Week 5 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

 The Blame Game

 

            I find it painful even to imagine what it must have been like over Christmas for the families whose electricity supply was cut off for day after day.  It made me realize how very much my life relies upon a dependable electricity supply.  I have a gas central heating and hot water supply system but they have electric controls.  My water heating is supplemented by a solar panel that has its own photo-electric cell to operate the circulating pump – but there’s little enough sunshine for water heating or for the solar pump on a succession of dark and dismal winter days!   I need electricity for lighting, for cooking, even for heating a kettle for a cup of tea; for charging the batteries of my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) without which I would be completely housebound, for operating my tv and radio, and for keeping this laptop  (on which I write my weekly blog and communicate with my far-flung family and friends)  operational!  At 92, without electricity I would just have to climb into bed, pile blankets on top of me and hope to hibernate until the lights and the power came on again.

 

                 I can remember a time when we were not as dependent upon electricity as we are today.  In 1926, when I was five years old, my mum, dad and I moved into a newly-built terraced house in Ipswich with no electricity.  Space heating was by coal fires, lighting was by gas and there was a gas cooker (with a wonderful new gadget, a ‘regulo’ thermostat, to control the heat of the oven!) and a copper gas-fired boiler provided hot water for the weekly ‘washing day’ and ‘bath night’!  We had a battery operated ‘wireless set’ with a ‘dry battery’ and a ‘wet battery’ or ‘accumulator’ that had to be charged, at a local garage, weekly.  A few years after we moved in, mains electricity was installed – but for a few lighting points only.  My mother used to speak enviously about wealthier acquaintances with ‘all electric’ homes.

 

            No – I don’t yearn for the ‘good old days’ – but in the ‘20s and ‘30s we certainly didn’t have to worry about power cuts!   Nowadays most of us don’t have to worry about them very often, but they are devastating when they do occur – and when they happen over the Christmas period they are that much the worse.  I’m not surprised that our Prime Minister had a less than friendly reception when he visited a much-flooded and power-cut-stricken area in the New Year.

 

            Why was it that so many households were without power for several days?  This is what the power company bosses were asked when they faced a committee of hostile MPs a week or so ago.  It was hardly surprising.  No doubt the memory of those days is already beginning to fade, but at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014 Britain was buffeted by storm after damaging storm and drenched by heavy rain day after day, for weeks at a time. The engineers who had to restore electricity supplies to those cut-off homes had to work round the clock in appalling and often dangerous conditions.  It shouldn’t be forgotten either, that power supplies and their maintenance are now the responsibility of private firms, driven by market forces.  Their first responsibility is not serving the public but satisfying the shareholders – many of whom don’t even live in the UK.  Like all private enterprises they have been forced to cut their workforce to make it cost-effective under normal circumstances – which inevitably means it is inadequate to deal effectively with abnormal circumstances such as we have experienced in recent weeks.

 

            Then again, the government has received warning after warning from scientists world-wide about climatic change, largely the result of human activity, producing extreme weather conditions throughout the world. This isn’t just something that may happen in the near future.  It is happening now – and, thanks to tv and modern information technology – we are seeing it happen. Still the political response is half-hearted and inadequate.  I am not an unqualified admirer of modern China, which seems to me to exhibit some of the nastier features of both communist and capitalist societies.  The Chinese government though, does seem to have appreciated the reality and importance of climate change, and of humankind’s responsibility for it. They are seeking and exploiting renewable sources of energy and are, for instance, building hundreds of wind turbines throughout their vast territories.

 

            Our government’s response so far has been to impose cuts on the Environment Agency, cut back on its ‘green’ programme, and encourage ‘fracking’!  I wish that I thought that any probable alternative government would be materially better – or even materially different.  What Britain needs is not reform – but a revolution of ideas and values; not more competition but more co-operation, an end to the ‘bonus culture’ (ultimately far more noxious than the 'benefit culture' that worries members of the government so much!) and to the notion that humans are motivated only by greed and fear.

