Week 35 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

Our Brave New World

          At the end of the 1960s I was, as a Public Health Inspector, involved with a great deal of Health Education work.  Consequently Clacton Council released me for one morning each week to attend a two-year part-time course for teachers of adult ‘further education’ at the local Adult Education Centre.  It was very interesting, though by the time I had completed the course and passed the appropriate City and Guilds examination I had been appointed as the town’s Housing Manager.  The qualification was useful though when, in 1973, I applied successfully for the post of Public Relations Officer to the newly created Tendring District Council..

            I remember vividly our very enthusiastic young ‘further education’ tutor.  The  1960s had seen the dawn of the electronic age and he was tremendously enthusiastic about the benefits that it would bring to everybody.  The day was coming, he said, when no-one would need to do more than a few hours of work for perhaps just three or four days a week.  Humanity was heading into a golden age in which everyone would have vast amounts of leisure time.  It would be our task (he made it seem like sacred mission!) as teachers of adult education, to teach folk how to fill those unaccustomed hours of leisure positively and for the greater good of humankind.

                    How astonished that young man would be (perhaps he is, because he was a decade or so younger than me) at the world of the 3^rd millennium – half a century later.  The advances in electronic science have been greater than he could possibly have imagined. His promised ‘leisure time’ though is being endured, rather than enjoyed, by two and a half million unemployed, while those who have work are having to work harder and for longer hours than ever before.  Many shops and other businesses are open seven days a week. The government is doing all that it possibly can to tempt, persuade or coerce young mothers to entrust their children to professional ‘carers’ and get back into paid employment, and for the chronic sick and disabled to do any work of which their failing bodies or minds are still capable.

       

         In the 1960s marriage was still the norm.  Most married women preferred, at least once children were born, to pursue careers a mothers and home-makers.  Nowadays it is common for couples to live together as ‘partners’ before, or perhaps instead of, marriage.  Both of many such couples need to work to ’manage’ a burden of debt imposed upon them at least partly by government policy – repayment of student loans can take a working lifetime, and the government actively encourages mortgage debt in pursuit of its unrealisable ideological aim of ‘home ownership for all!’.

            The gap between the incomes of the wealthy and the poor is wider than it has ever been.  The new Chief Executive of a failed bank on a salary of £1 million a year, is considered to be ‘self-sacrificing’ because he agrees not to be handed a six figure bonus for a couple of years!  Meanwhile state benefits to the poor are capped, stricter means testing of benefits are imposed and the state-friendly national press derides the unemployed as ‘scroungers’ and ‘shirkers’.   More and more people are dependent upon food banks and charity handouts for survival.

Depersonalisation

            A week or two ago I wrote in this blog about the many times when, on Clacton Railway Station, the ticket office is unmanned, there are no staff visible (there may be one or two employees tucked away in an office somewhere!) and rail passengers have to be content  with a time table on the wall, a ticket machine and printed warnings about the penalties for travelling without a valid ticket.  What more, I asked rhetorically, could travellers possibly want?  Below is some sound advice for the successful entrepreneur in the 21st century:

           Employing  HRUs (Human Resource Units, or flesh-and-blood men and women) is rarely cost-effective  They expect to work only a third (at the most) of each 24 hour day and to take at least one day off every single week!  They expect to be paid enough to enable them to feed, clothe and house not only themselves but their families, and enough to allow them to save for a pension when they can work no longer.  They expect to be paid when they are off sick or on holiday and it’s difficult and expensive to get rid of them when they’re surplus to requirements.  Where possible it always makes financial sense to use a machine rather than an HRU, and the electronic age is making that possible in more and more fields of what was once thought of as human activity.

I hate it!  It’s not just because every pound saved by using a machine rather than a human means another person unemployed.  That comes into it of course, but personally I don’t like drawing Cash from a machine instead of from a friendly bank or post office counter-clerk.  I don’t like phoning a once-friendly help-line and being told by a mechanical voice that if I want this, press 1, if I want that, press 2 and if I want the other press 3, or – worse still – being referred to a website!  I don’t like buying things ‘on line’.  I’d rather go to a shop and see and feel what I am proposing to buy.  Often I’d like to chat about my purchase.  There was a time when shop assistants were knowledgeable about the things (cameras and photographic equipment, fishing tackle, camping equipment) that they sold, but those days are over.  Often nowadays there aren’t even instruction booklets.  ‘Full details are available on-line sir – you’ll find the website address on your purchase!’

