Week 44 2013

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Our Grandchildren’s Legacy

            One of the most persuasive arguments that the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer use to justify their continuing assault on the finances of the poor and disabled and the services on which they depend, is that it would be grossly unfair of us to leave our grandchildren with a legacy of our debts that we have been too selfish to clear.  It’s a persuasive argument. None of us wants to be the cause of suffering or hardship to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.   I doubt though if it has  satisfied those whose car has been damaged by a pothole in the road, who have tripped over a broken paving stone or who have found that they are no longer eligible for a financial benefit needed to keep their family warm and above starvation-level.  Our top politicians are also – or so I thought – quite keen on supporting British industry that will provide jobs for British workers and thus make up for some of the unemployment resulting from their cuts in the public services.

            That being so, I find it difficult to understand why they are quite so enthusiastic about a new nuclear power station that is to be built, at the cost of billions of pounds, by a French enterprise and financed by the Chinese!   It will, announced the Prime Minister, provide thousands of jobs and cost the British taxpayer nothing at all.  And that, he added with self-satisfaction, ‘must be a good thing’.

            The Chinese aren’t philanthropists and they are lending that money for the power plant’s construction just as surely as the financial institutions lend money to the government to allow it to carry out its functions.  They’ll want it back – with interest!  It may not cost us anything now as tax-payers but it certainly will cost our grandchildren and great-grandchildren as consumers.  Luckily for the government they won’t have votes in the next General Election!  The government has promised repayment by means  of electricity charges to domestic, commercial and industrial consumers at twice the rate at which those consumers are charged today – and goodness knows, many people, and many firms, are finding today’s prices crippling.  It’s true that some of that increase will be absorbed by general inflation by the time that power station is producing electricity – but wages and incomes (except for those of the very wealthy) aren’t keeping up with inflation now.  Why should we assume they’ll do so in the future?

            Debt will not, of course, be the only legacy left to our grandchildren and great grandchildren by this and other nuclear power stations.   The production of nuclear power leaves a toxic residue that remains lethal for hundreds of years and for which no-one has yet discovered a safe means of disposal or storage.

            I wrote fairly light-heartedly in this blog about ‘fracking’ a few weeks ago.  The real objection to its practice is not that it will despoil the countryside and possibly pollute water supplies but that it will encourage complacency in the face of the strongest evidence yet that accelerating climate change is taking place and that human activity is responsible for it.  Fracking, as well as being expensive and destroying the beauty of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, produces fossil fuels that will hasten that climate change and delay our development of sufficient clean and renewable sources of energy sufficient to meet the UK’s needs.

           

            Nuclear power doesn’t produce greenhouse gases but it does have bulky by-products that remain lethal for centuries.  Nuclear power plants are also subject to damage by natural disasters, as we have seen recently in Japan where radio-active material from a ruined nuclear energy installation continues to pollute the Pacific Ocean.  Had anyone warned of that Japanese power plant’s potential vulnerability four years ago they would have been laughed at, just as those who in Britain warn about vulnerability to natural disaster and to terrorist action, are laughed at today.

            We need to press on with our harnessing of the power of the wind and the sun.  We need also to find effective ways of exploiting the power of the waves that crash onto our beaches and the foot of our cliffs all the year round.  The potential energy of wind, sun and waves does, as critics delight in pointing out, vary according to the weather and the season.    That of the tides that ebb and flow twice daily round our coasts and into and out of our estuaries is completely dependable.  Tidal power doesn’t pollute, needn’t deface the landscape and doesn’t produce a lethal by-product.  It has been harnessed and used in tide-mills for centuries. We need to use 21^st century technology to exploit for modern use this totally reliable, non-polluting and inexhaustible source of energy.

I have little doubt that if we invested half as much capital and effort into researching and developing those entirely benign and renewable sources of energy as we spend on manufacturing weapons of death and destruction, our grandchildren would have all the energy they needed, in safety and at prices they would be able to afford.

Late News - David Cameron has announced that he will 'roll back' the green taxes introduced to combat  climate change as they add too much to fuel bills.  Well, it's easier than confronting the energy supply companies and it should win a few votes for his Party.  Tough on those grandchildren and great grandchildren about whom he and the Chancellor were once so concerned.

A Prophecy Fulfilled!

How very rarely does the ability to say ‘I told you so!’ give the speaker any satisfaction whatsoever!

It must surely be obvious to any sane person that this dreadful civil war in Syria must be stopped. Thousands of innocent people have been killed.  Thousands more have been rendered homeless.  Much of the country has been reduced to ruin. The flood of refugees is overwhelming neighbouring countries.  Egypt and Libya, Muslim countries that might have been expected to welcome their fugitive co-religionists are simply moving then on – many to their deaths as they try to cross the Mediterranean Sea in cockle-shell boats. The religious tolerance that was once a hallmark of the Syrian regime has been replaced by sectarian strife, intolerance and persecution of people of minority religious traditions. Christians, who before the civil war had lived in peace beside their Muslim neighbours have been particularly targeted by the very rebels whom our government is supporting. 