 

The Face on a Coin

 

              Almost daily my laptop brings me messages urging me to support this, that or the other campaign by joining with others in ‘signing’ a petition, writing a protest letter or passing on the appeal to a friend.

   Some I simply ignore – like the one I received asking me to urge that some councillor, a member of UKIP, should be sacked because he had announced his conviction that the recent storms and floods were a divine punishment for the government’s recent approval of ‘gay marriages’.  Well, daft as that idea is – I don’t find it much, if any, dafter than the idea that UKIP will solve all, or even any, of Britain’s problems.

 

           A campaign that I do wholeheartedly support is that of commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of World War I by issuing  a £2.00 coin bearing a replica of the bust of Nurse Edith Cavell, a true heroine of the ‘Great War’. She was a British nurse (a Norfolk girl as it happens) working in a hospital treating the wounded of all nationalities in German-occupied Belgium. She was arrested, court-martialled and summarily shot in 1915 for helping wounded allied POWs to escape to neutral Holland.  The official intention is to issue such a coin with a replica of a recruiting poster used in World War I with a bust of General Lord Kitchener with pointing finger urging potential recruits that Your Country needs you!

 

Edith Cavell’s best remembered words are ‘I realize that patriotism is not enough.  I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone’.  Surely in the centenary year of the outbreak of ‘The Great War’ this is a much more appropriate message to the world than that of a General urging others to sacrifice themselves on the killing-fields of Flanders..

 

 

 

 

More or Less

 

We are now over three weeks into the New Year and I have realized that something is missing from the news-media scene!   Whatever happened to all those planes and coaches full of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants whom we were told would be flooding into Britain to demand our homes and jobs and to take advantage of our health and social services directly the barriers came down on 1^st January?   I am sure that the Sun the Express and the Mail would have told us all about them had they arrived.  One or two did turn up by air on New Year’s Day and received a VIP welcome, including a hand-shake from a concerned MP.

 

 We have since learned that not only has there been no flood of east European immigrants but there were no applicants for jobs in Britain that had been advertised in Romania and Bulgaria. A Romanian spokesman said that Germany and not the UK was the favoured destination of those of his compatriots who wanted to move to other parts of the EU.  I hesitate to say I told you so because my guess was no better informed than that of the editors of the Europhobic press. I was right though and I do feel justified in saying that I’m not surprised.

 

Not being brilliant at mathematics, I listen with fascinated admiration to More or Less on BBC Radio 4 from 4.30 pm till 5.00 pm on Friday afternoons.   Researchers for this programme check figures about pay, unemployment, crime, hospital appointments and so on, made by politicians or in popular newspapers and sent in by Radio 4 listeners..  They usually prove the claims to be false or exaggerated and I have never yet heard the accuracy of the findings of the More or Less researchers questioned.

 

Last week they investigated claims that immigrants to this country were an added financial strain on our economy, and counter-claims that they brought more to our finances than they claimed back.  One or the other had to be right!   More or Less discovered that migrants from other EU countries (those are the ones to whom we cannot bar entry and about whom the UKIP-friendly press gets so indignant!) do pay more to us in tax and other charges than they withdraw in ‘benefits’. Clearly we should welcome them.

 

 

 

              

Week 4 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

The Prime Minister’s Choice

          In last week’s blog I said that the Prime Minister’s reaction to the increasingly clear evidence of global catastrophe resulting from accelerating world-wide climate change would tell us whether he really was a far-sighted statesman determined to pull his country, and lead the world, back from the abyss – or whether he is just another  politician whose vision doesn’t extend beyond the next general election..

            I fully expected to have to wait a few weeks for the answer – but it was made clear even before my blog had been posted on the internet!   No – the Prime Minister isn’t going to redouble efforts to reduce our national dependence on the fossil fuels that are producing catastrophic weather conditions across the globe, and to set an example to other industrialised nations to do the same.  On the contrary, he is proposing to bribe local authorities into permitting ‘fracking’ in their areas, and is telling us that these operations will result in the creation of thousands of jobs, cheaper gas and oil and less dependence on our  obtaining these fuels from the world’s political  trouble spots.

