Week 1 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Seeing the Old Year out and the New Year in!

            I wish all blog readers a very Happy New Year of peace and hope.  2013 was, so the top politicians will undoubtedly say, the year in which the UK finally began its recovery from the financial crisis that has been crippling us.  The political leaders of the government lose no opportunity of blaming the crisis on the profligacy of its predecessors. However the recently retired Governor of the Bank of England, who was surely in the best position to know, made it clear that it was in fact the greed and incompetence of the Bankers (political supporters of the present government) that was responsible.

            I think that he was probably correct – but that doesn’t mean that the previous government was blameless.  They should have spotted what was happening and re-introduced the curbs and restrictions on the bankers that had been abolished by their predecessors to free them for their task of wealth creation.  In fact it freed them to feather their own nests and to ruin the country.  An earlier Labour Prime Minister is said to have been ‘dazzled by duchesses’.  Tony Blair and his associates were blinded by billionaires!

            It certainly is good news that economic recovery is beginning, that output is increasing and that there are fewer unemployed.  It’s a pretty hollow recovery though when thousands of those who are in work are also officially ‘in poverty’, when money-lenders and the gambling ‘industry’  are thriving, thousands are homeless, and the fastest growing activity in England’s green and pleasant land is the establishment of food banks where charitable giving prevents the poor from actually starving to death, and ‘Crisis at Christmas’ takes a few hundred rough sleepers off the streets and – for a couple of days – gives them a tantalising glimpse of something approaching normality. 

            It seems quite likely that there will have been a ‘consumer boom’ in the few weeks running up to Christmas with tills in the local shops ringing merrily and ‘on line’ shopping flourishing as never before.  How much of that mini-boom has been funded by borrowed money – credit cards stretched to their maximum and pay-day loans making sure that the kids weren’t disappointed on Christmas morning and that there was plenty on the table later in the day?  The next few weeks will be the time of reckoning when creditors will demand that those debts be repaid – with interest.  For many it will be a far from happy New Year.

            I believe that our country will never truly prosper until it has narrowed the ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the poor; until the proportion of the income of the wealthy that is paid in income tax is the equivalent of the proportion of their income paid by the poor in indirect taxation – VAT and customs duties.  Until that happens it is simply untrue to claim that the ‘benefit system’ means that the poor are being subsidised by the wealthy.  On the contrary it is the pennies of the poor that make it possible for the wealthy to live in luxury.

            I am fully convinced that the government’s principal source of revenue should be an income tax set at a percentage  of each citizen’s gross income, before he or she has a chance to siphon it off into offshore tax havens or ‘charitable trusts’.

            There’s nothing particularly revolutionary in the idea that taxation should be by a percentage of income rather than a fixed sum.  The medieval church demanded ‘one tenth’ (a tithe) of its members’ income.  That’s probably why tithes were so unpopular with land owners and prosperous farmers!  In the public services, and I think in much of the private sector too, pay rises are a percentage of the employee’s current pay.   That’s how it is that, certainly in local government, a chief executive may claim proudly that his two percent pay rise was exactly the same as that of the most humble clerk.  Two percent of £100,000 is a considerable sum of money. Two percent of the minimum wage is a pittance.

            If pay rises are given in percentages, thus widening the gap between poor and wealthy with every pay increase, why should not income tax be levied on exactly the same principal to narrow that gap?   

Four times is more than coincidence!

            I am not a James Bond fan.  I have never read a James Bond novel, nor have I ever watched a James Bond film.  However there can be few of us who don’t know that James Bond prefers his cocktails ‘shaken but not stirred’ (can anyone really tell the difference?).   Perhaps slightly less well known is his comment when misfortunes befall him that ‘Once is happenchance, twice could be coincidence, but three times means enemy action’.

            Well, during December 2013 we have, not just  three but four times, experienced winter storms that have swept in from the Atlantic with 60, 70, 80 mph gusts of wind that have uprooted trees, brought down power lines cutting off electricity supplies, turned over high-sided vehicles and damaged buildings.  Torrential rain has brought flooding (some householders have had their homes flooded again and again) and the storm that occurred during the first week of December was accompanied by a tidal surge of the same magnitude as the one in 1953 that had brought death and devastation to many communities along the east coast.  The fact that there were no fatal casualties this time is attributable to improved sea defences, the efficiency of local authorities in evacuating threatened areas and providing temporary accommodation for those displaced, and above all perhaps, to the accuracy of the Meteorological Office’s weather forecasts.

            Four damaging storms in one month in temperate Britain (a phenomenon that has never occurred before in my nearly 93 years) - and the winter of 2013/2014 has only just begun!  Surely that – coupled with unseasonable hurricanes and snow storms in the USA, uncontrollable bush fires in an even-hotter-than-usual Australian summer, and the most destructive cyclone ever recorded devastating the Philippines, should  be enough to make even the most stubborn sceptic (our own Clacton MP for instance) accept that potentially catastrophic climate change is taking place and should be the very first concern of every government in the world!

A Family Christmas Celebration            

               

                                   Christmas Family Lunch – Double Tree Hotel, Cambridge, 25.12.2013

My family and I were extremely lucky over the Christmas period. A damaging storm kept me awake most of the night before Christmas Eve. By morning the wind had dropped and in the early afternoon my elder son drove me to Cambridge where I stayed, with eight members of my immediate family, in the Double Tree Hotel beside the River Cam.  Christmas Day was calm and sunny.  We did a little tour of Cambridge’s grey-stone colleges and of the river on which, many years earlier, I had enjoyed punting.  We later had a convivial traditional Christmas lunch at the hotel.  Boxing Day morning was again calm and sunny and in the afternoon I was driven back to Clacton-on-Sea and home!  It had been a very happy family occasion.

Heather and I punting on the Cam in the summer of 1975.  Just to remind blog readers – and myself  – that I haven’t always been a decrepit old man!

I can’t forget though that while we were enjoying ourselves in a comfortable hotel and returning to our warm and comfortable homes, thousands of fellow Brits were, some for the second or third time, refugees from flooded homes or were trying to survive a miserable Christmas in icy cold homes with no electric power for lighting, heating or cooking.

            It is surely time for our politicians to stop worrying about what may happen in the future and concentrate on the climatic disaster that is threatening us - and the whole world -  now!