Week 31 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

Grandfathers

          Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, was born on 14^th November 1948.  I well remember hearing the official announcement of his birth on the radio. My 24 year old wife Heather and I had been married for two and a half years. We were living in a bungalow just off the Norwich Road in Barham, three or four miles north of Ipswich. In the autumn Heather had been diagnosed as suffering from laryngeal and pulmonary tuberculosis.  She was confined to her bed and we were waiting to learn when she would be transported to a sanatorium at Nayland near Colchester..  There she was to spend more than a year, a period punctuated by six weeks in Papworth Hospital, where she underwent life-saving but  disabling surgery (thoracoplasty) involving the removal of eight ribs. This permanently collapsed her left lung allowing it to heal.

Visiting Heather in Nayland Sanatorium in summer 1949.   Patients having thoracoplasty were expected to lose a stone in weight during the surgery, which involved three operations with rests of a fortnight after the first and second. They were therefore required to put on a stone beforehand.  Heather was taken to Papworth for surgery a day or two after this photo was taken.  It is my only photo of Heather in which she appears to be 'plump'!  

In November 1948 we had our own worries and. I can’t pretend that we were particularly interested in the royal birth. I do though remember the BBC announcer telling us, with a plummy accent (BBC radio news-readers all spoke posh in those days!) that Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth ‘has given birth to a Prince’.  I remember thinking - and probably saying to Heather, ‘Fancy her giving birth to a prince.  I thought that members of the Royal Family had babies just like the rest of us!’

             Heather was discharged from the sanatorium ‘cured’. Despite her subsequent lifelong frailty, four years later she gave birth at home, to the first of our two sons. They, in due course, gave us three grandchildren, two boys and a girl.  Heather died at the age of 82, three months after our diamond wedding anniversary.  She had lived to see all three of her grandchildren grow through schooldays and adolescence and  graduate with good degrees at universities.

            Now, the baby prince who was born while Heather was waiting to be transported to the Sanatorium is himself a grandfather.   His grandchildren (I have no doubt that he’ll have more!) will have privileges ours have never known – but they certainly won’t have the freedom to choose their careers, their friends, their partners and their paths through life that ours have had.  I hope that if, like me, he reaches his nineties, he will be as proud of the progress of his grandchildren as I am of mine.  

My grandchildren!

           The youngest of my three grandchildren has just celebrated his thirtieth birthday. This means that they are all beyond the first flush of youth and are making their way in the adult world.  I very much hope I’ll remember their birthdays, and that they’ll be pleased to receive my birthday greetings of love and good wishes for as long as I draw breath.  Here they are on the left – Chris, the oldest, Nick the youngest and Jo in the middle, with just a year dividing each of them, as they were years ago when they really were grandchildren. Below, now young adults, they are with me on the recent occasion of the family wedding of my son Pete (Chris and Nick’s dad and Jo’s uncle) and Arlene Esdaile.

        

All three are graduates (their grandma and I were both proud to leave school at 16 with our General Schools Certificate and Matric. Exemption!)  Jo is the real intellectual.  She is already an M.A. and an M.Sc.   She has been working as a Social Worker seconded to the Renal Unit of a large  Sheffield Hospital and  she has now been accepted for a Ph.D. Course studying clinical psychology at Sheffield University.  She’s a beauty too;  it’s really not fair

 on all the other girls!

            Chris has been teaching English in Taiwan for almost a decade. A few years ago he was named ‘Teacher of the year’ by the educational organisation employing him.  He speaks Mandarin like a native and I notice that on his ‘Facebook’ page he now puts messages in Chinese calligraphy!  He graduated in Fine Art and has produced pencil portraits of family members using old photographs as references.  One of his drawings of his grandma as the school-girl of 15 that she was when she and I first met, almost reduced me to tears when he gave it to me.

Heather Gilbert (destined to become Heather Hall) aged 15 – drawn over 65 years later by her grandson Chris!    

I wrote about grandson Nick’s career in this blog a few weeks ago.  He graduated in Photography and after rising to the very top in the European Travel Agency, has founded and is the Managing Director of his own International Tourism Consultancy (www.SE1media.com) He has a charming Belgian girl-friend, Romy Cywie, who has been welcomed as a member of ‘the family’ (I now make a point of remembering her birthday too!)   Can you wonder that I am proud of my three grandchildren?

The Prince of Wales will be very fortunate if, at my age, he has a family as warm, as united and as supportive as I have.  I am only sorry that their grandma isn’t here to enjoy hearing about their activities and appreciating them all as much as I do.