            Those local authorities that accept the bribe won’t have to cut their budgets as severely as they had expected and we can, so the Prime Minister claims, all hope for less expensive fuel and a marked further reduction in the number of unemployed.   That should be worth a few thousand votes in the next election.  When Mr Cameron decided to opt for the political alternative he certainly did so in style!

            Will fracking threaten our water supplies and produce the mini-earthquakes that its opponents prophecy?  Possibly not, if the operators carefully follow every recommended safety precaution.  However  since the products of successful fracking are fossil fuels, one thing that their use certainly will do is increase the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and thus accelerate even further the climatic change that is threatening us all.

            A feature of the fracking operation about which I heard for the first time on the tv news this (13^th January) evening is that profitable production from a ‘fracking well’ lasts only four years.   It then becomes necessary to sink another well elsewhere.  That no doubt accounts for the fact that I have seen aerial photographs of considerable areas of the USA reduced to an industrial desert by fracking operations.  That – as well as the possibility of cheap fuel, a reduction in the unemployment figures, and increasingly extreme weather – is something to which we can look forward in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’.   That’s the kind of prospect that makes me feel quite glad that my ninety-third birthday approaches!

Gove’s War

          I have to confess that Michael Gove is one member of the government for whom I have, on occasion, felt just a little sympathy.  I think, as he evidently does, that there is something wrong with our educational system and it seems to me that some of his ideas, although they are greeted with derision by most of the teaching profession, have merit in them. 

            However I have often been glad that Mr Gove is not concerned with foreign affairs or with the armed forces.   He must surely be one of the few people in the UK/in Europe/in the world, who can look at the Middle East and still believe that the invasion of Iraq (for which the infamous Bush/Blair axis secured parliamentary approval only by deception) was a ‘good thing’ and has resulted in a better and more peaceful world.   Tell that to any member of Iraq’s Christian community. They were tolerated and influential in Saddam Hussein’s time, but now, like most Christians in Muslim-majority countries, they are living constantly under threat and seeking refuge elsewhere when they can.  Tell that too, to Shia Muslims living in Sunni areas and vice versa.  El Qaida, which prior to our ill-conceived and illegal invasion, scarcely had a foothold in Iraq, now flourishes!

This war memorial, to the fallen of the American ‘Rainbow Division’ catches something of the pathos and tragedy of World War I    

Now, during the centenary year of the outbreak of World War I, Michael Gove urges us to ‘celebrate’ what used to be called ‘the Great War’ and to ignore the ‘left wing intellectuals’ who claim that it was a flagrant and appalling squandering of human life engineered by scheming politicians and made worse by incompetent military commanders driving (but never leading!) masses of unwilling soldiery like sheep to the slaughter.  One doesn’t have to be left-wing or particularly intellectual to accept the remembered testimony of those, now no longer with us, who fought in and survived that war – and the evidence of the World War I cemeteries and war memorials in northern France  and Flanders.

            Probably the most famous war memorial in mainland Europe is the Menin Gate outside Ypres, the only Belgian town that was never under German control during World War I, where some of the bloodiest battles of that war were fought.  Completed in 1927 the Memorial was intended to bear the names of the British and Commonwealth soldiers who were known to have been killed in those battles but whose bodies had  never been found. There were 55,000 such soldiers and, huge as the Menin Gate memorial is, there was found to be insufficient space for 55,000 names. Consequently the Menin Gate has the names of only some 35,000 names and the others are memorialised elsewhere!

            Poet, author and war hero Siegfried Sassoon* (he was awarded the M.C. Military Cross* for his conspicuous gallantry) wrote of the Menin Gate,

Well may the dead, who struggled in the slime,

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

            I reckon that if Siegfried Sassoon were alive today he would say much the same about the  ‘celebration’ of the centenary of the outbreak of World War I.  I and other ex-servicemen survived World War II because military commanders in that war were less careless of human life than their predecessors had been just over two decades earlier.