I am not alone.   I had thought that it might be my age that gave me this dislike of machinery and fondness for poor frail and often failing humanity.  However I have received an email from a regular blog reader, some thirty years younger than me, that expresses even stronger feelings than my own.  Here it is:

You may remember me expressing dismay at the de-personalisation we are suffering; Benefits being administered by Call Centres all over the country; Libraries with automatic book check in and check out machines;  Cafes reduced to a bank of vending machines;

Some Supermarkets (M&S Moorgate) with 90% automatic tills; Almost all Barclays banks “upgraded” to a hall of ATMs with a hotline to a call centre to arrange loans;  Plans to close ALL ticket offices on the London Underground and take no cash on London buses – everything paid for by Contactless Credit Cards and Oyster Cards.

 The final straw today, in the Evening Standard, was that Brent Council has opened up a brand new Civic Centre and has a Hologram Person directing people where to go in the entrance lobby. Apparently the machine holds a tablet where you can key in questions and are told where to go by a simulated voice

I know 1984 came and went without George Orwell’s worst fears being realized, but even he didn’t see this coming.  How long before they decide we don’t need People in Call Centres, because robots are cheaper and voice recognition software is good enough? – 10 years maximum is my guess.

And of course the Internet is really part of the problem because although it provides more opportunities for people to talk to other people on social web sites, it allows so many public and private organisations to hide behind a web site – often not even providing a phone number or an address or the name of any member of staff.

Then the other amazing thing is people living in two worlds at the same time. Over many decades we have become used to people listening to music from ever smaller music players while they walk and work.  Today though I saw several people WATCHING a video on their mini iPad, with earphones in their ears as they WALK through the tube station.  Can you believe it, a completely parallel fantasy existence whilst actually walking in the real world!

            I haven’t seen anything like that.  I am sometimes alarmed though when I am on my mobility scooter and see someone walking towards me on the footpath while engaged in an animated conversation on a mobile phone – sometimes even tapping out a text message as they walk.   They are obviously in a world of their own and relying on anyone in their way to step aside and let them pass.  Now that’s something you just can’t do when you’re on a mobility scooter!

A sign of the times

          A new Aldi Supermarket is being built almost opposite the recently re-opened Century Cinema in Clacton-on-Sea.  It is expected to open in mid October and there will be thirty job opportunities for local people. Aldi Management recently had two ‘open evenings’ to interview applicants for these forthcoming vacancies.

            I am told that over 1,000 hopefuls turned up to ask for for one of those thirty jobs!  Yet much of the press persists in propagating the government-friendly myth that most of those surviving ‘on benefit’ are scroungers and slackers who don’t want work.  I'd like to see the editors - or better still - the owners, living for a few weeks on 'job seekers allowance'!      

                                                                                                  

Week 34 2013

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Fracking

A’fracking we will go,

 A’fracking we will go,

Because our toil

Will find the oil

That makes the economy grow, grow, grow!

That makes the economy grow!

The above ditty, which I offer free of copyright to anyone who wants it, could well become a popular playground song of the 2020s though only, of course, if a strictly non-profit-making activity like singing is permitted by the Directors of the Education Industry (by then fully privatised and market sensitive) during primary schools’ productive leisure periods, formerly known as ‘playtimes’.

‘Fracking’ is by no means the most attractive and melodious word to have been introduced into the English vocabulary by modern technology – but it seems likely to be one to which we will have to accustom ourselves.  It is a shortened form of ‘hydraulic fracturing’, a means of extracting gas and/or oil from hitherto inaccessible, but apparently plentiful, reserves of both these sources of energy in beds of shale deep below the earth’s surface.