 

St George of the Exchequer to the rescue!

           Interest on mortgages for house purchase is at an unprecedentedly low level.  Good news for borrowers but not so good for those of us who see our life savings entrusted to banks and building societies. Those savings are steadily decreasing in value as inflation outstrips interest rates. It also means that monthly mortgage repayments are low. They are within the capacity of a great many would-be home owners.  However, financial institutions have recent memories of being saved by government bale-outs from bankruptcy resulting from by unwise lending. To prevent a recurrence they are demanding much larger deposits – perhaps as much as 20 or 25 percent of the total loan required – before granting mortgages.   These are beyond the reach of most young people, particularly those who (thanks to the government’s policies) are already burdened with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt.

            That’s .where George Osborne our Chancellor of the Exchequer rides in like a knight in shining armour, to save the situation.  He is going to lend those eager young couples the money they need for their deposits.  He started the scheme on quite a modest scale but is now proposing to widen the scheme to include purchasers of existing as well as new properties. Prospective home buyers will need to have saved no more than five percent of the money they hope to borrow from a bank or building society. This, he hopes, will not only help those who want to fulfil the Conservative dream of a nation of home-owners, but will also encourage developers to build and thus help Britain out of recession

And perhaps it will – eventually. Immediately though it has increased the demand for houses from those who, thanks to Mr Osborne’s generosity (with our money!) can aspire to home ownership.  It will take many months at least for any building programme to take effect.  In the meantime market forces will ensure that house prices once again rise above the rate of inflation until the bubble bursts and we have yet another financial crisis. This time the government has been warned by the Institute of Directors (hardly ‘loony lefties’!) of the probable results of their policy.   But, of course, ‘Nanny knows best’ and the government will continue pursuing the chimera of ‘Home Ownership for All’. Surely a time in which ‘no-one can expect a job for life’ is not one in which young people should be encouraged to get themselves into long-term debt.   What is needed is not affordable homes to buy but publicly owned houses to let at affordable rents, such as local authorities provided in the century prior to the advent of Thatcher/Blairism.

           It doesn't appear to have occurred to Mr Osborne that if loaning most of the deposit money required for house purchase was too risky for the banks and building societies, it might be too risky for him too.  Perhaps the thought would have crossed his mind had he been taking risks with his own money, rather than ours!

  

Week 30 2013

Tendring Topics………on line

Helping the taxpayers! (but, who are the Taxpayers?)

         

Last week I heard Work and Pensions Minister Iain Duncan Smith defending the Government’s cuts in benefits for the needy and, in particular, the £20,000 ‘cap’ on benefits to any family.   It is clearly unfair, he said, that anyone on benefit should be financially better off than those who are working. He also claimed (without any firm evidence, as a BBC interviewer pointed out) that in pilot areas where the benefit cap had already been introduced, thousands of folk who had been living on benefit had been encouraged back to work.

Obviously, everybody who is able to work should be encouraged to do so – but where are they to find a job when, as in this area for instance, there are twenty applicants for every job vacancy?  Does Iain Duncan Smith really believe that anything other than a tiny minority of the two and a half million unemployed people in the UK prefer to live on ‘benefit’.  Like the tax avoiders and tax evaders, that tiny minority should be exposed and penalised.  Whatever the feature writers of the tabloid press may say, their lives must be pretty miserable, especially when much of that ‘benefit’ isn’t retained by the recipient but is handed over directly to a rapacious private landlord..  But you’d hardly expect a government that includes seventeen millionaires to appreciate that!

Over and over again Mr Iain Duncan Smith claimed that he had to balance the reasonable interests of ‘the taxpayers’ against the cost to the nation of benefit payments.  By the taxpayers he clearly meant those (like me!) who are fortunate enough to have an income high enough to be liable for income tax. But we are by no means the only taxpayers, nor is income tax the only way in which we contribute to the government’s finances   During the Thatcher years (‘the avaricious eighties') there was a deliberate policy of reducing ‘direct taxation’ such as income tax, corporation tax and death duties, and compensating for this by increasing ‘indirect taxation’  (referred to as ‘stealth taxes’ by the tabloid press when imposed by a government that they oppose!) These are VAT, taxes on insurance, gambling and air travel, and customs and excise charges – on, for instance, fuel oil, tobacco products and alcoholic drinks.

This policy was continued by New Labour under Tony Blair and his successors. Indirect taxes are levied equally on rich and poor alike (we’re all in this together’) but, of course, they have a much bigger impact on the incomes of the poor than they do on the rich.