           

I hope that we will remember the outbreak of World War I with repentance for human folly and wickedness and determination never again to be deceived by scheming politicians into the wholesale slaughter of our fellow men and women. As for Michael Gove – a Biggles Omnibus and a few ancient copies of The Boys own Paper should keep him happy.   Let us hope that he is never in a position to realize his dreams of military glory.

            *Siegfried Sassoon was a volunteer infantry officer who became aware of the criminal waste of human life in World War I and subsequently became a peace campaigner.  His paternal ancestors had been Iraqi Jews and he owed his German Christian name to his gentile mother’s love of Wagner’s music. He was undoubtedly recklessly courageous and was known as ‘Mad Jack’ as a result.  It has been said that OBE sometimes stands for ‘Other B………. Efforts’.  No-one has ever been awarded an M.C. for any efforts other than his or her own.

           

Calling all (or any!) local blog readers

            Such are the wonders of modern technology that I can be pretty confident that there are over 2,000 regular readers of this blog world-wide.  I know that I have many readers in the USA and in Russia as well as in the UK, readers in Germany, Poland, Bosnia and the Ukraine and even a few in India, in mainland China and Vietnam. What I don’t know is whether I have many local readers, from southern East Anglia – in particular from north-east Essex and southern Suffolk.

            I know that I have one or two because they have contacted me – but perhaps that’s the lot.  We have it on the very best of authority that a prophet it less likely to be honoured in his own neighbourhood and among his own people than further afield!  This particular item is especially for all – or any – local blog readers.

            On Sunday 12^th January, BBC tv’s Countryfile programme invited viewers to contact them if they felt that a Countryfile programme might possibly be made in their particular area.  These programmes cover local farming but also most other rural activities and interests – particularly where there is local controversy,  such as the tourist development of Dedham Vale for instance.

Bridge Cottage, Flatford Mill         

I have emailed them suggesting the Suffolk/Essex border area; the countryside that inspired Constable and Gainsborough, from Sudbury through Dedham, Flatford Mill and Manningtree to historic Harwich, home of the Mayflower.  Then there’s the rich agricultural land of the almost-an-island Tendring Peninsula, with Walton Backwaters – scene of one of Arthur Ransome’s children’s novels and, on the outskirts, Colchester, England’s oldest recorded town as well as, on the Essex 'sunshine coast', no less than five coastal holiday resorts, each with its own character but all having safe, clean, sandy beaches, ‘all the fun of the fair’ for those who want it and the lowest average annual rainfall in the British Isles;  all easily accessible from London!

                                   The home of the Master of the Mayflower in Harwich        

  I am quite sure that a visit from the Countryfile team and a programme featuring the Essex/Suffolk border would enhance the economy of the whole area and bring us welcome holiday visitors.  Why not respond to the Countryfile appeal and suggest a visit to our region?  Emails should go to countryfile@bbc.co.uk   If you have any photographs of the area send them as attachments.   To my own email I attached a photo of Bridge Cottage, Flatford Mill, and one of the Harwich home of the Master of the Mayflower. Here they are!

           

           

Week 3 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

Climatic Change

          A fortnight ago I commented in this blog that four damaging storms in the one month of December were more than just coincidence.  I had no doubt that they were part of a world-wide pattern resulting from global warming and climatic change.  If the New Year has brought in any change it has been a change for the worse.  Cornwall and Wales have had an almost continuous battering by wind and sea for day after day.

There have been deaths and flooding both from the surging sea and from drenching rain falling on already sodden ground.   The Somerset Levels have filled with flood water and supplies have  had to be taken by boat to some inland communities.  Meanwhile, a blast of Arctic Air is producing polar conditions through Canada and the northern half of the USA with hospitals having to deal not only with hypothermia but frostbite!  Temperatures lower than those at the South Pole have been recorded! Our tidal surges, damaging gales and floods are just a small part of a global problem.