 Backing either one side or the other in an attempt to force an end to conflict by bringing one of the combatants to victory is as stupid as it is wicked!  The fact is that both sides have shown total contempt for human life. Both sides are culpable.   The only possible end to the conflict must surely lie in negotiations in which all concerned are prepared to compromise to restore the country to peace and allow Syrians – free from any foreign interference – to heal their wounds, bury their dead and rebuild their shattered country.

Just such an international conference has been planned for next month.  I prophesied in this blog that I thought it likely that Russia would be able to persuade the Syrian Government to attend in a spirit of compromise.  Our government's ability to persuade the rebels (a hotchpotch of liberal idealists, fanatical Muslim jihadists and known democracy-hating terrorists, many of them foreigners with no previous   association whatsoever with Syria) to send representatives ready to compromise and authorised to negotiate, would be another matter!

So it has proved.  The Syrian Government is prepared to attend the international conference with no preconditions.  By promising that President Assad would play no part in any future Syrian Government (I'd have thought that that was a decision that the Syrian people might have been allowed to decide in the ballot box?) our Foreign Secretary William Hague has persuaded some of the rebels to send representatives.  Others though, notably members and supporters of Al Qaida, are interested only in total victory no matter how many innocents are slaughtered to achieve it. If, miraculously, a compromise is reached and a new peaceful Syria emerges, I have little doubt that supporters of Al Qaida will continue their war of terrorism to try to undermine and destroy it.

Just one good thing does appear to be emerging from this appalling conflict.  The Head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, believes that the surrender and destruction of Syria’s stock-pile of chemical weapons will mean that the organisation’s objective;  a world free of these terrible means of killing fellow human beings, can and will be achieved in his lifetime.

If that is possible – then why should it not be possible to make progress towards achieving a world free of those even-more-terrible nuclear weapons?  At the moment we in the UK live in one of seven countries (but officially only six!) that possess these dreadful weapons of mass destruction. Do we really imagine that the citizens of for instance, Canada, Germany, Sweden and Japan sleep any less easily in their beds than we do because they don’t possess these so-called ultimate deterrents?  I hope, again for the sake of our grandchildren and great grandchildren, that it doesn’t take their use in some future conflict to persuade the world’s governments of the importance and urgency of banishing them for ever from our planet.

  Is the UK betraying Europe – for the CIA?         

The UK Government's deafening silence amid a chorus of indignation about the bugging of the phones of European leaders, while David Cameron reserves his condemnation for those who have revealed this practice, gives credence to the accusation that Britain's GCHQ has been assisting in the CIA's clandestine activities.  Imagine the outrage there would be if it were revealed that agents from 'Brussels' were listening in to the private conversations of David Cameron, George Osborne and William Hague!  How do we know that the CIA isn’t doing just that?  ‘We’ve been given assurances……. I’ve no doubt that if Angela Merkel had enquired six months ago, she’d have been given the same assurances.  There’s no honour among thieves or among spies  and not very much it seems, among politicians!

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Week 43 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

Our ‘free press’ and the politicians……. just who controls whom?

          I have been observing the current quarrel between ‘the press’ and all three main political parties with astonished fascination.  Our free press is, so its representatives insist, the envy of the civilised world.  It is the safeguard of our hard-earned freedoms and must be at all costs protected from interference by scheming politicians.  Ed Miliband’s recent protests against  the Daily Mail’s  vilification of  his father as an ‘enemy of Britain’ is, so it was claimed, an example of attempted interference; ‘Just what one might expect from the son of a committed Marxist’, was implied.

            I knew nothing about Ed Miliband’s dad until recently. However I now know that he was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who subsequently served on a destroyer in our Royal Navy, and took part in the D-day landings on the Normandy beaches. That surely speaks for itself.  I am old enough to remember that the Daily Mail in the 1930s supported the Nazis in Germany, and Hitler and Mussolini’s pal General Franco in Spain.  I remember too the Daily Express, a newspaper with a very similar outlook to that of the Mail assuring us throughout 1938 and the early part of 1939 that ‘There will be no war this year – or next year either!’ There really wasn’t much to be proud of in our ’free press’ in those days.

            With regard to the present concerns of ‘the press’, my own anxiety is almost the exact opposite of theirs.   Unless UKIP triumphs in the next General Election, I don’t really think there is the least possibility of our press coming under government control in any way comparable with that of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or the USSR.   What is a matter of concern is the way – often quite blatant – in which the owners of the press have manipulated and bent the minds and wills of our top politicians.