Like the coal, gas and oil to which we are accustomed they are ‘fossil fuels’ and thus doomed eventually to come to an end.  However they will – if exploited - reduce our current dependency on oil and gas from distant and unreliable overseas sources.  They will also postpone, perhaps for many decades, the exhaustion of these sources of energy and their inevitable increase in price as they become depleted.   What a relief to politicians – no need to persevere with those unpopular wind and solar energy farms!   No expensive and unpopular barrages to be built across the Severn and other estuaries to harvest tidal power!  That’ll really confound the ‘green lobby’, and trim the wings of UKIP and other organised opponents of green energy!  A government that welcomed fracking (thousands of jobs, smaller fuel bills, cheaper petrol – perhaps) should surely gain thousands of votes. Any serious troubles that may arise from it are probably several general elections away!

There will be trouble of course.  The process of fracking, if I have understood it correctly (and if I haven’t I’ll gladly publish any corrections that blog readers send me!) is to bore vertically a mile or more down from the earth’s surface, lining the borehole with concrete to prevent seepage of pollutants into the subsoil; then, when a pre-determined depth has been reached, extending the bore-hole horizontally for perhaps another mile underground. The ideal situation, I understand, is for the horizontal excavation to be through porous sandstone between two strata of shale.

Now the work that gives the operation its name begins.  Water, charged with grit particles, is forced under very high pressure into that horizontal bore-hole.   The pressure fractures the shale beds (the actual ‘fracking’) and grit carried by the pressurised water prevents the tiny fractures from closing again.   The water is then pumped out and oil and/or gas that had been held within the shale leeks into the bore-hole from those fractures.   The borehole becomes a well.

As I typed those last two paragraphs the sequence of events seemed to become more and more improbable with every word I typed!   However, fracking has been carried out with success for many years in all parts of the USA and has been proved to be successful in this country too.  There are snags about it.  The actual fracking is done deep underground but the surface works are extensive and, to say the least, unsightly.  Pictures have been shown on our tv of no-doubt formerly attractive countryside in the USA turned into desolate – but highly profitable - wasteland.  The fracking operation has been known to cause earthquakes – only small ones perhaps but earthquakes none the less! As well as the despoliation of the environment, fracking brings very real dangers of pollution of lakes and rivers and, in particular perhaps, of aquifers or natural underground water reservoirs.

Unsurprisingly, like sewage treatment works, landfill refuse disposal sites and waste incinerators, no-one wants a Fracking operation anywhere near their home.  They are the ultimate NIMBY (not in my back yard!)

Lord Howell, Mrs Thatcher’s Environment Minister and George Osborne’s father-in-law (a weighty thinker if there ever was one!) recently gave members of the House of Lords his valuable thoughts about the future location of Fracking wells:

‘But there are large and uninhabited and desolate areas. Certainly in part of the North East where there’s plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody’s residence where we could conduct without any kind of threat to the rural environment.’

            Geordieland is certainly ‘well away’ from Westminster and from  London’s ‘stockbroker belt’ but I doubt if the residents of Newcastle-on-Tyne,  Durham and other North-eastern  cities would agree that their beautiful  unspoilt countryside and coastline were ‘desolate areas’ offering ‘plenty of room for fracking without any kind of threat to the rural environment.’’

As it happens it seems that beds of shale offering rich pickings to frackers are distributed pretty evenly over – or rather under - ‘England’s Green and Pleasant Land’  There are areas of southern England where the residences of  some of the government’s most loyal (and wealthy and generous!) supporters are to be found, that are particularly promising.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our Prime Minister demonstrated his enthusiasm for this exciting new wealth-creating enterprise by encouraging one or two trial holes to be bored in Buckinghamshire (not a heavily populated county) in the immediate vicinity of Chequers!

I think fracking is a very interesting idea that may well have a great future – but I’m quite glad that no geological map of England I have seen shows any sign of oil-or-gas bearing shale strata beneath the fertile fields, wind-swept heathland, winding estuaries and salt marshes of East Anglia!

…….as others see us!

 

Ray and Ingrid

            I had a very pleasant surprise on Sunday 12^th August.  Ingrid my German friend of many years standing, and her English partner Ray had been entertaining two sixteen year old German girls from the Bayreuth area of Bavaria who were for the first time paying a short visit to England.  The previous day they had taken them on a lightning tour of London, seeing Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons, London Bridge and Tower Bridge, the London Eye and Oxford Street.

