Tendring Topics……..on line
‘Call the
Midwife!’
This
is said to be a ‘temporary arrangement’ but we suspicious Clactonians suspect
that it’s one of those ‘temporary
arrangements’ that go on for longer than expected – until, in fact,
everyone comes to accept them and it is then decided to make them permanent. `
No-one
likes to see a local service closed down and local people compelled to go
further to a larger more distant centre, but the nature of the maternity
service and the geographical situation of both Clacton and Harwich make it
doubly undesirable in our Tendring district. A glance at a large-scale map of
south-eastern East Anglia will make it clear that the Tendring peninsula is
almost-an-island bounded by the estuaries of the rivers Stour and Colne, a
relatively narrow isthmus extending from Colchester to Manningtree, and a wide
length of coastline with the port of Harwich/Parkeston and the popular holiday
seaside resorts of Dovercourt, Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton-on-Sea,
Holland-on-Sea, Clacton-on-Sea, Jaywick Sands, St Osyth and Brightingsea.
The
only road access is through that
Colchester/Manningtree isthmus from which highways fan out to serve resorts
which attract motorists from London, the Midlands and the whole of East Anglia
to their safe, sandy beaches, seaside holiday attractions – and the lowest
average annual rainfall in the United Kingdom! It follows that throughout all the summer and
at weekends in the spring and autumn (particularly bank holiday weekends) those
roads are often clogged up with holiday traffic, sometimes reduced to a snail’s
pace by sheer numbers, or by the occasional road accident.
Tough
on the mother in labour, perhaps with her first baby, stuck in a traffic jam
somewhere between Clacton – or Harwich – and Colchester ! I don’t suppose that the time-and-motion
experts who calculated that under ‘normal circumstances’ neither journey should
take much more than half an hour, even thought about that. Babies in a hurry to be born know nothing
about normal circumstances, holiday traffic or traffic jams.
I’m
not surprised that Clactonians have protested, marched and demonstrated against
this stupid and thoughtless decision of the hospital authorities. Why though were there two almost identical
marches with two lots of protesters?
The Saturday march was the Conservative march, organised and led by Conervative
Tendring District Council. The Sunday
march was the Labour march and was organised by the local Labour Party and led by
the prospective Labour candidate Tim Young..
The closure of Clacton and Harwich’s
maternity units is not a political issue.
Gilbert and Sullivan wrote in one of their comic operas ‘Every little man-child that is born alive is
either a little Liberal or a little Conservative’. Luckily they don’t know that and, luckily
or not, nowadays it isn’t only male babies involved, nor is it limited to just
two parties.
I
think it a great pity that the two main parties hadn’t got together for a
united protest march, thus demonstrating that compassion and common sense
aren’t the sole prerogative of one party, and that they can unite when the
occasion demands it. They might have
persuaded some of the others to join in – the Lib-Dems, the Greens and the Ukippers
(I’m sure they’re convinced that it’s all the fault of ‘Brussels ’) might well have joined them!
Those Market Forces
I don’t like
living in a society with an economy reliant on Market Forces. I believe that co-operation is better than competition,
that we shouldn’t all be trying to get as much as we can for as little as we
can get away with, and that we shouldn’t need to follow the advice to ‘shop around’
and change our power supplier, our banker, our savings account, whenever it may
seem that it would pay us to do so. Old people - and there are a lot of us in this area - don't like unnecessary change. The
cheapest is rarely the best and the supplier or the banker may change his
charges as soon as you put your phone down. In the 17th and 18th
century Quaker businessmen – grocers, brewers, bankers, manufacturers – made
their fortunes by declining to yield to market forces. They bought in or made the products they
sold, added just sufficient to make themselves a reasonable living and stuck to
that price and to that quality of goods.
Quaker businesses may not always have sold the cheapest goods but
customers could be quite sure that they hadn’t been watered down or
adulterated, that the price wouldn’t be put up if there were to be a sudden shortage
and that there would be no hidden ‘extra
charges’. That policy benefited both
the buyer and the seller.
Oscar
Wilde once defined a cynic as someone who
knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The ethics of the market place have made
us a nation of cynics. We’re interested
only in prices. The only ‘value’ market
traders recognise is the highest price that goods or services can command at
any given time ‘in the open market’. A
diamond ring commands a higher price than a shovel (though there are situations
in which a shovel could save your life and a diamond ring would have no value
whatsoever), and a merchant banker (a money lender) can demand a higher price
for his services than a brain surgeon!
Market
prices depend upon supply and demand.
Increase the demand for any desirable product without increasing its
supply will raise that product’s price as surely as night follows day.
It
was this axiom that made me predict confidently in this blog that the
government’s help to buy scheme for
would-be house buyers would have the effect of raising house prices. You will recall that a major factor in the
creation of the financial crisis from which we hope we are now emerging, was
the unwise lending of large sums of money for the purchase of homes. Because there were not enough homes for
hopeful would-be purchasers to buy, the price went up…and up, until it toppled
over.
Many
house-buyers had taken on a debt they couldn’t hope to pay off. Hundreds were rendered homeless and lenders
were left with bad debts that could have rendered them bankrupt had the
government not bailed them out – with our money!
Determined
not to make the same mistake again, banks and building societies increased the
deposit they required from would-be buyers to as much as 25 percent of the
price of the property, effectively putting home ownership out of the reach of
most first-time buyers. However David
Cameron and George Osborne, determined to pursue the chimera of ‘a nation of
home-owners’ introduced their ‘help to buy’ scheme which offered an additional
loan to help with that deposit so that the initial sum required by the
house-purchaser would be no more than 5 percent of the price of the property.
This
has had two totally predictable effects. Demand for homes once more greatly
exceeds supply and – as I had foreseen – house prices are again rising well
ahead of general inflation. The other
effect is that the government has, by guaranteeing most of the required deposit, taken on a debt that the professional money lenders had thought was too risky –
and, without consulting the electorate – has done so with taxpayers’
money! This has clearly worried the
professionals and they are now asking would-be borrowers a series of very
intrusive questions before they will arrange a mortgage. ‘How much do they
spend on holidays, on dining out, on alcohol, on entertaining, on children’s education and other financial
commitments, and how they would manage their mortgage repayments if – or rather
when - interest rates rise?
The
best response? It’s surely to accept
that home ownership is not everybody’s obvious choice. Repeal the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation and
encourage local authorities to build homes for letting as they did for a
century before the advent of Margaret Thatcher – and allow those same
authorities to allocate those homes as they think best. In a word; to restore some of the democratic local
decision making that is an important aspect of the ‘localism’ to
which the government pays lip-service but has been systematically destroying
since taking office.
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