            I have little doubt that the credit/blame (delete as preferred) for the creation of New Labour lies as much with Rupert Murdoch as it does with Tony Blair and Lord Mandelson.   Remembering The Sun’s boast that, ‘It was the Sun wot done it’ when in 1992 persistent vilification of Neil Kinnock by that newspaper led to an unexpected defeat of the Labour Government, Tony Blair and a few of his colleagues moved the Labour Party’s policies far enough to the right to win the approval of the head of News International.  While Tony Blair was in control, the Sun supported New Labour. Rupert Murdoch acknowledges his own over-riding influence on the political outlook of The Sun, but claims that the editor of The Times has complete freedom of action.  No doubt, but the editor of that once-illustrious publication is well aware of the owner’s views and would be very foolish to ignore them.

            He who pays the piper calls the tune.  On a much more humble scale, I had complete freedom of action when I wrote Tendring Topics (in print) for the Coastal Express. No-one even dreamed of telling me what I could, and what I could not write.  However my awareness of the fact that adverts from Estate Agents and Used Car Salesmen kept the free weekly on the road, made sure that any criticism in my column of either occupation was very limited and discreet.

            Mrs Thatcher courted the good will of Rupert Murdoch and other senior figures in the News International Empire. So did Tony Blair and so, to a greater extent than either of them, did David Cameron and senior members of his government.  John Major was an honourable exception – and John Major suffered for it at the hands of the The Sun.  Of course there were no written agreements between any senior politician and the rulers of the press.  It was just that they were all good friends and the political leaders knew what their friends’ views were (on Europe for example, on immigration, on anything that might cause inconvenience to the extremely wealthy) and bore them in mind when formulating party or government policy.  They were also, of course, well aware of which policies would and which would not produce positive headlines in the Sun!

            It is sometimes claimed that the newspapers have little effect on the way that people vote.  I simply don’t believe this is true.  The newspapers do influence public opinion, and can do so without publishing a single word that isn’t true.  Out of the thousands of newsworthy events that occur every day, most are probably politically neutral.  Of the ones that aren’t, the editor who wishes to succeed in his profession gives those that support the owner’s views, headline and ‘feature article’ treatment.  News stories that oppose those views are either ignored altogether or tucked away half-way down an inside page.   When did you last read a positive story about the European Union, about Green Energy or about the contribution that immigrants make to our economy in the Sun, the Daily Mail or the Daily Express?   Remember that the Sun, arguably the most noxious of the three, has over seven million readers – the largest readership of any daily in the UK.   Of course a sizeable proportion of those seven million believe every word they read – and vote accordingly.   

            Lord Leveson in his report, touched on the way in which newspaper proprietors and their senior staff may influence politicians but, as far as I am aware, offered no solution. I don’t believe that very wealthy individuals, who need not even be British citizens, should be able to control such a powerful means of moulding public opinion. Perhaps a national newspaper or regional newspapers, could be run by an organisation similar to the BBC, which (since it is criticised from both the left and the right) probably gets the balance of its news bulletins and discussion programmes about right.

            I wouldn’t like to see national newspapers under the control of politicians.  But they are at least answerable to us at election time.  I would prefer that to their being controlled by a foreign cosmopolitan billionaire, who is answerable to no-one but himself and owes no loyalty to Britain or to British traditions and culture.

The British Red Cross Society

          A few months ago Ingrid Zeibig, a German friend of mine, sent me a photograph that brought vividly to the forefront of my mind events of nearly seventy years ago when I spent eighteen months as a prisoner of war in Italy, followed by a further eighteen months in Germany.  Particularly in Italy, where I was in a large POW Concentration Camp in northern Italy I learned what constant nagging hunger meant and what could be its consequences.

       
           Now, my doctor would probably tell me that I am overweight. Then my face fell in, my ribs protruded, and my weight fell day by hungry day. Scarcely a week passed without one of my fellow-prisoners dying of hunger related disease.  During that time we had the opportunity of having our photographs taken and sending home to our parents or wives.  My mum took one look at mine and tore it up.  She couldn’t bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow I had become. What kept us alive and never completely devoid of hope during that dreadful time, was the delivery to the camp of food parcels from the British, or sometimes the Canadian, Red Cross Society.  Each parcel contained tins of meat or fish, dried or condensed milk, margarine, a tin of jam or honey, tea or coffee, sugar and biscuits.  We were supposed to get one each, every week, but in Italy delivery was very spasmodic and sometimes we’d go for weeks without a parcel.  Then, when they arrived, the Italian guards insisted on opening each parcel and piercing every food tin so that its contents had to be consumed almost immediately.  We all believed that this was done out of spite and envy but, on reflection; I suppose it was to prevent our saving food to eat if we escaped!