            Sunday was their day to see the English seaside.  Where better than Clacton-on-Sea with which Ray was familiar (his home is in Ipswich) and Ingrid has visited on two or three previous occasions.  They spent the morning and the early part of the afternoon on the pier and the beach and called on me, for a cup of tea and a chat, at about 4.30.

            I found the two visitors to be very courteous and friendly young ladies who were full of teenage enthusiasm for England and everything English.  They had thoroughly enjoyed their visit to London, where they had seen all the places they had heard about or seen on German tv.  I was astonished that they commented on the cleanliness of London’s streets – though it is some years since I have been to the capital and over sixty since I lived there. Perhaps things have changed since those days.

            They were no less enthusiastic about Clacton.  I am glad they saw us at our best.  It was a warm and sunny day at the beginning of carnival week.   They had thoroughly enjoyed themselves on the pier and on Clacton’s safe and sandy beaches – though of the four of them, only Ingrid had had a swim.  The others found the North Sea too chilly, even on a warm and sunny day in August.  They had been somewhat disconcerted by the speed of the rising tide!  The girls had previously known only lake-side beaches and Ingrid had spent only a brief time on a beach on her previous visits to Clacton. 

The two girls were learning English at school and our conversation took place in both English and German.  Either I said very little (which those who know me best will consider unlikely!) or my German is much better than I had thought it was, because Ingrid emailed me later to say that one of the girls had subsequently asked her if I was German or English!  Be that as it may, it is good to know that two German teenagers have returned from their first visit to England with wholly positive thoughts about our country and about Clacton-on-Sea and the Essex Sunshine Coast.

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Week 33 2013

Tendring Topics………on line

Clacton-on-Sea – Sea, Sand…..and Social Deprivation?

            Those of us who complain about the increasing crime rate are often assured that it’s all just an illusion.   ‘There’s a perceived increase in crime brought about by sensational press reports and by politicians with an axe to grind. The fact is that there is a steady decrease in reported crime. Year by year Britain is becoming a safer country in which to live’. 

This may well be true in most of the country but it certainly isn’t in north-east Essex.  In Clacton-on-Sea there were 38 robberies in the town during April, May and June compared with only 15 in the corresponding months last year.  In Colchester (which I certainly never think of as being ‘safer’ than Clacton) there was also a rise in robberies but only from 8 to 15.  Elsewhere throughout Essex, just as the wiseacres insist, the number of robberies and other crimes did fall.

I am disturbed by the knowledge that part of that north-east Essex crime wave is taking place uncomfortably close to my home in Clacton’s Dudley Road.  It’s not so long ago that a knife attack took place within view of my front door.  Had it not been for a neighbour giving first aid and summoning an ambulance and the Police it would have resulted in a violent death and a murder charge. More recently there has been a mugging involving ‘grievous bodily harm’ in Old Road, only a few hundred yards away from my home.  Even more disturbing to me personally was a report in last week’s Clacton Gazette of a man who had withdrawn a three-figure sum in cash from Magdalene Green Post Office at 9.30 am one morning.. As he walked home along Coppins Road in broad daylight, three men attacked him and robbed him of his money.  It is from that same Post Office that I sometimes draw three figure sums of money from my bank account.  I too travel home along Coppins Road on my mobility scooter!

Recently elected Police and Crime Commissioner Nick Alston is reported as saying that Clacton’s problems arise from. ‘a toxic mix of multiple occupancy, alcohol, people choosing to live here or being placed here, and unscrupulous landlords’.  Well, yes, but he might have added that another very potent ingredient of that toxic mix is the very high, and still rising, level of unemployment, and the virtual impossibility of  unskilled new arrivals in the town finding work.

Social Deprivation

The local daily Gazette reports the finding of the Centre for Social Justice that 54 percent of those aged between 16 and 64 in Clacton’s Pier Ward, are on unemployment benefit, the fifth highest percentage in the country.  That’s at the very centre of the town which one might have thought would be its richest area! In Jaywick, part of which is officially Britain’s most deprived area, 35 percent of working age people claim unemployment benefit and 54 percent of the over-16s have no educational qualifications.  They are not alone.  In Clacton overall 41 percent of adults, over twice the national average, have no qualifications!  Nearly one in three Clactonians, the fifth highest in the country again, claims a state pension. I’m one of those one-in-three and I hope that, at 92 and having been a taxpayer for some seventy of those years (and I still am!), no-one grudges my claiming it.

