Blog date 32

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘Now is the hour…..

                          …….for me to say goodbye’

 

            Those were the opening words of a popular song of the wartime years when there were so many goodbyes, many of them for ever.   I am afraid, dear Blog readers, that time has come for what was my weekly blog.  Google informs me that I have been writing and publishing it for seven and a half years and that I have written and published 390 blogs in that time.   For the first three or four years I wrote an average of about 2,000 words per blog.  More recently I have reduced that to about 1,000.  I reckon that I averaged about 1,200 words a week for seven and a half years.  That’s 7.5 x 1,200 x 52.  No, I’m not going to work it out but it certainly comes to quite a lot of words.

            Also thanks to Google, I learn that my blog has a world-wide readership.  There are twice as many regular readers in the USA as there are in the UK.  I have regular readers in Germany, France and Russia, and occasional readers in virtually every European country and in such countries as China, India, Sri Lanka, and Japan.  Thank you all, dear readers, for your interest and encouragement.

            I used always to enjoy writing my blog and was proud of it. Lately though I feel that I have become stale and repetitive.  I find myself forgetting how to spell simple, straight-forward words.  I often have to refer to Google for facts that should be – and once were! – engraved in my memory.  It is, I think, just old age. Now that I am 94, it seems better to depart from the internet stage before I publish something that is obviously total rubbish.

            The causes that I have supported throughout those seven and a half years remain the same.  I can only hope that others will keep them alive.

Nuclear Disarmament

I believe in unilateral nuclear disarmament.  Our own nuclear arms are concentrated in the Trident Submarine Fleet wrongly described as ‘our independent nuclear deterrent’.   It is anything but independent (can you imagine our government even threatening to use a nuclear weapon without the OK of the USA?).  It hasn’t deterred any one of the many acts of violence and aggression that have taken place since the end o0f World War II.  Did those nuclear submarines deter the Argentines from invading the Falklands?

It might persuade other governments relying on nuclear defence to refrain from using their weapons because of the certainty of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD!)  It would not deter the jihadists of the Islamic State from using such a weapon if they ever got hold of one. They are quite certain that they’ll be assured a ‘front seat’ in Heaven if they kill themselves while precipitating a satisfactory number of infidels and apostates (every-one who doesn’t share their noxious beliefs) to the ‘other place’!

 A country relying on a nuclear weapon ‘as a deterrent’ has a government as stupid and as irresponsible as a fifteen year old adolescent who carries a sheath-knife into the classroom with precisely the same motive!     

Working for World Peace

            I do not believe that the best way to secure world peace is to ring Russia around with members of Nato – inevitably seen by the Russians as a hostile alliance.  We complain of the ‘provocative action’ of the Russians in flying a couple of bombers round Britain keeping just outside British air space.  What are the Russians to think of NATO military manoeuvres in Poland, just beyond Russia’s frontiers?  We know the Russians have an enormous army and air-force.  They know that NATO has too!  For goodness sake, let’s stop trying to prove that ‘mine is bigger than yours!’   They’re both big enough to reduce our wonderful world to ruins if their top politicians are daft enough to let them. And I fear that some of them may be. For goodness sake let us talk peace and join together to think of how best to counter the acts of the jihadists – the real enemies of both Russia and ‘the West’.

Working for a more equal economy

            The top ‘at home’ priority of any responsible British government should be to narrow that yawning, and ever widening, gap between the incomes of the very poorest and very wealthiest of our citizens. Shamefully this gap actually widened during the decade of New Labour rule.  A way in which any government could narrow that gap would be the radical reform of the income tax system and making a reformed income tax the principal source of government revenue. Every adult, rich or poor, should be required to pay the same percentage of his or her gross income as their annual subscription for the very-considerable privilege of living and working in the UK.   Benefits to the very poorest of us would need to be raised to prevent this tax reducing anyone to homelessness or malnutrition.  I think that 20 percent of every adult’s gross income (before there’s a chance to salt it away overseas or in a charitable trust!) would probably be sufficient.  We would then all have an interest in Britain’s economic future and really would ‘all be in this together’

The European Union

Forty years ago I voted no to the European Common Market in that famous referendum. I had the rather romantic idea that we could seek closer economic and political union with the countries of the Commonwealth and what was left of the British Empire, to create a political and economic bloc capable of co-operating or competing with the USA and the  world’s emerging powers.

If I’m still around when we have the opportunity to vote either to stay in or depart from what is now the European Union, I shall vote to stay in, and I will hope that we achieve an even closer economic and political union with our European partners. I believe that the UK can make its voice heard and its opinions respected better as an active member of a federal Europe than as a non-voting protectorate of the USA.

We are part of Europe by geography, history and culture.  Nowadays it isn’t politically correct to say so but over the centuries the Christian faith has been the background in front of which the ancestors of all we Europeans have lived, worked and died.  As was repeated over and over again in the Scottish referendum campaign;  ‘We’re better together’!

I’d have a little more respect for Ukip if they really stood for an independent United Kingdom as they claim. They don’t. Their venom is reserved for our neighbours and friends in Europe.  You’d think that the EU was another hostile country determined to weaken and destroy the UK instead of a union of Nations in which we have exactly the same influence as anyone else. Remember the Ukip members of the European Parliament rising and turning their backs at the playing of the European Anthem.  I don’t believe that even the most fervent Republicans would be so ill-mannered as to turn their backs when others were standing and singing ‘God save the Queen’.

