March 2015

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day thou canst not then be false to any man’

            In Shakespeare’s Hamlet that was part of the advice that Polonius, a Danish courtier, gave to his son Laertes before the latter embarked on a trip to England, then a distant perilous country, full of temptations and pitfalls for a visiting young Dane with money in his pocket. 

 If Nick Clegg had heeded that advice five years ago I think it very unlikely that his Party would now be facing the possibility of humiliation in the coming General Election.  The Liberal Democrats didn’t really have to be junior partners in a very unequal coalition.  They could have let David Cameron form a minority government promising to support it for as long as it was possible to do so without breaking pledges that they had made to the electorate.

            But he allowed the promise of the empty title of Deputy Prime Minister and two or three Ministerial jobs for a few of his lieutenants to lure him into a coalition and – very shortly afterwards – to break spectacularly the pledge he had made to the electorate  about University Tuition fees.

            Before the last General Election I don’t recall that anyone expected it to result in a hung Parliament and an unequal Conservative/Lib.Dem. coalition.  This time two other parties, the Ukippers and the Greens are serious contenders nationwide and in Scotland the Scottish National Party will almost certainly overturn Labour’s domination of the electoral scene.  Few expect either of the two main parties to achieve an overall majority in the House of Commons. If we are again to have a coalition government which parties will coalesce to form one?

            Nick Clegg appears to be confident that the Liberal-Democrats will again hold the balance and have the choice between coalition with the Conservatives or Labour.  The opinion polls suggest otherwise and so, for what it’s worth, do I.   Since the Lib-Dems, in government, broke promises that they made to the electorate before the last election why should we imagine they’ll be any different now?  I voted for them then but they certainly won’t get my vote in May.  I’m not alone!

            In Scotland the SNP has come on in leaps and bounds since the referendum.   Nicola Sturgeon, their present Leader, seems to be a worthy successor of Alex Salmond. The Tories are evidently fearful that they will have sufficient successful election candidates to join a coalition with Labour and form a government. Many Labour hopefuls fear the same. Well, they certainly brought that possibility onto themselves.  If at the time of the referendum they had been a bit less enthusiastic about preserving the United Kingdom intact there would now be no Scottish MPs at Westminster.   Both Ed Miliband and Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, have said that there will be no such coalition but, of course, politicians don’t believe other politicians’ promises any more than the rest of us do!     

            If there are a substantial number of Scottish MPs I think it likely that they’ll do what the Lib.Dems. should have done last time; support a minority government for as long as its policies are acceptable to them but try to amend or defeat them when they are not.   They won’t get any seats in the government that way but ‘What profiteth it a man (or a political party) to gain the whole world – and lose his soul?’

            A much more sinister, and I fear more likely, outcome of the General Election could be that UKIP will form a coalition with a minority Conservative government, with Nigel Farage as Deputy PM and several Ukip MPs (almost certainly our own turn-coat MP Douglas Carswell would be among them) in senior government posts. The flamboyant and charismatic Nigel Farage would soon outshine the present PM and the Chancellor in the public eye, and probably in the eyes of a substantial number of hard-line Tory MPs.  Farage’s career has, so far, mirrored that of Adolf Hitler in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.  I fear a future in which he acquired real power.

            But it may well be that all these anxieties and hopes are groundless.  Such is our first-past-the-post electoral system that perhaps, to everyone’s surprise, either the Conservative or the Labour Party will secure a commanding majority and rule the country for the next five years.  If that is so then I can confidently predict  the future outcome:  Britain’s future will not be anything like as happy and as prosperous as supporters of the ruling party promise – but neither will it be quite as disastrous as opponents of that ruling party fear.