The poor make a contribution to Government’s Inland Revenue whenever they have their cars or motor bikes (often vital for their work or seeking work) repaired, serviced or filled with petrol or diesel; every time they buy a packet of cigarettes or a pint of beer, and every time they buy a lottery ticket in the hope (almost certainly in vain!) of escaping from a life of poverty.

In the Biblical parable ‘the widow’s mite’ was one hundred percent of her wealth, a far greater personal contribution than even hundreds of the shekels of a wealthy Pharisee. Today, as a result of indirect taxation, the working and unemployed poor pay a higher percentage of their income to the Inland Revenue than those in the highest income brackets.

  Pay rises to public servants and to many employees in the private sector are

 always a percentage of their existing income.   When, for instance, all the staff of a local authority get a 2 percent pay rise, Chief Executive Officers can claim that they get exactly the same pay increase as the humblest clerical officer, despite the fact that the CEO is getting 2 percent of perhaps £150,000 and the junior employee 2 percent of less than £20,000!  I wonder if they would continue to equate their loss with that of junior officers if they were compelled to suffer a ten percent pay reduction!

           

I believe, very strongly, that the government’s principal source of revenue should be an income tax consisting, just like those pay rises, on an equal percentage of every adult’s existing income.  I believe too, that every British adult and everyone who lives and works in Britain, should pay that percentage of his or her income as an annual membership fee of the Society of British Citizenship – and that they should be proud and pleased to do so.    

 ‘The Lady’s not for Turning’

          That phrase,  parodying the title of a play of the late 1940s by Christopher Fry, is one of Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher’s best remembered sound-bites.  It was true too.  Mrs Thatcher was very strong-minded (opponents might have said ‘stubborn’ or even ‘pig headed’) and rarely, if ever, changed her mind on a matter of policy.

            The same can hardly be said about her successors in government today..  Their path is littered with the torn-up remains of policies that have either been abandoned or changed out of all recognition. Particularly blatant is their recent U-turn on a minimum price for alcoholic drinks, and the plain packaging of cigarettes.   It seems but yesterday that Prime Minister was making impassioned speeches about the benefits to public health that would result from both these policies and how preventing the sale of cheap alcohol would reduce anti-social behaviour.

            Now, so it seems, the imposition of plain packaging for cigarettes is to await the result of a similar experiment on the other side of the world in Australia (and I thought the coalition government claimed that Britain led the world!) and the imposition of minimum prices for alcohol has been shelved indefinitely.  It is now being claimed that no-one will be discouraged by plain packaging from having ‘that first smoke’ that can begin an addiction.  If the tobacco manufacturers really believe that, then why do they oppose plain packaging.  It must surely be cheaper to produce than packaging currently in use.  This government U-turn will without question result in continued growth in alcohol fuelled  antisocial behaviour, additional cost to the NHS for the treatment of tobacco and alcohol related diseases, and the premature termination of thousands of promising young lives.

            Does the hope of a few extra votes in the no-longer-distant next general election or a few extra thousand pounds in the party war-chest really make all that worthwhile?

‘Council takes stock and turns clock back 30 years’

            That, last week, was the Clacton Gazette’s headline over a news story that gave me real satisfaction and raised by several notches my opinion of the present Tendring District Council.   For years now I have urged that the best solution to Britain’s housing problem – and the best way to get the building industry onto its feet and busy again – was to encourage local authorities to build or purchase houses for letting as they had done successfully for a century prior to Mrs Thatcher’s Right to Buy legislation of 1980.   This had compelled local authorities and Housing Associations (but not private landlords) to sell, at bargain basement prices, the homes that earlier generations had built to solve as they thought their community’s future housing problems.  Right to Buy was, in fact, a very effective means of buying votes with other people’s money.  Better still, those ‘other people’ were no longer around to protest!  They were those of earlier generations who had thought that they were building homes to ensure that no-one in their areas need ever be homeless, overcrowded or living in sub-standard conditions.

            Last year the coalition government made a bad situation even worse by compelling housing authorities to give tenants wishing to buy their homes even bigger discounts.   They also prevented ‘social housing’ from being offered to anyone other than the poorest of the poor, and required that all tenancies should be short term and should be terminated if the tenant’s income rose above the poverty level.  This they compounded with the ‘bedroom tax’ that charges social housing tenants extra rent for any spare bedroom!