            This had all been foreseen.  As I pointed out in my blog; The signal fires of warning, they blaze but none regard.  And so through night to morning, the earth spins ruinward’.  A Cambridge University professor, interviewed on tv explained that as long ago as the 1980s, scientists had warned the world’s governments that climatic change, largely the result of human activity, would produce extreme weather conditions world-wide – and so it has.  Desperately trying not to appear to criticise the government, the professor said that of course the prime minister and chancellor had wider economic issues to consider. He did regret though that they had found it necessary to cut the grant to the Environmental Agency, striving to alleviate some of the worst effects of these extreme conditions.  A much-travelled Blog reader, on his way to Cornwall on business, sent me this email:

This kind of weather is exactly as predicted in my Climate Change booklet I got from the UN in Geneva.

Flooding and Wind disasters have gone up around the world massively in the last 10 years, and are set to continue to get worse as there is more and more heat energy in the atmosphere.

But your MP thinks it’s all a load of rubbish! Let’s hope his home is flooded out.

Well, I do try to avoid having such uncharitable thoughts about our MP and I don’t think it at all likely that either of his comfortable homes will be flooded.  I do wonder though if he has now considered the possibility that the Australian authority on whom he based his climate-change-denial might just possibly have been wrong and virtually all other scientific opinion right.

Whatever else our Prime Minister may be, he is certainly neither stupid nor ignorant (though his grasp of 20^th century history sometimes seems to be a bit shaky!)  I have no doubt that he is well aware of the accelerating effects of climate change and of the urgent need for all nations in the world to work together to counter them.  However he is constrained by the need to hold his Party (which has its fair share of ‘neanderthalers’) together, to keep on the right side of the millionaires who control the popular press, and to do nothing to imperil his Party’s chances in the now-not-so-distant General Election.   Today (8^th January) he has publicly conceded that the extreme weather we are experiencing may be the result of global warming.  The next few weeks could make it clear whether David Cameron really is a great statesman with his country’s, and the world’s, interests at heart – or whether he is just another successful politician.

Our Iron (hearted?) Chancellor

            I do wish that George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, could manage to have a less self-satisfied smile on his face as he tells us that, despite the growing economy and falling jobless figures, we’ll have to endure increasing austerity for two years after the next general election.  This will involve making further billions of pounds of savings, a large proportion of which will have to come from ‘welfare’. His previous forecasts have been mostly wrong so we can always hope that this one will be too – not least with regard in the assumption that he’ll still be chancellor after the next election.

Once again the poor (they’re the ones who’ll be affected by cuts in the welfare budget) will be the ones to suffer.   The lengths to which Mr Osborne will go to prevent the really wealthy from experiencing even the slightest inconvenience is really astonishing.   You’ll recall that one of his early acts as Chancellor was to reduce the tax payable by those liable for the highest rate of income tax.  That’s people with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year (roughly £2,885 per week!)   I am tired of hearing the oft-repeated tale that if the government dares to ask the wealthy to pay the same proportion of their income in tax as the poor, they’d simply up sticks and leave the UK.

                                                                           

Let them go if they want to; but I suggest that those who care so little for their native land that they’ll live abroad rather than pay their fair share of meeting its financial needs, should automatically lose their British citizenship – which would be restored to them only after they had paid the income tax for which they were due.

Here are some ideas to raise a few extra million (or possibly billion) pounds that, unlike his austerity measures, would make no-one homeless or unable to feed their family or buy them the necessities of life:

Restore that extra payment on the highest band of income tax and reduce the level of liability for that tax from £150,000 to £100,000 a year, a figure that is much more than twice the average income in the UK. This is surely a very moderate and reasonable suggestion.

Make all universal state benefits liable for income tax. Those, like myself, with a supplementary pension from our former employment, already pay tax on our state retirement pension, so why shouldn’t we pay it on winter fuel allowance, attendance allowance, free tv licences, free bus passes and so on?  This would mean my paying a little more income tax  for my fuel allowance, attendance allowance (paid because of my limited mobility), and tv licence – but it wouldn’t seriously impair my living standard.   Others might have to pay rather more but folk whose income was so low that they were not liable to pay income tax would be unaffected.