           

There’s Ingrid with a genuine World War II Red Cross Food Parcel originally intended for a hungry POW!  I could practically see – and taste – the contents.

In Germany things for me (though by no means everyone had the same experience) were much better.  I was at a small working camp. Our guards weren’t bad chaps, our rations were better (they realized that they wouldn’t get much work out of us if we weren’t better fed!), the Red Cross parcels came regularly and were distributed unopened. And, of course, when you’re working with food, as we often were, you don’t go hungry!  I have tried always to support the British Red Cross and have often thought of those food parcels and how pleased we were to see them.  The photo that Ingrid sent me was of her with one of those parcels!  She was visiting Colditz Castle (now it seems to be a museum) with a friend, and the parcel – just as I remembered them from my POW days - was among the exhibits.

            I received that photo some months ago but I was reminded of it last week when I learned that the British Red Cross was again distributing food parcels to the hungry – but this time to the hungry in our own country. And Freedom from want was one of the ‘four freedoms’ for which we thought we were fighting in World War II! How shameful that one of the world’s wealthiest countries – that can afford to give tax hand-outs to its wealthiest citizens and patrol the world’s oceans with nuclear submarines - has an underclass that depends on Food Banks and Red Cross Parcels for survival, that this winter will have to decide whether to eat or heat, and spends its coppers ‘having fun’ with the national lottery in the forlorn hope of escaping from soul-destroying poverty to extreme wealth!

           And top politicians have the effrontery to claim that we’re all in this together!

           

             

           

           

             

Week 42 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

Syria – a Glimmer of Hope.

            Greek mythology has it that when Pandora opened the forbidden box (rather as, in Hebrew mythology, Eve ate the forbidden fruit) all the evils of the world escaped to plague mankind – greed, cruelty, hatred, death, famine and disease.   Right at the end, when the box had seemed to be empty, came hope – and, in the face of every disaster, hope has remained with humankind ever since.

            The Middle East and in particular Syria has had a surfeit of all those evils during the past two years.  Armed rebellion against the regime of President Assad, and the resistance to it of forces loyal to the President, have brought death and destruction on an unprecedented scale to that unhappy country.  Thousands have been killed or mutilated, thousands more – refugees from death and violence - have been rendered homeless and have sought shelter either in their own or neighbouring countries.  The situation has been made worse by foreign interference.  Britain, France and the USA have joined Saudi Arabia and other Arabian Peninsula states (unlikely champions of freedom, tolerance and democracy!) in supporting the rebels, while Russia and Iran support the Syrian government.  Surely non-one can possibly imagine that ‘victory’ for either side can justify the carnage and destruction of this Civil War made even worse by the use of chemical weapon attacks, for which both sides claim their opponents were responsible.

            The glimmer of hope appeared when, after a particularly appalling chemical weapons attack the USA, convinced that the Syrian Government had been responsible, threatened missile strikes on government targets.  The Syrian Government declared that they were not responsible for that outrage, but that they were prepared to surrender all their chemical weapons to the United Nations for destruction.  There was considerable scepticism in London and Washington about the genuineness of this offer – and anger from the rebels and their Arab (Sunni Muslim) allies who had hoped that missile strikes from the U.S. would give them a decisive advantage.

            But, confounding the sceptics, the Syrian government has given the United Nations’ inspectors all the access they demanded, and destruction of these dreadful weapons has begun.  The civil war with conventional weapons (and heaven knows they are terrible enough!) rages on, but the Russian Government is urging that both sides should be brought together at a Peace Conference to be held in November.

            There surely lies at least the hope of peace.  I have little doubt that the Russian Government will be able to coerce the Syrian Government into attending the Conference prepared to compromise, but will the rebels be ready to do the same?   They consist of a number of quite separate groups sometimes (so it is reported) fighting among themselves and with quite different objectives. Those enjoying the support of ‘the west’ believe they are fighting for a new democratic and tolerant secular state in which Sunni and Shia Muslims will live at peace with each other and with Christians.  It seems quite likely that they would be prepared to compromise to reach agreement with the Government in the interest of peace and reconciliation.

 How about the fervent jihadists, some of them members or supporters of Al Qaida? They are determined to turn Syria into their own kind of Muslim state enforcing their interpretation of Sharia law and tolerating neither ‘infidels’ nor Muslims of other traditions.  These are the people who massacred the Pakistani Christians in Peshawa; who shot sixteen year old Malala, the heroic Pakistani girl who campaigned for girls’ education; who punish ‘unchaste’ women by burying them to their waists and then throwing stones at them until a merciful death releases them. 