            I was therefore delighted to see that, despite all the obstacles, Tendring Council was to go ahead and, for the first time in thirty years, buy homes for letting to needy housing applicants in our area.  They have set aside a million pounds for this purpose.  Their first purchase is to be of six flats in Victoria Road, Walton-on-the-Naze at a cost believed to be about £525,000.   They also have plans to build two council houses in Brightlingsea, and it is expected that more homes for letteing will be built in other towns.   They hope that they will thus raise the council’s existing housing stock to 3,227 homes.  It will, of course, take many years to rectify the effect of three decades of inaction.

              

            Council Leader Peter Halliday is reported as saying, ‘It is fair to say that most people don’t think a Conservative council would want council houses, let alone building or buying to add to housing stock………..We are determined to get local housing for local people, and the only way to do that is to do it ourselves’.

            Good for Councillor Halliday! It wasn’t always the case though that Conservative Councils didn’t want Council Houses.  I was Clacton Urban District Council’s Housing Manager in the early 1970s.  The council owned about 1,000 houses, bungalows and flats and had a building programme adding a few housing units every year.  Clacton Council had a Conservative Majority (though they certainly weren’t run on the parliamentary political lines that central government has forced on councils today) but resolutely refused to sell any of their council properties, though they encouraged and offered support to tenants who bought a house or bungalow in the private sector thereby releasing a council house for letting.

           

Myself as Clacton’s Housing Manager in 1973 or thereabouts. Oh dear, don’t I look every inch the Town Hall Bureaucrat!!

           

The Council's members, of all parties, were proud of their housing estates – and so was I.  Tenants were encouraged to cultivate their gardens and to keep the interiors of their homes spic and span. The knowledge that, provided they paid their rent regularly and complied with the other tenancy conditions, they had homes ‘for life’ encouraged this.   We had two and three bedroom houses and flats for families, specially adaptable bungalows for the disabled or elderly, and a few one-bedroom flats for singletons.   Thanks to the building programme and casual vacancies arising from deaths or tenants moving away, during my time as housing manager no family or individual ever, to my knowledge, ‘slept rough’ within the Clacton Urban District.  Nor did we ever have to resort to ‘bed and breakfast’ accommodation for homeless families.

        Later, when I was Tendring Council's Public Relations Officer, I remember showing with pride a visiting American studying British local government, round one of our Clacton housing estates.  He was deeply impressed.  ‘You wouldn’t find social housing like this in the States’, he told me. That was nearly forty years ago. I haven’t visited any of those estates recently but I have a feeling that nowadays he would find himself to be more ‘at home’.  

           

Week No 29 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

A Family Wedding

                                                             The Bride and Groom      

Monday 8^th July saw a happy and memorable event in my family when my elder son Peter and Arlene Esdaile were married at Colchester Registrar’s Office.  I have known Arlene for over a decade and she already knew knew how pleased I would be to welcome her as a daughter-in-law and member of the family.  Both bride and groom live in London but I think that it was in consideration for me that they chose Colchester as the wedding venue.  It was a thoughtful gesture that I very much appreciated.

A family occasion. Oh dear – I look glum; but I wasn't!                     

   Chris, Pete’s elder son from his former marriage, flew back from Taiwan to be present at the occasion, as did his younger son Nick with his Belgian girl-friend Romy, from Brussels.  Also present were Pete’s younger brother Andy, his wife Marilyn and daughter (my granddaughter) Jo, who travelled from Sheffield where she lives and works, my sister-in-law (Pete’s Aunt) Margaret - all Pete’s immediate family in fact - and Arlene’s younger sister Jill.

It was a lovely sunny day and, after the wedding ceremony, Pete and Arlene invited us all to a splendid celebratory evening meal at Wivenhoe House Hotel in the grounds of Essex University before they departed for a fortnight’s honeymoon in St. Kitts, the tropical Caribbean island home  of Arlene’s ancestors. It was a very happy  family occasion that we’ll all look back on with pleasure.

Note – both photos are from the collection of my grandson Nick

Shock, horror – Brussels demands that Britain releases all its murderers!

            Well no, nothing remotely like that has happened – but you’d certainly imagine that it had from the outrage expressed by some politicians and echoed by the EU-hating press.  What has happened is that the European Court of Human Rights, that we helped to establish and which is quite independent of the EU, has ruled that it is wrong to condemn any criminal to whole-life imprisonment without offering any chance whatsoever of his or her ever  being offered even a limited degree of freedom.