How much those two measures would raise for the exchequer I don’t know. They would, of course, raise much more if we had a properly graded income tax system in which we all paid a percentage of our gross income in tax.  However much or however little it raised, it would make those with low or average incomes (those hard-working taxpayers top politicians are always on about!) feel that perhaps we are all in this together and the whole thing isn’t just a ‘Robin Hood in reverse’ conspiracy to rob the poor and give to the rich, as it seems to be at present.

‘What’s in a name?’

            ……..asked love-sick Juliet Capulet in what is probably Shakespeare’s best-known play.  There can be quite a lot, as our Clacton MP Douglas Carswell may have found out when he invited readers of his Newsletter to describe him in two words.  I wonder what he was hoping for – Clacton’s Crusader, the People’s Voice, Brussels’ Scourge perhaps?   I wonder if they were among those that he received.

            Hardly surprisingly, his request was greeted with derision by his opponents. Norman Jacobs, described in the Clacton Gazette as a ‘respected historian and Labour supporter’ said that the two words that came to his mind were ‘diddly’ and ‘squat’, words that had been used together by former Tendring Council leader Peter Halliday to describe his opinion of Mr Carswell’s contribution to the town.  I have been acquainted with Norman Jacobs for some years, often supporting his point of view – sometimes opposing it.  I really believe that he could have done better than that – and I wondered if I could.  Stringing words together into a readable narrative is the only real skill I have ever possessed.  Could I summarise our MP’s qualities in just two words?

            The two characteristics that come to my mind whenever Douglas Carswell’s name is mentioned are his fervent Europhobia and his conviction that, if climatic change is taking place, it is part of a natural cycle and nothing whatsoever to do with human activities.  It follows that all this business about finding renewable sources of energy and reducing the ‘greenhouse gases’ in the atmosphere is waste of time and money.

             ‘Climate change denying Europhobe’ uses twice as many words as those requested in Douglas Carswell’s invitation.  Then it came to me – I’m not really sure if it is one word or two but it certainly sums up succinctly my view of our MP.  How about Crypto-Ukipper,* a Conservative MP who prefers Nigel Farage’s outlook to that of David Cameron?

* Ukipper is pronounced You-kipper. You won’t find it in any dictionary yet, but give it a year or two………

           

             

           

Week 2 2014

Tendring Topics……….on line

The Politicising of Local Government

          One of the saddest developments that I saw during my thirty-three years in the local government service was its gradual politicising.  Mostly I have worked with small authorities.  My first two years, prior to World War II, were with Ipswich County Borough Council (nowadays it would be called a unitary authority) but my position then, as a junior clerk/trainee sanitary inspector, was so lowly and insignificant that I gave no thought to the councillors and chief officers.

            After the war I qualified as a sanitary inspector (later to be redesignated public health inspector and ultimately, after my retirement, as environmental health officer) and obtained a post with the Gipping Rural District Council, a very rural area in East Suffolk, just north of Ipswich.  In 1955 my family and I (by that time my wife and I had one son) moved to the Clacton area for me to work for the Tendring Rural District Council, an almost equally rural district adjacent to Clacton and taking up the greater part of the area of the Tendring Peninsula.  After a year (and the birth of another son!) we moved to my present home in Clacton and I became a public health inspector there, but later was appointed as the Council’s Housing Manager.   Clacton Urban District was another quite small authority comprising the town and holiday resort of Clacton-on-Sea and its seaside suburbs of Jaywick Sands and Holland-on-Sea.

            During my years working for rural authorities in Suffolk and Essex and for a small urban authority in Essex, I was scarcely aware of the political complexion of my employers.  A majority of Gipping Rural District councillors were either farmers or parsons.  Most declared themselves to be Independent and represented only the interest of the local community that had elected them. There were, I think, just two Labour councillors.  The vicar of Needham Market also declared himself to be independent but he made no secret of his socialist political convictions and his very ‘high church’ (Anglo-Catholic) theological outlook. He was deeply loved by his mostly-conservative congregation who voted him back with a comfortable majority at every council election.    The farmers and other members of the clergy probably voted Conservative in national election but I am quite sure that when they considered the local matters that came to their attention they, and the Labour members and Needham Market’s eccentric priest, all genuinely considered them on their merits without giving any thought to national politics.