They may be in a minority among the rebels but I fear that because of their determination, their conviction that God is on their side, and their willingness to die (and to kill!) for their cause, their will is likely to prevail.  I wish I could imagine them reaching a compromise agreement with the Syrian government – and keeping it!

We can only hope – and pray.  The God revealed to us in Jesus Christ loves all his human children – Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists; even those who deny his existence.  I believe though that there may be just one human action, the ultimate blasphemy, that always provokes God’s wrath.  That is deliberately harming a fellow human being – and claiming that it is being done in his service!

             ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways’

                                                  John Greenleaf Whittier, 19^th Century American Poet and Quaker

A 21^st Century Heroine

          Mention of Pakistani teenager Malala above reminded me of the thought-provoking Panorama programme on BBC tv on Monday evening 7^th October, in which she and her family were interviewed about the attempted assassination that brought her to the front pages of the world’s press – and, thanks to British surgery, her almost miraculous recovery.

            I presume that English is not Malala’s first language yet this unassuming sixteen-year-old spoke fluently and eloquently in English of her campaign, in defiance of death threats, to be educated herself and to achieve education for girls world-wide.  To silence her, a Taliban assassin had boarded a school bus and shot her twice in the head.  Thanks to the fact that she had been immediately rushed to her local hospital and thence to Britain for extensive surgery she had lived to tell the tale.  Now, with the full support of her family, she  is determined to continue her campaign for girls to have the same right as boys to a proper education.

What a contrast between this Pakistani teenager who fought, and is fighting, against tremendous odds, for education for herself and others and the many British children who have to be bribed (sorry ‘offered incentives’) to get to school regularly, who do not value education for themselves and who, by disruptive behaviour, do their best to deny it to others!

Just the day after that Panorama programme we learned that a world-wide survey of standards of literacy and numeracy among young people between the ages of 16 and 24 had revealed that British young people within that age-group had come near the bottom!  How sad it is that oldies like me are not greatly surprised.

A Glad Farewell to Party Conferences

          I am glad that the political party conferences are over.  I find listening to top politicians, whichever party they support, is a depressing experience. One regular blog reader who emailed me after the Conservative Conference seemed even more angry than I was – perhaps he had paid more attention than me!

            ‘I really don’t think even Mrs Thatcher so skilfully turned public opinion against one minority after another, blaming each for our economic woes.  It has been the migrants, the not-so-disabled, the subsidised tenants, the ones with subsidised bedrooms, and now the 200,000 ‘life style choice’ claimants who have been unemployed for more than 2 years.  And each pronouncement has been lapped up by a willing public and press eager to find someone else to blame.  No attempt to explain how any of these issues could possibly have caused the economic crisis.  It is really easy to see how easily Hitler was able to use the same tactics to turn a nation against the Jews!  And there were the pre-conference announcements that “we don’t need to be at the forefront of green energy, and it is adding too much to fuel bills and – we are minded to block all future land wind farms” (which are actually the cheapest form of green energy), on the very day that the worlds scientific community warned of the consequences of climate change.

I felt that the Conferences of all three main parties reinforced my conviction that they really all have the same policy –  to get elected at all costs and to remain in office as long as they can persuade a gullible electorate to let them. Gone are the days of conviction politics – when political parties had fairly clearly defined final objectives and devoted their efforts to persuading the public that those objectives were desirable and attainable, and that they were the ones who could achieve them.  Nowadays not even the Mail and the Express ever refer to the Labour Party as Socialists.  Nor can the Conservatives claim to be ‘conservative’. Mrs Thatcher’s governments made more revolutionary changes to the British way of life than any of her predecessors or successors.  It was under her governments that we lost our manufacturing base and became reliant on ‘service industries’ (money lending, share juggling and the like), and the policy of wholesale privatisation began. Our efforts were to become directed towards satisfying the shareholders rather than serving the public.

An exception is sadly the one Party whose policies I believe to be totally mischievous and, if they were implemented, disastrous. UKIP has one principal aim; to get the UK out of the European Union.  It is obvious to me that the United Kingdom, on its own, cannot hope to compete or to co-operate effectively with other world political or economic blocs.  As an active part of a more closely integrated European Union we could do either or both.  Europe is the biggest recipient of our exports.  We are Europeans – geographically, historically and culturally.  Of course the EU is imperfect – but its imperfections are largely due to the determination of individual states to pursue their own short-term interests rather than those of Europe as a whole.  The EU is not some alien and hostile state.  We are an important part of it. We have helped to create it and make it what it is. We, if we summon the will to do so, can perfect it.  For all our sakes I pray that we will not fall for the Neo-Fascist nationalist charms of Nigel Farage and his disciples.  Their policies, including that of a rapid exit from Europe, are simply those of the ‘raving right’ of the Conservative Party.  If that is really what we want, I am glad that at 92 I am unlikely to have to live under the UKIP/Conservative coalition government that I can see on the not-so-distant horizon..