            What happens at the moment is that Judges are obliged to give anyone found guilty of murder, a sentence of imprisonment for life.  However judges realize that murders do not all involve the same degree of wickedness, nor do all murderers pose an equal risk to the public if they are, at some time or other, granted a measure of freedom.  Therefore, when sentencing a man or a woman to life imprisonment they customarily add that although they are to suffer a life-long punishment, after perhaps ten, fifteen or twenty-five years they may be considered for release on parole.  Very rarely, the judge considers the actions of the convicted criminal to be so heinous, that he or she should remain imprisoned until death, with no possibility of parole.

            It is members of that last very small group whom the Court of Human Rights has ruled, should be given a glimmer of hope.  The suggestion, as I understand it, is that all ‘lifers’ should be considered for parole after say twenty-five years imprisonment.  The fact that they are considered for parole does not, of course, mean that parole will be granted.  I understand that a prerequisite of this is that prisoners admit their guilt and show remorse for their crime. That would surely rule out Jeremy Bamber, Essex’s best-known whole-life convict.  Despite the failure of repeated appeals, he continues to protest his innocence of the murder of five members of the family into which he had been adopted. He therefore neither admits his guilt nor shows remorse.  If he did manage to convince an appeal court of his innocence he would be automatically released. Therefore although he is one of those who have brought this matter to the European Court of Human Rights, he appears to be unaffected by its ruling.

            It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable that all prisoners should be considered for parole after twenty-five years. We are all quite different persons from those that we were a quarter of a century ago.  In that respect criminals are the same as the rest of us.  Parole may be refused as well as being granted.  If granted it can be subject to conditions laid down by the parole board.  I would have thought that prison governors and staff would welcome the offer of a ray of hope to even the most intransigent prisoner. The possibility of either a favourable or unfavourable report to the parole board must surely be an aid to discipline.

            Dante posted the message ‘All hope abandon ye who enter here’ at the entrance of Hell.  Our prisons are supposed to be places of punishment – but they’re not supposed to be a hell on earth.

One rule for the rich and powerful, quite another for the rest of us.

          Public outrage at the golden handshakes given to top BBC officials to expedite their departure brought to my mind a letter that I had recently received from a blog reader and regular correspondent about the very different treatment of members of the senior hierarchy of public institutions who are found wanting, from that meted out to junior employees.

            My correspondent was a former Chief Officer of a large London Local Authority who is now Managing Director of his own business.  In his former capacity he was responsible for the dismissal or demotion of a number of junior staff who had made serious errors of judgement; decisions that he considered at the time to be fair and just.  Recently though there has been a spate of ‘honourable resignations’ of head teachers of educational establishments, .members of the House of Lords, senior officers of the NHS, Chief Police Officers, Chief Executives of local authorities and Chief Executive Officers of Banks, without any proper investigation and revelation of their failings.

            He does not suggest that all those who ‘honourably resign or retire’ are guilty of gross misconduct but acceptance of their departure without a formal enquiry means that the full facts are never revealed, and the individuals concerned are never either exonerated or reprimanded. They are free to exercise their profession and many have done so with little or no loss of income. ‘Unproven allegations’ cannot be mentioned for fear of a libel action.

            During the MPs expenses scandal only a very few blatant offenders were prosecuted.  A great many MPs were simply allowed to pay back the ‘expenses’ that they had falsely claimed.   Junior civil servants or local government officers who had misappropriated public funds or ‘fiddled’ their expenses would not have been given that option.  They would have been summarily dismissed and probably prosecuted. They would have lost their pension rights and become unemployable.

 

            My correspondent says that, ‘unlike most social problems in this country, this injustice could be promptly and easily remedied.  It would require just one letter, sent with ministerial support from the head of the civil service to instruct the governing bodies of Health Authorities, local authorities, police forces and other public institutions to treat Chief and Senior Officers in accordance with their existing disciplinary code in the same way as they would treat junior staff and, if there are serious allegations, they should on no account accept an offer of resignation or of early retirement.

           

   

           

Week 28 2013

Tendring Topics…………on line

Tendring Careline

          On Sunday afternoon, 30^th June, I was watching the tv in my living/kitchen when a disembodied voice disturbed me.  ‘Warning!’ it insisted, ‘the telephone is disconnected’.  It emanated from the ‘magic box’ of my Tendring Careline installation sitting unobtrusively on the window-shelf of my sitting room. Tendring Careline is a district council service that for over a quarter of a century has offered security to old or disabled folk living on their own,  I have been signed on as one of its clients for two or three years and recommend it without hesitation to people in a similar situation as myself.

My Careline (magic box) Transmitter/Receiver

positioned on my window shelf.  Beside it is my pendant – placed there solely to be photographed. Two minutes after the photo had been taken it was round my neck again!