Councillor Peter Halliday, the Council’s leader, is reported as saying that it is important to understand what is causing these problems and how to address them.  He says that high unemployment in the town has been exacerbated by a high number of benefit migrants moving to cheap accommodation either in Jaywick or in one of the old bed-and-breakfast boarding houses being converted into night shelters.  He said that more needed to be done to encourage working people to live in Clacton, rather than the unemployed.

The fact is, of course, that many, perhaps nearly all, of those unemployed ‘benefit migrants’ would very much like to become ‘working people’.  They don’t come to Clacton because it’s easier to get ‘benefits’ here.   They come because the cap on benefits and the ‘bedroom tax’ have made it almost impossible for unemployed – and many low-paid working people – to live in the London area.  It’s a short train-ride from London to Clacton.  It’s usually possible, if you’re patient and try really hard, to get some sort of employment in London.  Incomers don’t realize – or don’t believe – that the employment situation is much worse here.

Many of those who survive on benefits and seem content to do so, have tried in vain so many times to get work that they have given up trying.  Meanwhile, as a result of the government’s austerity cuts and in the interests of ‘efficiency’, machines are replacing flesh and blood, employers are ‘down-sizing’ and ‘rationalising’ and there are fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled or semi-skilled workers to do.  The reason why, as Councillor Halliday suggests, we are short of ‘working people’ is that we are desperately short of work for them to do.

Clacton’ sunny side!  

Younger son (Andy) enjoying himself on Clacton beach half a century ago!

Meanwhile, at least during this extraordinarily hot and sunny summer, Clacton-on-Sea appears on the surface to be flourishing.  Visitors (mostly day-visitors it’s true) are enjoying safe sea bathing from our sandy, gently sloping beaches, strolling through our colourful cliff-top gardens and having seaside fun on the reinvigorated pier. The till-bells of pubs, restaurants and town centre shops are ringing merrily!  I doubt if any of the visitors who throng Pier Avenue, High Street and Station Road in the August sunshine would believe that they are enjoying themselves in a ‘benefit ghetto’!  Those of us who have made our homes here (I have lived in Clacton for nearly sixty years so I surely qualify as a native) wouldn’t wish to live anywhere else.   Here in Clacton-on-Sea it is rarely quite so cold, quite so unbearably hot, quite so wet, quite so overcast as other parts of the UK.   No other seaside resort in Britain has as low an average rainfall as Clacton-on-Sea, Brightlingsea, Frinton-on-Sea, Walton-on-the-Naze and Dovercourt.  The driest spot in the UK is officially St. Osyth – just two or three miles as the crow flies from my front door.

Elder son Pete busy with his school homework almost fifty years ago.

Clacton is a wonderful place in which to live and to bring up children – but we do need better schools for them  (like the ones we had here half a century ago!) and much better career opportunities for them as they grow up. They shouldn't need to go to  London, or even to Colchester, Chelmsford or Ipswich, to get a worthwhile job. Both my sons took it for granted that there would be no satisfying employment locally for them and that they would have to go to London to further their careers

Human Resource Units (or Children of God?)

 Not everyone is clever or skilled.  There needs to be adequately paid jobs for those who are willing enough to work, but lack any particular skill.  Public authorities once met that need but do so no longer.  Do you remember the time when there were uniformed porters at railway stations, conductors on buses and important looking uniformed ‘commissionaires’ at the entrance of cinemas and theatres?  They weren’t very important or very well-paid people but they provided a uniformed ‘presence’ that deterred vandals and hooligans, they answered people’s questions, and they generally made life easier for the rest of us.  Nowadays there’s often no-one manning the ticket office at Clacton Station!  There is a ‘ticket machine’ and notices warning of the penalties resulting from travelling without a ticket.  What more can travellers possibly want?