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Week 41 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

A Helping Hand

       

   It is a sad comment on today’s world (or perhaps on my state of mind!) that my heart sank when, responding to a ring on my front door bell, I found two personable young women smiling at me.  Were they hoping to sell me something, seek my financial support for some worthy cause; or try to persuade me to become a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness?   It was none of those things.  They were calling on me and my neighbours  to publicise the help that is available from our local Citizens’ Advice Bureau.  They gave me a flyer, reproduced here, giving contact details and the range of their service and – no doubt noticing I was leaning heavily on a stick! – assured me that if, when I needed help or advice, I couldn’t get to their office they would gladly send an adviser to my home.

            They also handed me a very useful little leaflet entitled Quick Guide to Welfare Reform which sets out the effects of the Government’s recent changes to Social and Welfare Services, how they may affect us and what we can do to help ourselves if we are affected. The leaflet tackles the replacement of Disability Living Allowance with Personal Independence Payments, as well as Social Fund Reform, Universal Credit (replacing a number of currently means-tested benefits) the Benefit Cap, the Bedroom Tax and Council Tax Benefit. In each case brief advice is given on ‘what can I do?’ to those affected.

            Supposing, for instance, you are currently receiving Disability Living Allowance and you get a letter (as, if you haven’t already had one, you undoubtedly will!) from the Department of Work and Pensions informing you that that allowance is coming to an end and asking if you want to claim Personal Independence Payments.  If you fail to claim PIP your payments will simply stop.  Your local Citizens Advice Bureau will help with your application for PIP, with appealing the decision if you are not awarded PIP, with finding out what other benefits may be affected and advising you on coping financially if you have a drop in income.

           

A Nation of Debters!

Nowadays practically everyone is burdened with debt to an extent that was unheard of in my pre-World War II childhood and youth.  In those days if you wanted something badly you ‘saved up for it’ perhaps for months or even years.  My parents had a horror of debt that, to some extent, they have passed on to me.  I remember them discussing far into the night whether or not to buy a radio (in those days it was a wireless set of course!) by hire purchase or, as my dad disparagingly described it, ‘on the never, never’.  They did decide to do so in the end!

            How very different things are today!  ‘Saving up’, was struck a mortal blow with the advent of the credit card.  Do you remember the posters advertising the very first ones?   ‘Barclaycard takes the waiting out of wanting!’  Daytime commercial television owes much of its finance to adverts for those easily obtainable (but less easily cleared!) payday loans – ‘Two or three hundred pounds till next payday – just to get you through a one-off crisis’.   But, of course, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to pay back the whole of that loan plus interest, on your next payday – and the interest will begin to accumulate!

            Then there are debts resulting from government policies.  Student loans, to pay tuition fees and living costs, can amount to £20,000 or more – a debt that can hang over former students’ heads for the whole of their working lives.   House purchase by means of a mortgage loan is strongly encouraged by the government that has the ideological aim of creating \a nation of home owners.  That may be the result in twenty or thirty years’ time.  In the meantime though it creates only a nation of home buyers – a nation of debtors, any one of whom could lose his or her job at any time, default on the mortgage payments and become homeless.

            It is no surprise therefore, to discover that debts are among the most common problems about which Citizens Advice Bureaux are consulted.  They can’t make debts disappear but they can help you to sort out your household budget and perhaps negotiate with your creditors to work out an acceptable way for you to deal with that debt burden.

            Debt is like a cancer.  The sooner it is caught, the more likely it is that there will be a happy ending.  The borrower should consult the local CAB before being ensnared by a loan shark or a payday loan provider.  If you live in the Tendring District phone the number on the flyer at the beginning of this blog.  I think I am right in saying that wherever you live in the United Kingdom there will be a CAB within a few miles.  I know that Tendring Topics….on line has readers in the USA, in Russia, in mainland China and elsewhere in Europe and the world. Debt is a universal scourge that ignores national borders.  I can only hope that there are similar services in their countries for those who need them..

A Housing Bubble?

            I have never pretended to understand economics.  I hope though that I have my fair share of common sense.  It is obvious to me that when the demand for an object or a service increases more rapidly than that service can expand or the objects can be supplied, the price of that service or those objects will rise.

            This is what happened with the housing market in the 1990s.   The demand for houses (spurred on by the political ambition of home ownership for all) outran the supply.   Thanks to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ legislation (that the New Labour Government had lacked the courage to repeal) there was no large stock of publicly owned homes to help keep rents down, so private landlords raised their rents as high as ‘the market’ permitted. The ethical principle of the 'free market'  is, of course, to get as much as you can grab for as little as you can get away with. 