The ‘magic box’ incorporates a powerful microphone and loud speaker and is connected to the land-line telephone system.  With it comes a plastic pendant with a red push-button that I wear round my neck at all times.  Should I fall and be unable to get up, become suddenly ill, or should there be any other emergency (a fire, a flood, an intruder!), pressing that red button anywhere in my bungalow and at any time of the day or night, will alert one of the round-the-clock staff at Careline’s Clacton headquarters who will seek to reassure me and take immediate appropriate action.  This might consist of phoning the police, the ambulance service or the fire service or simply asking a neighbour who holds the key to my bungalow to look in and give me a hand.  On the outside wall beside my front door is a ‘key safe’ in which there is a key to front door accessible only by the use of a code number that Careline would give to the emergency service.

            My last week’s emergency wasn’t really urgent by Careline standards, but the fact that my telephone land-line wasn’t working meant that my pressing that potentially life-saving red button would be fruitless.  I could have tried phoning British Telecom myself on my mobile phone but I knew from experience that I’d be answered by a mechanical voice with questions that I would be unable to understand or answer -  ‘Please enter your account number and press one (or possibly 2 or 3) under this, that or the other circumstance’ – for instance!   I thought that if I phoned Tendring Helpline, I would at least reach a helpful and sympathetic human voice – and that if they phoned BT they’d carry more weight than an exasperated ninety-two year old could hope to.

            I was right on all counts.   A very helpful and sympathetic young lady replied to my call. She promised to phone BT on my account and ring back to let me know the result. And so she did.  Fifteen minutes later my mobile phone rang and she told me that BT had several disconnections in my area and that mine would be fixed before lunch time the next day.  It didn’t happen quite like that. Monday lunch time came and went.  The land-line phone was still out of action. At about 3.00 pm I phoned Careline again and a different, but equally helpful and sympathetic young lady assured me that she’d ring BT again and urge them to regard my re-connection as urgent.

            Just before 10.00 pm I thought that I heard a click from my land-line phone.  I lifted the receiver – and there was the familiar and very welcome dialling tone!   I immediately went into the sitting room, pressed that red button on the pendant round my neck (it was after 10.00 pm by then but it is a 24 hour service), told the Careline operator who answered me  that all was now well, and asked her to pass on my thanks to her colleagues.   ‘Just part of the Tendring Careline Service’, she replied. It was really quite a tiny crisis – but to a nonagenarian living alone, even tiny crises can seem enormous.

            I do recommend the Careline service to elderly folk living alone, particularly those who have a degree of disability.  The address of Tendring Careline is Barnes House, Pier Avenue, Clacton-on-Sea, CO15 1NJ and the telephone number is 01255 222727.  The service isn’t free I’m afraid.   The charge if you are exempt from VAT (you should be if you are suffering from a medical condition) is £18.00 a month  (£216.00 a year), or £21.60 a month (£259.20 a year) if you are liable for VAT. That charge includes the loan and installation of the ‘magic box’ and pendant. It’s well worth it if you can afford it.

            Blog readers who live elsewhere in the UK than in the Tendring District will almost certainly find that there is a similar scheme in their area, run either by the local authority or a private firm.  World-wide, I really don’t know the position.

A lone Lib-Dem Voice

          The parliamentary progress of Colchester’s Lib.Dem. MP Sir Bob Russell is always of interest.  If I were a Colchester voter his general support for the Lib/Con coalition government would prevent me from giving him my vote – but I admire the way in which he speaks his mind and is quite prepared to be in a minority of one when his conscience and/or common sense demand it.

            He, alone among Lib.Dem members of parliament, voted against the proposed high-speed rail link between London and the North.   I – and I note many readers of the local Gazette – am sure that he was right to do so.  This proposed rail link is a ‘prestige project that will inevitably take longer and cost more than is currently estimated.  When completed it will be possible to travel ‘up north’ rather more quickly than is possible by rail at present – though less quickly and rather more expensively than by air!

            Meanwhile the same government that is proposing to lavish millions of pounds of our money on this project, is cutting yet again their grants to local authorities; money badly needed, among other things, to fill in our potholed roads and repair our worn, broken and dangerous pavements.

            I am reminded of a story recounted by H.G. Wells of a visit to Russia in the years immediately after the revolution and civil war.  Looking across the Red Square in Moscow he saw an enormous building with a gigantic banner draped across it on which, in Russian Cyrillic capitals, was blazoned the message;  ‘INSTITUTE FOR THE ELECTRIFICATION OF ALL THE RUSSIAS!’

