Week 45 2013

Tendring Topics………..on line

'.........and from the easy speeches that comfort cruel men'

              As far as I know G.K.Chesterton, Edwardian author and poet and creator of the Father Brown detective stories, wrote only one hymn.  In it he asks for divine deliverance from, 'Lies of tongue and pen, and from the easy speeches that comfort cruel men'.

           At the end of the political party conference season an angry blog reader wrote bitterly to me about the way various groups had been singled out and falsely demonised at one of the conferences, as responsible for  all our economic woes - the long-term unemployed, the allegedly not-so-disabled, occupiers of under-occupied social housing, people living on ‘benefit, young people neither at school nor in work, illegal immigrants, legal EU immigrants, and so on……and on. 

            More recently we’ve had another scapegoat to explain whose fault it is that it’s so difficult to make an appointment to see your family doctor, why hospital wards are understaffed and why accident and emergency patients, needing immediate attention, sometimes may have to wait for hours to get attention.  It’s nothing to do with hospitals having had to downsize their nursing and medical staff to meet government economic targets.  Of course it isn’t!  It’s all those foreigners – health tourists – who come to Britain with the sole purpose of exploiting our free National Health Service. They go home directly they’ve had expensive treatment that we have paid for with our taxes.

            An official government report claimed that the NHS is spending up to £2 billion a year on ‘foreign visitors and short-term migrants’ and £300 million of that figure is spent on ‘health tourists’.  Health Minister Jeremy Hunt said that we couldn’t afford to run an ‘international health service’ and that less than 50 percent of chargeable foreign nationals are identified.  Funny thing – like most old people I’ve spent quite a lot of time in doctors’ and hospital waiting rooms in the past year or so, and the only obvious ‘foreigners’ I’ve encountered (and have been pleased to see!) have been the foreign doctors who make up for the fact that we’re no longer training enough professionals each year for those jobs.

            Needless to say Clacton’s Europhobic and climate-change-denying MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, has leapt onto the populist bandwagon.  Having read reports in the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph that ‘an EU study has found that 600,000 unemployed migrants are living in Britain at a cost of £1.5 billion to the NHS alone’, he claimed that ‘a wave of benefit migrants….a tsunami of economic refugees’ are causing a huge burden on the NHS.

            None of the allegations are true.  Evidence from the London School of Tropical Medicine and the University of York, quoting research commissioned by  the government itself, showed that, contrary to Jeremy Hunt’s claims, twice as many foreign visitors pay to use the NHS as exploit free health care and that the UK is a net exporter of patients seeking treatment.    Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Social and Economic Research claims that evidence shows that EU migrants, like migrants in general, on average pay in more than they take out.

            You’d never dream, from the allegations of the Health Minister and a sycophantic press that British visitors to mainland Europe (health tourists?)  enjoy exactly the same privileges when visiting other EU countries as other EU citizens enjoy in Britain.  During the past seven years I have visited mainland Europe on nine or ten occasions, staying for several days in Belgium and in Germany and visiting five other countries that are members of the EU, and one non-EU country. Always in my wallet I have carried my small plastic European Health Insurance Card (they’re free, and you can get an application form for one from any post office) that throughout the EU entitles me to exactly the same medical treatment as any citizen of the country I am in.

            I am fortunate in that I have never needed to use that card, but its possession has allowed me to visit countries in mainland Europe without taking out the very expensive (at my age!) health insurance that would be prudent if I were visiting the USA or any other Non-EU country.  Nor should it be assumed that health provision in other European countries is necessarily inferior to that in our own.  My grandson Nick,  founder and Managing Director of an international tourism publicity consultancy, spends a great deal of time in Brussels.  He has used the Belgian health service on a number of occasions and he tells me that, although different, it is in no way inferior to ours.

            Access to the whole of Europe’s health services is, of course, one of the privileges we would automatically lose if, in any future referendum, a majority of us were stupid enough to vote to leave the European Union.

‘Fair’s Fair!’ – but what is ‘Fair’?

          I never for one moment imagined that in any confrontation between our elected Members of Parliament and representatives of the energy suppliers I would find myself agreeing with an argument of the energy suppliers.  I do believe though that one of their contentions – that the cost of the government’s ‘green energy’ measures should be drawn from general taxation, rather than from the fuel bills of energy users – is wise and reasonable.

            I would however urge that it should be funded from income tax rather than from VAT and customs duties on alcohol, tobacco, petrol and the like. VAT, customs duties and fuel bill add-ons are ‘indirect taxes’ which take no account of ability to pay.  The multi-millionaire filling the tank of his Rolls Royce (or getting his chauffeur to do it!) pays exactly the same price and the same amount of tax for his petrol as the agricultural labourer filling that of his battered second-hand Ford.  Obviously that tax is a far greater proportion of the farm labourer’s income than is that of the multi-millionaire.  Income tax is a ‘direct tax’ that does something to restore that balance – and could do much more if the tax was really calculated as a fixed proportion of every adult’s income.

            There are clearly two opposing views of what is and what is not ‘fair’.  The Chancellor and his supporters consider that it is ‘fair’ for everyone, rich and poor alike to pay more-or-less the same amount towards the provision of services for the whole community such as the NHS, Social Security, policing, refuse collection and so on.  Indirect taxes help to secure this. ‘The rich man in his castle’ pays in VAT exactly the same amount as ‘the poor man at his gate’ for his purchase of goods or services, or in excise duty when he fills his car or buys himself ‘a pint or a wee dram’.  Thus the  chancellor and those who agree with him are able to claim with absolute sincerity that the tax system is fair and that ‘we are all in this together’.

            I believe that our contribution towards services that benefit the whole community should not be regarded as an imposition, but paid with patriotic pride as our annual fee for the privilege of  British citizenship.  This annual payment, the equivalent of today's 'income tax', should be levied on every British adult, rich or poor as a percentage of his or her gross annual income (before any of it can be diverted to 'charitable trusts' or off-shore tax havens!)   The percentage required would be calculated annually.  I can only guess what it would be but I’d be surprised if would be much in excess of 25 percent.   Only thus would we become a ‘fair’ community in which every paid-up citizen had a financial stake. Then we would truly be able to say that, We’re all in this together!’

The Great Storm!

            A remarkable feature of the storm that lashed southern and central England on Monday morning 28^th October was the accuracy with which it had been forecast by the Meteorological Office.  For almost a week we had been told of its approach, the time of its arrival and its predicted path across the southern half of our country.  We were advised about the amount of damage likely to be sustained, the possibility of local flooding,  trees being uprooted, structural damage and interruption of electricity supplies, road traffic and rail services.  The forecasts were correct in every respect. Possibly because of that, only four deaths attributable to the storm were reported nationally. In Clacton-on-Sea trees were uprooted and there was some structural damage to property but – as usually happens – we suffered rather less than most of southern England.          

The Helter-Skelter – before the storm.

The most spectacular – and nationally reported – damage that we sustained was to Clacton Pier where the Helter Skelter was blown over and severely damaged.  Once before, in 1956, a similar storm had uprooted trees, damaged buildings, blown the Helter Skelter into the sea and sunk pleasure boats moored off the beach.  I remember it particularly because at that time the Council’s public health inspectors, of whom I was one, were responsible for recording and reporting details of each day’s weather to the Met. Office – and preparing a brief local weather forecast to be displayed early each morning on a notice board near Pier Gap  and the memorial garden. Any member of the public sufficiently determined and physically strong enough to struggle against the howling gale to the notice board on that particular morning would have read ‘Sunny intervals, risk of rain at times, breezy’