Week 24 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘Cash for Questions?'

            ‘Goodness me - No! That would be quite contrary to the standard of integrity expected of ‘honourable gentlemen’ and ‘noble lords’ of both Houses of Parliament. Remember all that fuss there was a few years ago about twenty pound notes in little brown envelopes? Cash for Questions is definitely not on the programme.  Cash for Consultancies? – well, that could be quite a different thing.’

            According to reports on tv and in the press, conversations on the lines above took place a few weeks ago between some of our parliamentary representatives and under-cover journalists who pretended to represent well-heeled business interests.   It seems that the MPs and/or members of the House of Lords involved were - perfectly legally – offered well-paid spare-time consultancies and agreed to further unobtrusively the interests of their paymasters ‘in the House’.  There would be nothing so blatant as ‘cash for questions’, nor so squalid as ‘bulging brown envelopes’.  But the consultant could organise an all-party group of parliamentary friends and colleagues who might raise matters of concern and perhaps ask questions of the relevant Minister.   No-one would suggest for a moment that those friends received any payment for this but (who knows?) they too might be glad of a favour one day.

            David Cameron (who actually foresaw this kind of problem before the last election!) has been spurred into action.  All ‘lobbyists’ (professional benders of MPs’ minds!) are to be registered and steps taken to limit their activities.  Big business will no doubt be relieved to learn that the working poor are also to be prevented from using theiir meagre contributions, entrusted to their trade unions, to influence the minds of MPs! The members of the Government really do imagine that they are thus ensuring that, we’re all in this together!’

            Cash for questions, fiddled expenses and now ‘cash for consultancies’; is there no end to it?  Ordinary members of the public may be astonished that men (no women have so far been involved in the latest scandal) who are in the public eye and who, by most people’s standards, are handsomely remunerated for representing us in parliament, should behave in this way for a few extra quid.  It is surely a result of the general market-driven conviction of the past twenty or thirty years that the desire for money is humankind’s sole motivation; that the rich can only be goaded into action by the promise of even greater wealth, while the poor are kept working by the threat of homelessness and starvation. Everything and everyone has a price! We haven’t yet reached a state that justifies the cynical trans-Atlantic comment that, an honest politician is a politician who, when he’s bought – stays bought!’  - but we’re getting there!

New Labour’s ‘Bright Ideas’

          ‘New Labour’ might almost be called ‘New Conservative’ because, when they achieve power, they seem to have a penchant for conserving the results of their predecessors' actions – no matter how disastrous they may have been.  They didn’t, for instance, repeal the disastrous ‘right to buy’ legislation that compelled local authorities to sell off their community’s housing legacy at a fraction of its true value. Despite its malign effects becoming more and more obvious as the years have passed, Ed Miliband has even apologised for the Labour Party’s having opposed that legislation while in opposition!   Similarly, the new hard-line Conservatives of Mrs Thatcher and her successors might well have been called the ‘New Revolutionaries’. They had no qualms whatsoever about systematically destroying everything established by a Labour Government chosen by returning‘victorious’ servicemen and women from World War II; thus changing the nation’s zeitgeist from service and co-operation to greed and cut-throat competition.

            Ed Miliband has made it clear that, should he become Prime Minister, he will continue in the tradition of Tony Blair and his New Labour colleagues.  There will be the same old devotion to the cut and thrust of the market place, the same deference to the money-changers in ‘the city’, the same preference of private to public enterprise.   He’ll try to make the whole system just a tad less unfair, a little less deferential to cosmopolitan multi-millionaires, perhaps even just a shade more efficient than the present cowboy setup.

            He will, for instance, stop the payment of the winter fuel allowance to those who pay the higher rate of income tax.  He will stop payment of children’s allowance to households where one member has an income above £50,000 a year.  The latter seems a good idea until it is realized that the household of a family with a member whose income is just over £50,000 a year might include a mother who stays at home, making a home for the family and bringing up her child herself, instead of passing the baby to the care of a child-minder while she makes more money.  That family would lose its child allowance while next door may be a couple where husband and wife each earn £45,000 and pass their child on to a day nursery at the earliest opportunity.   They’d keep their child allowance!

            Hasn’t it occurred to Ed Miliband, to George Osborne, or to anyone concerned with the nation’s finances that there is one way of making all ‘universal’ benefits fairer – and that is by making them subject to income tax?  This wouldn't penalise the poor in any way while the better off would be asked for no more than they can afford.  The state retirement pension, a universal benefit if there ever was one, is taxable.   There’s really no reason why children’s allowances, winter  fuel payments, disability (or whatever they’re now called) benefits, attendance allowances (that would affect me, but I’d gladly pay tax on it if all benefits were similarly taxed)  job seekers allowances and so on, should not all be subject to income tax.  Even with our income tax system as it is today it would make for fairness – and bring extra revenue to the government.  A reformed system taking a fixed proportion of the gross income (it’s between the gross and the net that all those wonderful tax avoidance schemes operate!) of every one of us, the poorest as well as the wealthiest, could make our income tax assessment the only means test to which any of us need be subjected – and it would mean that we really were all in this together

Art for Art’s sake

'Modern Art - in Jaywick

Folk of my generation tend to be dismissive of what I believe is known as ‘conceptual art’.  We can see no artistic merit whatsoever in, for instance, an unmade bed, a disembowelled sheep, a light flashing on and off, a pile of bricks, or the ‘acclaimed work of art’ resembling a half-finished poultry shed (on the left!) on which residents of Jaywick were able briefly to feast their eyes a year or so ago.  What’s more, we’re inclined to think that everyone sees them as we do, but that members of a younger generation (as with ‘The Emperor’s new clothes’) don’t like to say so.

This kind of ‘art’ (though, I think, a rather more attractive form of it) is found in the Orient too.  Here is a photo, sent to me by my niece in Hong Kong, of a giant inflatable duck that has been seen floating in the harbour there for several days.   She tells me that it has also been seen in Sidney Harbour in Australia.  Perhaps one day it’ll turn up in the Thames – or even perhaps in Harwich Harbour!

 

A giant duck in Hong Kong Harbour

Thinking about the far-flung members of my family made me realize that a completely original, and of course deeply meaningful (aren't they all?), work of modern art might be created by joining them up by pencilled lines on a globe.  There’s niece Christine in Hong Kong, grandson Christopher in Taipei (in Taiwan).  Then there’s grandson Nick who regularly commutes between London and Brussels. His journeys could make an art-work of their own.  He’s founder and Managing Director of an international tourism consultancy, SE1 Media Ltd.  (www.se1media.com) and on any given day is as likely to be found in Beijing or Brasilia as in either Belgium or the UK.

The ancient grandfather ('monarch of all he surveys!)

Then there are second cousins in Canada of whom I learned only through Facebook, and an even more remote relative (my grandsons’ Aunt) in Western Australia, plus a granddaughter in Sheffield and, right at the centre of the web in sunny Clacton-on-Sea, the ancient patriarch, the not-yet-quite-moribund nonagenarian grandfather!  I can’t wait to get those lines drawn to reveal the artwork of the century!  Where, I wonder, should I apply for an award – and perhaps a cash grant?