          Walking across the Square to this imposing building he found beside the entrance, a small notice, also of course in Russian; ‘Bell out of order’. 

‘Certainly tries very hard’

          That, I think, would be the words I would write on a report about Michael Gove’s progress as Education Minister in the present coalition government.  He really does try to produce an educational system from which Britain’s sixteen-to-eighteen year olds can emerge literate, numerate, with at least a rudimentary acquaintance with science, the history and geography of the world and in particular their own country, a familiarity with their own country’s literature and some knowledge of at least one foreign language.  It seems a great deal, but then the educational system does have 13 years in which to achieve that end, and they are the 13 years in which our ability to learn is at its highest.   More recently Mr Gove has set himself a rather more modest task; that of teaching the Civil Servants of the Department of Education to write literate, straightforward and grammatical letters and reports.  That surely doesn’t seem too much to ask.  He has circulated a memorandum containing ten points that they should observe when composing such a piece of prose.

            Some of the advice is unquestionably very sound.  When in doubt, cut it out. Read it out loud – if it sounds wrong don’t send it.  The more a letter reads like a political speech the less good it is as a letter. Would your mum understand that word, phrase or sentence?  Would mine? Isn’t that just a little patronising?  My mum (born in 1888) left a village school to go ‘into service’ at the age of 12.  As an adult she could write literate, grammatical and correctly spelt letters, had a knowledge of history and geography greater than that of many school leavers today, and she was familiar with the plots, and several of the speeches, of some of Shakespeare’s best-known plays.  Other advice that I would have added would have been:  Try to write short sentences.  If a long sentence can be made into two short ones, do it.  Short paragraphs are also to be preferred. A large unparagraphed block of print discourages the reader.   Try to begin the letter ‘Dear Mr Smith’ or whatever.  We all like our own name and we all hate being addressed as ‘Dear Sir or Madam’.

 Mr Gove suggests too that to improve their own prose his staff should read the work of great writers, suggesting George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Matthew Parris and Christopher Hitchens.  I’d certainly agree with George Orwell, Jane Austen and George Eliot, but how about Charlotte Bronte?   Parris and Hitchens are both political writers.  I’d suggest replacing them with P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, creator of ‘private eye’ Philip Marlowe.  They were both educated at Dulwich College, where there must have been a first class English Department.  They were both masters of written English (American-English in the case of Chandler) and both, though in very different ways, provide an enjoyable and page-turning read for even the most philistine civil servant.

             

           

Week 27 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘The King was in his counting house, counting out his money’

            These days, of course, it wouldn’t be the king but the Chancellor of the Exchequer.   For me, Chancellor George Osborne lost all credibility and respect when, at the same time as introducing an austerity programme that penalised the poor and disadvantaged, he reduced the liability for income tax of the seriously wealthy; those with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year!   Quite apart from the flagrant injustice of penalising the poor and rewarding the rich, I find it incredible that any Chancellor of a country with a serious deficit problem should deliberately, and despite widespread protest, cut off a source of revenue. That the source consisted of very wealthy people who would barely notice the loss compounds the irresponsibility of the action.

             The Chancellor expects to be credited with ‘helping the poor’ when he raises the threshold of liability for income tax, thus ‘taking thousands of low-paid workers out of the income tax system altogether’. It isn’t only the poor who are helped.  Raising the tax liability threshold benefits all income tax payers, including the very wealthiest.  What’s more, being ‘taken out of the income tax system altogether’ automatically makes those affected into second class citizens, patronised by ‘we tax-payers who have to support a nation full of slackers and scroungers!

            Last week’s financial statement continued the tradition that the Chancellor and his colleagues have established.  Can they possibly really believe that the poor are to blame for their poverty and that that there is work in plenty available for those who genuinely seek it?  Extending to seven days the time that elapses before an unemployed person can sign on to claim job-seekers’ allowance suggests that they do.  Unemployed and penniless people and their families still need to eat, pay the rent, and buy other necessities during those seven days.  How else can those without savings do so without resorting to the ‘help’ of a loan-shark or one of those pay-day loans that are so deceptively easy to obtain and so very, very difficult to pay off.

            It isn’t likely that very many people will criticise the decision to deny the winter fuel allowance to elderly Brits. living in countries enjoying milder winters than those in the UK. It hadn’t even occurred to me that those who choose to live permanently overseas had been receiving it!  The countries affected are residents in European Union countries bordering on the Mediterranean, including France but excluding Italy.   At first glance that seems ridiculous. Surely winters in, for instance, Calais and Rouen must more closely resemble those in Britain than do winters in Naples or Palermo?

