increase in the number of new homes on the market.  Those all-powerful market forces will force up house prices again – and again – until once more the bubble bursts!  As Stan Laurel (or was it Oliver Hardy?) used to say ‘Now look what a muddle your right to buy and home ownership for all have got us into!’

The Teaching of History

            No regular reader of this blog is likely to accuse me of being an uncritical admirer of our present government and its members.  Yet I have to confess to having some sympathy for Mr Michael Gove, Education Minister.  He is painfully aware of the fact that there’s something wrong with Britain’s Education System (if you doubt this, watch any popular quiz show on tv and note the encyclopaedic knowledge of sport and pop music and the abysmal ignorance of virtually everything else) but his every attempt to do something about it provokes anger and derision from the teaching profession.   His ideas on the teaching of history go back, so they say, to the 1920s and 1930s.  His critics are quite convinced that in those unenlightened days, History Lessons consisted of learning, by rote, dates of kings and queens and the battles in which they were involved.

             Well, I was at school from the late ‘20s to the late ‘30s and my History Lessons weren’t a bit like that. They were exciting.   From our very first years at school, we learned something about Egyptian and Greek civilisation at a time when Western Europe was sunk in barbarism, about the Roman Empire, the Roman invasion and occupation of Britain and that empire’s eventual collapse.  As we progressed we moved on to learning about the Anglo-Saxon invasion and settlement of Britain, followed by the Vikings and eventually the Normans.  As we grew older we learned rather more about all these events and how they happened.  The Dark Ages were followed by the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.  We learned about the great Empires that succeeded the Romans – the Ottoman Empire, the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, and those of Spain, Portugal, France and ourselves.  In the 1930s the British Empire was, of course, still intact.   

            This narrative, that made sure we all realized how and in what order each event led to its successor, was lightened by colourful, sometimes legendary, stories about events of the past;  King Alfred burning the cakes,  the Burghers of Calais, Henry VIII’s six wives, the martyrdom of Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley,  Raleigh spreading his cloak over a puddle so that Queen Elizabeth could walk on dry-shod, Drake finishing his game of bowls before sailing out to meet the Spanish Armada, the Speaker of the House of Commons defying King Charles I and so on.  They all helped to make us feel that history was about real people like ourselves.  In those days ‘school history’ ended with the Causes of the Great War (we didn’t, of course, call it World War I because we didn’t know there was going to be a World War II!)  Those like myself, who were studying history for the General Schools Examination (the Matric) spent two years studying one particular period of history in greater detail.   My class studied British, European and World History from 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, to 1914 – the beginning of the Great War.

            It was an action-packed century.  There were wars, in many of which we were involved, among them Crimea, two Boer Wars, Sudan, the Indian Mutiny, and two failed attempts to control Afghanistan (pity our present politicians hadn’t studied those more closely!)  There were others in which Britain was not involved; American Civil War,  Austro-Prussian War, Franco-Prussian War, and wars of liberation in Latin America.  It was a century of nationalism with the unification of both Germany and Italy. It was a century of social unrest – the birth of the Trade Union movement the Labour Party and of the Christian Social Movement.  It was the century of the Chartists and of Karl Marx; when even Benjamin Disraeli, founder of the Conservative Party was briefly a ‘Radical’!  It was a century of ‘dark, satanic mills’, slums, and cholera epidemics, but it was also a century of Parliamentary Reform, of Education, Factories and Public Health Acts.  A great many good, and evil, aspects of life in the third millennium saw their beginnings during the 19th Century.

            I reckon that we could do a lot worse than return to the History teaching of the 1920s and 1930s.  The fact that, after well over seventy years, I remember so much of it surely suggests that they must have got something right in those days!