            The demand for home ownership increased.  To encourage purchasers, banks and building societies were prepared to lend 95 percent of cost of house purchase – in some cases even 100 percent, with perhaps an additional loan for the purchase of furniture.  On day-time commercial tv, money-lenders touted for custom; ‘Never mind if you’re unemployed, disabled and have a low credit rating.  We may still be able to help you with a loan’.  ‘Then thrived the usurers’, as Shakespeare might well have put it had he lived at the end of the 20^th century instead of the 16^th!

            Inevitably the bubble burst.  Thousands were left with huge debts and homes that had lost their value overnight. Thousands were made homeless, having lost their homes (that they had thought they owned!) and their savings.  Banks and building societies had to seek government help and the government used our money to rescue them.  That – as the former governor of the Bank of England repeatedly told us – is the cause of the country’s financial problems.  It wasn’t the poor, the unemployed and the disabled who produced the financial crisis from which the government is now trying to extricate us, but the banks and the money lenders aided and abetted by a business friendly government.

Once bitten, twice shy.  The money-lenders, having been rescued with our money, were determined not to be caught out again.  There was still a demand for homes – still no great reserve of social housing to keep rents at a reasonable level.   Interest rates have been kept artificially low but lenders could sieve out risky borrowers by demanding a much larger deposit than in the past before agreeing to a mortgage.  Often twenty-five percent or even more of the purchase price was demanded.

Is history about to repeat itself?  When the government first announced their help-with-the-deposit scheme that guaranteed all but five percent of the deposit on a mortgage, I commented in this blog that the demand for homes ‘at affordable prices’ would now outstrip the supply. Those ‘free market forces’ that are so popular in government circles would ensure that  house prices would rise – perhaps as another bubble expanding to bursting point?   Since then the Institute of Directors, the Institute of Chartered Surveyors and the national Chambers of Commerce are among those who have warned of the same danger. 

Has the government heeded?  Not a bit of it.  They have expanded the scheme to include the purchase of existing houses as well as new-builds and at the recent Conservative Party Conference it was announced that the scheme would begin immediately instead of in a year’s time as had been earlier announced.  It does of course need the co-operation of the Banks and Building Societies. Only Lloyds and RBS (over both of which the government can exercise direct control) have so far agreed to take part. In the meantime, house prices are rising.  I suppose that, as a home owner with my mortgage long since paid off, I should be pleased. I’m not!

           

Week 40 2013

Tendring Topics………on Line

 Redundant Royals?

          I am sorry that Prince William is giving up his job as a search and rescue helicopter pilot with the RAF.  It was a thoroughly worth-while occupation and he seemed to enjoy doing it. How splendid, I thought, that a senior member of the Royal Family should be in the armed forces, but saving lives rather than threatening them. I’d have thought it was much more satisfying, and more socially useful, than trotting round the country – or the Commonwealth – cutting ribbons, shaking hands and making anodyne speeches.

            Sadly, government policy would soon have snatched that job from him even had he had wished to continue with it.  Obsessed with the doctrinaire conviction that every function carried out by a public authority will be better and more efficiently performed by private enterprise, the government is discontinuing the air-sea rescue service that has been carried out by the RAF and out-sourcing it to a private firm.

            Air-sea rescue, the Royal Mail; what next I wonder?   If the government cuts too deeply into the public services and privatises too many of their activities they could find themselves in serious trouble.   Do you remember when the private sector let us down over security at last year's Olympics or when, a few years earlier, a food-animal epidemic produced a problem the solution of which was beyond the private sector’s capability? On both occasions they urgently needed the public sector’s expertise, loyalty and co-operation. To solve a similar problem in the future they may find that there’s no public sector left on which they can fall back!

            Even Mrs Thatcher, the great evangelist of privatisation, drew the line at selling off the Queen’s head by privatising the Royal Mail.  Having passed that hurdle I’m only surprised that Messrs Cameron, Osborne and co haven’t yet had the idea of completing the job by privatising the monarchy.  News International could surely put in a successful tender.  They’d make the institution productive, profitable and cost effective – and produce satisfying dividends for their shareholders.  They’ve already had unrivalled experience of manipulating the mighty and bending the minds of top politicians.  The reign of King Rupert the First would undoubtedly be remembered as the one in which the United Kingdom really became a land fit for cosmopolitan billionaires to prosper in.

 Tough about the fate of the former Royal Family – and the rest of us!

A Freeze on Fuel Prices?