            Probably so – but the decision is made by a comparison between the average winter temperature in south-west England and the average winter temperature throughout the country concerned.   Italy’s average winter temperature is brought down by the permanently snow-capped Italian Alps and by the peaks of the Apennines extending down ‘the spine’ of Italy. I doubt if many, if any, ex-pats live among those peaks…………… but rules are rules!

            I really don’t understand why the Chancellor is so reluctant to use income tax to make winter fuel allowance and other benefits fairer, and yield revenue to narrow that deficit much more easily and painlessly than anything that he has done so far.  The state retirement pension is subject to income tax.  I can see no valid reason why all benefits (in fact, all sources of income) shouldn’t be similarly taxed.

            The only conclusion that I can reach is that the Chancellor’s political outlook, and that of his colleagues sees something morally wrong  in the idea that we should be taxed in accordance with our ability to pay.   A couple of pence in the pound on VAT or customs duty may lose a few votes, but it is tolerable because ‘the rich man in his castle’ and ‘the poor man at his gate’ pay exactly the same amount.  That clearly is the government’s idea of us ‘all being in this together’.

            A tax for rich and poor alike based proportionately on ability to pay?  Unthinkable – that’s the road to red revolution and the end of civilisation for ‘people like us’ (with a Rolls in the garage, a yacht in the marina, and a second home in Majorca).

            Mrs Thatcher must have had much the same idea when she replaced the rating system for the local financing of local government by the Poll Tax.   Rate demands had, admittedly very imperfectly, reflected the wealth or poverty of the householder.   The poll tax was the same for us all, the millionaire, the slum dweller and the rural cottager.  A late 14^th century version of the Poll Tax triggered the Peasants’ Revolt.  The late 20^th century version triggered revolt against Mrs Thatcher and her government and led to her eventual downfall at the hands of her own supporters. I think it unlikely that I shall still be around to see the eventual consequences in the 21^st century, of robbing the poor to make the wealthy even richer.

Clacton County High School

          My two sons were both pupils at Clacton County High School in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.  Both did very well there and I have always followed the progress of the school with a warm interest.

            I was very pleased therefore to read in the Clacton Gazette that the CCHS is in the top twenty percent of schools for raising pupils’ educational standards from admission at 11 to completing their GCSE examinations at 16.   Sue Williamson, chief executive of the Secondary School Admission Test education group, is reported as saying ‘Clacton County High School should be congratulated for their stunning performance in adding value to their students’ achievements.  It is one of the best schools in the country in outperforming expectations for their pupils and improving their future prospects.  There is plenty that other schools could learn from their success’.

            So far, so good.  It isn’t quite the whole story though.   On a back page of the same Gazette are to be found tables showing the percentage of pupils from each school and educational  establishment in Colchester and the Tendring District who went on to University or other Higher Education Institution.  These give a rather different picture.   Out of 110 school leavers from Clacton County High School 44 percent went on to Higher Education Institutions but only 6 percent went to the top third of these (that is, to a good university).  Not a single pupil from any school or other institution within the Tendring District gained admission to either Oxford or Cambridge Universities.  Things have been very different in the not-too-distant past.

  Peter Hall B.A.(Cantab) aged 21, on his graduation day. Selwyn College Chapel is in the background.  He was subsequently made an M.A.     

My elder son left Clacton County High School in 1970 at the age of 17, having sat and passed his ‘A’ level exams with outstanding results,. He had been  accepted by Selwyn College, Cambridge to begin his life there as an undergraduate from September 1971. He would then be just 18.  He spent his ‘gap year’ working in the store room of the Eastern Electricity Board HQ in Clacton, learning something of the ‘real world’ of work before he began his studies.  In 1971 he was one of  at least four CCHS sixth formers who became students at Cambridge University, all of whom graduated with honours.  Those four I knew about personally.  There may well have been others whom I didn’t know who started at either Oxford of Cambridge that same year.

       I don’t believe that young men and women of Clacton at the end of the 1960s were cleverer than those of the first decade of the 21^st century.  While it is possible that they were prepared to work and study harder (there certainly weren’t the distractions then that there are today) I think that their expectations and those of their teachers were higher, and that their teachers were more inspiring – and perhaps more skilled.

            Clacton County High School has proved itself brilliant at instilling a basic education into what may sometimes have been unpromising and perhaps resistant human material.  I believe though that the low percentage of pupils gaining admission to the best Universities – and none at all to Oxford and Cambridge – demonstrates that the school is failing its more gifted and hard-working pupils.   

           

   .