            I never really got to know the Tendring Rural and Clacton Councillors as I knew those in Suffolk but I have no reason to believe that they were materially different. In those days and in small authorities, a political label was just an indication of the general philosophy of the councillor.  I am quite sure they would all have been shocked if they had been told they were expected to stick loyally to ‘a party line’. I do know that, for the year immediately preceding local government reorganisation in 1974 the overwhelmingly Conservative Tendring Rural District councillors chose as their chairman, Derek Crosfield, a well-known local Quaker and an active member of the Labour Party. I know too that throughout the time I was in their employment the strongly Conservative Clacton Urban District Council refused to sell off their council houses, though they encouraged and supported tenants who bought their own home, thus leaving a council house available for letting.

            Sadly, all that changed in 1974.  Harwich Borough Council, Frinton and Walton, Brightlingsea, and Clacton Urban District Councils and Tendring Rural District Council were abolished and replaced by a single Tendring District Council with a population in the vicinity of 100,000.   Five smallish authorities with very little in common beyond their geographical situation within the Tendring Peninsula became one large authority

1973 was a very worrying time for local government employees.  I had hoped to get the job of Director of Housing for the new district.  I didn’t.  It went to the Housing Manager of the Tendring Rural District.  I could, I suppose, have tried for the job of Deputy Director (probably on a higher salary than I was on as Clacton’s Housing Manager!).  Or I could have reverted to my original job of Public Health Inspector.  Neither possibility appealed to me.  Luckily the new Council wanted a Public Relations Officer.  I had by that time acquired a great deal of successful experience of both spare-time freelance journalism and public speaking.  I knew much more about journalism than most local government officials and much more about local government than most journalists.  I got the job;  not nearly as high a salary as ‘Director of Housing’ but much more enjoyable and satisfying!

            With reorganisation came politicisation.   The Government had decreed that all Council Committee Meetings and meetings of the full Council must be open to the press and public – so that members of the public could see every moment of the decision-making procedure.  It sounds wonderful, but it didn’t happen like that. Politics suddenly became all-important.  The majority party held private meetings (they were ‘unofficial’ and therefore allowed) to discuss every aspect of the Council’s functions and the agenda of every forthcoming committee meeting.  Recommendations were agreed at these meetings and any committee members who had reservations about them were expected to toe the party line.  Similarly, when the Committee report and recommendations came to the full Council, members of the majority party were expected to support them loyally.  Thus decisions affecting the whole of the district could be – and often were – made not by a majority of the members of the Council but by a majority of the ‘majority party’, which certainly was not necessarily a majority of the whole Council.

            Even that didn’t satisfy central government’s desire to make every council chamber a mini-House of Commons.  Councils were to be reorganised and were given two choices.  The first, and government-preferred, option was to have a directly elected Mayor – like the Mayor of London, who has executive authority only partially checked by a ‘London Assembly’ with ‘scrutiny powers’.   We hear a great deal about the activities and opinions of London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, but I haven’t heard a whisper of the activities of the London Assembly.

            The other alternative, adopted by the great majority of local authorities, was to have a small executive ‘cabinet’ of the ‘majority party’ to decide the policies of the local authority and to get them ’rubber stamped’ at Meetings of the full Council.  Thus, decisions were made by a majority of an even smaller group of councillors, and party members were expected to endorse them.   We now have a Council resembling the House of Commons with a ‘government’ an ‘opposition’ ‘three line whips’ and all the other parliamentary nonsense!  Even more sinister in my opinion, has been the relegation of the Council Chairman or Mayor to a merely ceremonial role while  real power and authority lie in the hands of the Council’s political ‘leader’, usually the senior member of the Majority Party.  I am reminded of the situation in pre-war Nazi Germany when, parallel with existing forms of local government, there was always a Nazi Gauleiter to keep them on the ‘right path’.  Similarly in the Soviet Union every local Soviet (or council) had its political commissar to ensure compliance with the wishes of the Supreme Soviet.