          Goodness – it was rash of Ed Miliband to promise to freeze fuel prices for a fixed period, two years in advance of the possibility of his being able to fulfil it. Despite national efforts to develop sources of sustainable energy, oil and gas originating from countries that are notoriously unstable and unreliable seem likely to be our main sources of energy for the foreseeable future.   If he should succeed, say the furious fuel companies, he is risking power failures and blackouts. Is that a forecast I wonder – or a threat?

            I warmed to the idea just a little when I learned that Lord Mandelson was strongly opposed to it.  He, you’ll recall, was one of the architects of New Labour and is remembered for his comment that he, ‘had no problem with billionaires’.  I am one of the many who think that in a country where thousands are depending on Food Banks and charitable-giving to survive, he should have a problem with them.

            A regular blog reader suggests a couple of ideas that might have gone into Ed Miliband’s speech if he really wants to prevent the poorer members of our society having to choose between eating and heating:

What would be a good and realistic thing to do is to ban energy companies from charging extra for pre-paid meters. These are almost entirely used by poor families with debt problems who live in low-cost privately rented homes, bedsits for example.  The price difference they have to endure is really quite significant. If this involved any extra cost it would be much fairer for all consumers to share it..

 A more imaginative policy would be to force energy companies to introduce a price structure in which the first xx Kilowatts were very cheap but after that the more fuel was used, the more  would be its cost per unit. This would make it possible for poor (and frugal) people to stay warm at lower cost, while those who were trying to heat six bedroomed mansions and a swimming pool would find it very expensive and be encouraged to put solar panels on the roof

Well, why not?

A Closer look at Clacton-on-Sea’s Sea Front.

          Regular readers of this blog will know that old age and arthritis have crippled me (or, to use a politically correct euphemism, ‘have severely reduced my mobility’).  Without my electric mobility scooter – my iron horse – I would be housebound.  With it I can visit local friends, go to church and to our Quaker Meeting and do my shopping.  For longer journeys I am dependent on the kindness of my family and friends to give me a lift in their cars.  I very much appreciate these occasional outings but, of course, when we reach our destination and the car is parked, I can still hobble only a few yards, leaning heavily on my stick and preferably with a supportive arm!

Pete and I (on my ‘iron pony’) on Clacton Pier        

Pete and Andy, my two always-thoughtful sons, found a solution. Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene visited me on Saturday 21^st September.  In the boot of Pete’s car was an easily-assembled mini mobility scooter – an iron pony – that he and Andy had bought for my use!  Pete drove us to Marine Parade West and parked his car with the help of my ‘blue disabled badge’.  Then, in a matter of minutes, he assembled the mini-scooter, and we set out on a journey of exploration.  We went down the slope at Pier Gap and onto the pier itself.  Riding my new steed was an exciting experience.  The controls were almost the same as those on my trusted ‘iron horse’ but everything (except of course me!) was on a much smaller scale.

It had been years since any one of the three of us had had a chance to explore the pier thoroughly – although we had received very enthusiastic reports from the younger guests at my birthday celebration in May. They had visited the pier after the celebratory lunch.  We were pleased and just a little surprised, to see that there were plenty of visitors of all ages enjoying themselves despite the fact that schools had re-opened and we were nearing the end of September.  There was plenty of noise and bustle.  Pete said it reminded him of the pier iu Clacton’s glory days in the ‘60s and ‘70s when Clacton had thronged with visitors during the holiday period.  He was particularly pleased to see the Steel Stella, the Helter Skelter and the Dodgems, as well as other newer rides.  We went to the end of the pier and surveyed the wind-farm, and the restaurant with its huge glass windows looking out over the ocean.

          

On Clacton Pier - Steel Stella and Helter Skelter

          Having explored the pier we thought that we’d take a  stroll along the lower prom towards the Martello Tower and the Coaches Car Park.  I can’t remember when I had last made that once-familiar journey.  Looking back, Pete was particularly pleased to see the silhouette of the pier with its Steel Stella, Helter Skelter and other buildings, looking exactly as he remembered the pier of his childhood.  Along the prom he and Arlene were impressed with the new brightly coloured beach huts and the lively (graffiti style) mural decorations on the nearby wall.

 

Brightly coloured beach hut and wall painting

. We walked back (well, I rode my iron pony of course) through the cliff-top gardens.  My visitors and I were exhausted but we had enjoyed ourselves.  Despite all the bad press reports and the whingeing letters in the local papers, Clacton-on-Sea has all that is needed for a bright future – sandy and safe beaches, a reborn and prospering pier, colourful cliff-top gardens, and a rainfall and sunshine record as good as  any holiday resort in the UK – and much better than most!  Tendring Council’s top priority should be to make that known to the world!

I am now looking forward to a visit from son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn on 12th October. Perhaps my new 'iron pony' will have another outing!