          Officials who are responsible for the work-force of any organisation used to be known as Personnel Managers or perhaps Staff Managers.   Have you noticed that nowadays they’re known as Directors of Human Resources?  That job title effectively puts men and women, whom we Christians believe to be the children of God, on the same level as cans of beans, bags of cement and gallons of petrol; Human Resource Units (HRUs).  From time to time, like bags of cement and gallons of petrol, they become surplus to requirements and can be discarded when cost effectiveness, productivity and profitability (the three ‘persons’ of Mammon’s Unholy Trinity) demand it.  The maximising of profits is best ensured by Zero Hours Contracts which mean that workers are always available to perform any task required – but the employer has no obligation to provide them with work or to pay them a retainer while they are idle.  The main purpose of any public utility company is no longer to serve the public – but to maximise the dividends of the share-holders.

            There surely must be a better way of organising society than that!

             

Week 32 2013

Tendring Topics….on line

‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’

          This was the advice that, in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, the old and worldly-wise Polonius gave his son Laertes when he was departing the shores of Denmark for England; a distant foreign land where debt was only one of the many perils facing an inexperienced young Dane travelling abroad for the first time.  Today England is part of a United Kingdom with a national debt that its government tries with only limited success to reduce, and in which a great many of its inhabitants get deeper and deeper into personal debt.  Perhaps things were different in Shakespeare’s day because nowadays the ‘lenders’ usually do quite well out of it.

 Payday loan companies, whose advertisements help daytime commercial television to survive, claim to give a badly needed service to folk with a temporary financial problem.  Their potential clients are the many thousands of people in Britain today in steady jobs with just-adequate salaries paid monthly. 

Suddenly, perhaps a fortnight before payday, the family car, or the tv, or the freezer breaks down, or perhaps there is an unexpected visitor.  It may need no more than £200 or £300 at the most, to solve the problem, but the ever rising cost of living coupled with pay freezes has meant that there are virtually no savings.  A Payday Loan will solve the problem.  Give the firm a ring and within minutes, the sum required will be in the borrower’s bank account.  Pay it back on payday, with what seems a very small interest charge and all will be well. How simple and straightforward it sounds.

But, of course, it isn’t.  If the borrower’s salary is only just sufficient for a normal month’s expenditure, once the loan and interest have been repaid the borrower won’t have enough left for the next month’s living expenses.   I had seen it happen often enough with Council House tenants’ rent arrears.  Those who are unable to pay the rent on one rent day are unlikely to be able make a double payment a week later.  The council didn’t charge interest on money owed in this way. It was usually possible to make an arrangement for the defaulting tenant to free himself from debt by paying just a small sum extra each week until it was cleared.  Payday loan companies do charge interest.  They’ll extend the loan period and the interest will begin to add up – sometimes to as much as 4,000 percent of the original loan!

I am glad that Archbishop Welby, who spent his earlier years in the realms of high finance, does see the problem – and hopes to use the resources of the Church of England to solve it.  He is planning to encourage the Church to support and extend the country’s credit unions. They could prove to be an alternative source of emergency lending that would eventually put the payday loan companies out of business.

Credit Unions could be described as local community banks. Members pay their savings – whatever they can afford - into their Union account and then, when a domestic crisis arises, they can borrow the sum required at a much lower rate of interest than that offered by any commercial organisation.  They can then repay it in instalments over twelve months though, if they are able to do so, it is to their advantage to pay it back by larger instalments over a shorter period of time.

There are currently about 400 credit unions in Great Britain with over a million members.  At the end of last year they held about £807 million in savings and there were about £627 million on loan to members.  The Church of England isn’t proposing to run credit unions but will offer its premises for their use and offer any other support that they need to ensure their success.

 Colchester and the Tendring District are served by the Colchester Credit Union set up in 2002.  It currently has 550 adult and 400 young members. Chris Burrows, the union’s secretary is quoted in the daily Gazette as saying that there has been a strong public interest since the Archbishop made his statement with 17 new membership applications the day after the statement made the headlines in the national press and nine people offering their support as volunteers.

The union lends sums of up to £3,000  to a total of about £20,000 a year, a figure that has risen since the government’s austerity programme began to take effect.  Colchester Credit Union tries to keep its interest rate for borrowers at one percent per month.  If you live in our north-east Essex area you can contact the Colchester Credit Union on info@colchestercreditunion.co.uk   or phone 01206 798823.