            In May I fully intend to vote for the Green Party candidate.  The Greens won’t form a government and it’s unlikely that they’ll be asked to take part in any coalition.  In my own Clacton-on-Sea constituency it’s very improbable that, with our present first-past-the-post electoral system, the Green Candidate will be elected.  I may help him save his deposit though (the Greens rely on the support of its thousands of members.  Unlike other parties, they have neither multimillionaires nor trade unions financing them), and nationally I will add to the number of Green voters.  ‘This above all’ I shall be being true to myself and voting for a party whose policies I wholeheartedly endorse; a party that really does want to make Britain and the world a better place for this and future generations.

            My vote will not be wasted!

           

A Spendthrift’s Charter?

            I have sometimes wondered if the present government likes having a large proportion of the UKs population in debt.  Perhaps it makes the failure of their policies to reduce the national debt substantially, seem less important.  There are student loans, for instance;. I understand that increases in tuition fees result in some students leaving their colleges with a debt burden of as much as £40,000!  Then, of course, the Government’s obsession with home ownership has made sure that thousands of home buyers will owe thousands of pounds to banks or building societies for the whole of their working lifetimes..

            The latest encouragement to financial irresponsibility is making it possible for those who put aside a percentage of their income every month to provide themselves with a pension on retirement, can now withdraw the money at any time from their ‘pension pot’ and use it as they think best.  The hope is presumably that they will re-invest the money to enrich themselves and to help keep the wheels of industry turning.

            It will surprise me if at least some of those pension investors, with the opportunity to get a considerable sum of money into their bank accounts will say, ‘Blow provision for retirement.  Let’s go on a cruise to the Bahamas.  We’ll worry about “tomorrow” when it comes1’

            I’m glad that I was never able to withdraw cash from the ‘pension pot’ into which I paid 6 percent of my salary for most of my working life.  I wouldn’t have squandered it on a spending spree but, when my wife was diagnosed with pulmonary and laryngial TB, I’d have been sorely tempted to withdraw any money I had saved in the hope of buying her better, speedier treatment.   Perhaps (or perhaps not!) in that way I might have bought my wife a speedier recovery; might even have spared her the major surgery that saved her life but left her with a permanent disability.

            There’s no ‘perhaps’ though about the fact that, without an adequate pension, our sixties and seventies would have been much less comfortable, less worry-free and much less pleasurable.  And now that I am in my nineties and have been a widower for nearly nine years, I would be a poverty-stricken housebound cripple without the pension that has provided me with a warm and comfortable home and, among many other things, my mobility scooter and the lap-top on which I am writing these words. Thanks to that pension I am able to remember generously the birthdays of my young great-nieces and great nephew (I have yet to acquire any great grand-children), and to offer visiting family and friends hospitality in a local licensed restaurant!  As some-one once remarked, 'money can't buy happiness, but it can help you to be miserable in comfort!'

 I daren’t think how miserable and bad tempered I’d be without all those things!  I’d advise anybody – ‘However much you may be tempted never imperil your retirement pension. You will live to regret having done so.  It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll make your fortune by gambling on the Stock Exchange – and even less likely that you’ll make it on the National Lottery!’

The Budget

Regular blog readers will know that my idea of a good Budget is one that narrows the yawning gap between the incomes of the very richest and the very poorest people in the UK.   A bad Budget is one that widens that gap.  It follows that it is a long, long time since I have experienced a good Budget and that the one revealed by George Osborne on 18^th March was more blatantly robbing the poor and enriching the wealthy than most.

The threshold of income at which tax becomes liable has been raised.  That means that some low-paid workers will no longer have to pay tax and that every single payer of income tax (including the very wealthy) will benefit.  Those who won’t benefit are the really poor, whose incomes are too low to be taxable.  They will, of course, continue to pay indirect taxes such as VAT and excise duties like those on petrol, alcohol and tobacco.   But that’s not all – the level of liability to pay the higher rate of income tax has also been raised, even higher.  Thus those whom most of us would consider to be very wealthy will receive a double hand-out. Meanwhile, there are to be even more cuts in the  funding of benefits and of public services, which will most  affect the very poor.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the news reports was that I didn’t hear a word of protest from Ed Miliband about this particular aspect of the Budget.