Victims of Politicising

            The end of the year brought two Essex victims of politicising onto the front pages of at least the local and regional newspapers.   One for whom I have the greatest sympathy is Peter Halliday, former leader of Tendring Council.   He was a working builder who believed in fairness, straight talking and straight dealing.  He clearly wanted to serve the local community, became an active member of the local Conservative Party (though I don’t think he would ever have been described by the late Lady Thatcher as ‘one of us’)  was elected to the Tendring Council, became leader of the Conservative majority group and thus political Leader of the Tendring District Council.  

            Early in December he resigned from the leadership and from his membership of the Council.   He had evidently found himself being urged to put Party interests before what he considered to be those of the local community and could endure it no longer.  He did not depart gracefully and discreetly but very angrily and with all sorts of allegations against former colleagues. He was a very obvious victim of politicising.

Lord Hanningfield

            Veteran readers of Tendring Topics, who remember my strongly worded criticisms of Lord Hanningfield when he was Leader of the Essex County Council, may find it astonishing that I should regard him as one of the victims of politicising.  I criticised his enthusiasm for expensive schemes remote from the statutory duties of a county council (there was the County Council Bank that nobody wanted and the Essex County Council branch in mainland China to boost Essex exports), for his wildly expensive  globe-trotting (with compliant councillors and senior officials)  to every corner of the world ostensibly to encourage exports, his eagerness to claim credit for any good the County Council did while passing the blame further down the line .  He once remarked that Essex could be an independent state; only joking of course, but there’s little doubt as to whom his Lordship had in mind for that state’s  President.

            Pride comes before a fall – and Lord Hanningfield’s fall was spectaculr.  He was convicted of fraud in his role as a member of the House of Lords and was given a remarkably short prison sentence of which, for reasons that are beyond my understanding, he served only a few weeks.  

            He was also suspected of fraudulently claiming expenses in connection with his leadership of the Essex County Council and was briefly under arrest in connection with an investigation into these allegations.   However no action was taken about this not, so I understand, because Lord Hanningfield was very obviously ‘not guilty’ but because of the difficulty of distinguishing between justified and unjustified expenses.

Most people in Lord Hanningfield’s position would simply have been thankful and have kept a low profile – but not his Lordship.  He sued the Essex Police for wrongful arrest and obtained substantial damages! Unabashed, he resumed his attendance at the House of Lords. This got him into further trouble. A few weeks before Christmas 2013 a newspaper revealed that for most of his visits to the House of Lords, for each one of which he had claimed £300 'attendance allowance', he had spent less than forty minutes there!

            How, you may ask, can he possibly be considered ‘a victim’ of politicising? He clearly has done very nicely out of it.  Quite so – financially; but exposure as a fraudster, a spell (even though brief) in prison and finding himself the subject of humiliating exposure in the popular press, must have been deeply painful experiences. On earlier interviews broadcast on tv he has appeared well dressed and smart but not so on his latest interview.  I thought he looked unkempt, his beard looking more like one whose wearer 'couldn’t bother to shave’ than one that had been neatly trimmed. I felt sorry for him.  I know, from my own experience, how easy it can be for an elderly man, living alone, to ‘let himself go’; something I am determined not to do!

            I believe that none of this would have happened had not Essex County Council been so thoroughly politicised. Had other members of the County Council not felt that they owed a debt to Party Unity he would never have been allowed to get away with his expensive jaunts abroad, his lavish hospitality (with our money) and his use of a County Council car and driver to take him to and from the House of Lords.

            It would certainly be easier to sympathise with him in his present plight if he were to show the slightest degree of regret and remorse – but he doesn't.  Lord Hanningfield is convinced that he has only done what everyone else was doing and that he has been unfairly picked on.  Of the latest revelations regarding his  brief attendances at the House of Lords to claim his £300 allowance’, he says that he has done nothing wrong, it is just ‘a storm in a teacup’ and that instead of concentrating on his alleged peccadilloes we should be thinking of his many years of service to the community.

            And I have little doubt that if his elevation to the peerage and the politicising of local government, hadn't put into his hands the power that corrupts, that is just what we would  have been doing.