I wish the Archbishop of Canterbury every success in his campaign though I think he is a little optimistic in his hope that it will put the Payday Loan Companies out of business.  The present government’s policies with student loans and its offer of  help in meeting deposit requirements for house purchase mortgages encourages borrowing, but does nothing to encourage the small-scale regular saving on which Credit Unions depend. I fear that Wonga’s and other payday loan companies’ adverts will continue to keep day-time commercial tv going for a while yet.    

A Republican Britain?   Not for me.

          A job that I thoroughly enjoyed during the seven years that I was Tendring Council’s first Public Relations Officer, was talking to – usually bright teenage – students from overseas about the British way of life and, in particular, about British local government. Most were either French or German and there seemed to be always two questions that I was asked at the end of my talk.  ‘Why do you British have such winding roads with so many corners to turn? and ‘Why do you British still have a monarchy while most other European countries are republics?’ 

I wasn’t really competent to answer the first question but I would disarm them by quoting G.K.Chesterton’s ‘Rolling English Road’.  It begins, ‘Before the Romans came to Rye or out of Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road’, and even the French students were amused at a subsequent verse, ‘I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire, and for to kill the Frenchmen I did not much aspire, But I did bash their bayonets because they came arrayed to straighten out the rolling roads an English drunkard made!’

To the question about the monarchy I was very pleased to give a reply that was not only the one the Council would expect from their PRO but one with which I personally agreed.  We have a constitutional monarchy because it works for us.  It means that we have a head of state who is outside (neither ‘above’ nor ‘below’) politics.  What’s more, he or she will have been brought up and educated for the role probably for many years before becoming our Sovereign, and have had years more experience of government than even the wisest and most knowledgeable politician. A hereditary sovereign can’t override the intentions of an elected government but is in an ideal position to act as confidante, to advise, and to warn of the possible consequences of any proposed action.  Elected political heads of state must have the uncomfortable knowledge that although just over half of the electorate wanted him or her as their leader – almost half most certainly didn’t.  A head of state appointed from among distinguished citizens merely as a figure-head would lack the knowledge and experience of a hereditary monarch to advise and, when necessary, warn political leaders.  The UK isn’t alone in having a constitutional monarchy - Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway also have a similar form of government.  They are all, I think, countries in which most Britons would feel ‘at home’.

Yes, I am an egalitarian and am opposed to privilege, but I believe that the privileges of inherited wealth are infinitely greater and more noxious than those of inherited rank.   Who do you think will be able to have the fuller, more fulfilled, more truly privileged life – the recently born Prince George of Cambridge or the son of an American media billionaire, an oil-rich Saudi prince, or a Russian oligarch endowed with millions of roubles courtesy of ‘freedom loving’ Boris Yeltsin?  Prince George won’t be able to choose his own friends, his own girl-friend and partner (without careful vetting) and his own occupations.  He will spend his youth and middle-age preparing for a post that very possibly won’t become vacant until he is an old man. His whole life will be spent under press scrutiny. Every word that he speaks in public will be recorded by reporters praying for an indiscretion that will make the next day’s headlines!  It’s certainly not everybody’s idea of the ideal career!

I wish him well.  His mum seems to be a pleasant and amiable young woman (though hardly ‘that nice girl next door we see go off to work every morning’) and his dad, involved in air-sea rescue, has, at the moment, a thoroughly useful job.  The news media, including the BBC, certainly went overboard at his birth – the Sun (which rarely, if ever, has a kind word to say about his grandad the Prince of Wales) even temporarily changed its name for the occasion!  But then, the new prince is a mega-celebrity and I suppose that in this celebrity-obsessed age, that’s what we must expect.   Like all his family, he will be very wealthy.  But if the kind of taxation system that I am constantly advocating in this blog – a universal annual income tax consisting of a fixed percentage of the gross income of every British citizen and permanent resident (rich and poor alike) - were to become the principal source of government revenue, his privileges, and those of the offspring of the American media millionaire, the Saudi prince and the Russian oligarch would all be cut down to size.   In my Britain, ‘royals’ would be expected to pay the same tax as everyone else but they would, of course, be entitled to claim expenses incurred as a result of the demands of the job.

Striving to replace a constitutional monarchy that has evolved over 1,000 years with a republic, while tolerating our current economic system, is  an irrelevant distraction, hindering rather than furthering progress towards the building of a New Jerusalem ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.