Ukippers seem to be quite happy with our membership of NATO (on which we Britons have never had the opportunity of expressing an opinion) and our one-sided ‘special relationship’ with the USA.    NATO and the ‘special relationship’ have cost us far more that the EU in both blood and money.  They involved us in two ‘colonial wars’, one illegal and the other unwinnable.  In every country where we have interfered the result has been disastrous. In Iraq Islamic State forces are slowly but surely taking over.  I’d be very surprised if there are not Iraqis today who look back on the rule of Saddam Hussein as a golden age! In Afghanistan the Taliban attacks ever more boldly, and the even-more-bloodthirsty jihadists of Islamic State have also put in an appearance.  Libya is now ungoverned and ungovernable – thanks to our helping in the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi!  Gaddafi’s rule was awful but the current anarchy (of which Islamic State is already taking advantage) is surely worse.

Climate Change

            I have left climate change till the last despite the fact that this is the threat that is capable of making the other causes that I have supported seem to be trivial irrelevances.  The reason it comes last is that effective countering of climate change demands the support and action of the government of every country in the world, and there are powerful forces trying to prevent this.

I took this photo of the Rhone Glacier on the pass between Italy and Switzerland in 1980.   I was told that last year 2014 there was no ice visible from that vantage point 

            
We don’t need a university degree to note that in recent years there have been more extreme weather conditions than even folk of my age can remember.  There have been extreme heat waves destroying rain-starved food crops.  There have been typhoons and hurricanes, devastating floods, prolonged droughts, occasional unseasonable spells of arctic weather. All of these have brought loss of life and destruction of property world-wide. The polar ice-caps are melting at an accelerating rate as are the mountain glaciers.

            The overwhelming conclusion of the world’s most eminent scientists has been that global warming is taking place and that this has caused those extreme weather conditions world-wide.  Furthermore, they are equally certain that most of that warming is due to human activity – to humankind’s relentless exploitation of the world’s natural resources, in particular to the profligate burning of fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) for space and water heating in the home, in industry, for travel, and for any other activity needing an energy supply.  The remedy seems simple and straightforward enough; reduce and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels and replace them with sources of clean, renewable energy such as can be supplied by wind turbines, solar panels, the sea’s waves, the flow of the rivers, the ebb and flow of the tide. There may be others. The UK, with its enormous coastline, is well suited for the use of tidal energy.

            Voices demanding urgent international action to combat man-made climate change include virtually the whole of the scientific community and, surprisingly but very, very gratifyingly, the Pope.  The present Pope has won the admiration of many non-Roman Catholics  and will, I hope, have persuaded thousands over to the ‘Green cause’.  Lined against them are the many thousands of people who work in, or profit from, the fossil fuel industries.  These include some very wealthy and influential men.

            Our new government which once, just before an election, urged the electorate ‘if you want Green. Vote Blue’, seems to have joined the forces of Mammon.  They are abolishing grants toward the production of wind turbines, giving local councils the final word over whether they should permit wind turbines in their areas (of course there will always be lots of local Nimbys who will oppose them) and are encouraging fracking – exploiting yet another source of fossil fuel as well as despoiling our  countryside.  In an earlier blog I said that if either the Conservative or the Labour Party won the election outright the results wouldn’t be as good as supporters had hoped but, on the other hand, they wouldn’t be as bad as their opponents had feared, I was wrong.  On the climate change front at least, the Conservative government’s action is even worse than their opponents had feared. Shortly there’s to be an international conference on climate change  My guess is that there will be lots of good intentions expressed but precious little urgent action promised.

            Perhaps I’ll conclude with a couple of verses from a poem by Arthur Clough, a 19^th century poet.  It has cheered me on occasion:

Say not the struggle naught availeth,

The labour and the wounds are vain

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been, they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.

Perhaps by yonder smoke concealed

Your comrades chase e’en now the flyers

And, but for you, possess the field.

Although the tired waves, vainly breaking.

Seem here no painful inch to gain;

Far back, through creek and inlet making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And that, dear blog readers, is the end of my final blog.  I’m sorry I couldn’t contrive a happy ending – but it is, at least, a hopeful one.

.

           

  

    

           

             

             

2nd June 2015

Tendring Topics………on line

Dwellers in ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’?

The NHS.

          I sometimes wonder if I live in the same world as today’s top politicians.  Here in Clacton-on-Sea there is an acute shortage of general medical practitioners (family doctors).   I have been served by the same medical practice since my family and I moved to Clacton in 1956 fifty-eight years ago.  In those distant days there were just two doctors. They were Dr Craig and Dr Geddes, both Scotsmen and not dissimilar to the Dr Cameron and Dr Finlay of the tv soap ‘Dr Finlay’s casebook’.  They behaved similarly too.   I remember several occasions when one or other of them visited my home late at night or early in the morning when one of my two then-young sons, or my wife or I, needed urgent medical attention.   There were no appointments.  Patients just turned up at the surgery.  They might have a longish wait to see a doctor but see one of the two doctors they always did.  And that doctor was always familiar with their medical history and could refresh his memory from written notes.

            Lots of changes have taken place since 1956.  Clacton has almost doubled in size and my doctors’ surgery, now renamed a ‘medical centre’ has doubled in size too. There are several practice nurses and a practice manager.  Both Dr Craig and Dr Geddes died many years ago.  At one point there were as many as six medical practitioners, two of them women.  There were, I think, appointments but most people just turned up at the medical centre and saw either their preferred doctor or whichever doctor was available.

            Now, there are only three doctors and one of them is only part-time.  They see patients only by appointment and it’s very difficult to make an appointment. ‘Phone just after 8.00 am’, you’ll be told by the receptionist – but the line is always engaged.  By the time you manage to get through all the doctors are booked.  I have found from experience that the only way I can make almost sure of seeing the doctor of my choice is to turn up at the medical centre fifteen minutes before they open at 8.00 am and ask the receptionist for an appointment then.  There’s usually a queue so I may need to get there before 7.45 am to be at the right end of that queue!   As I am now 94 I rarely bother!  The service provided for patients by our local doctors (the ‘front line’ of the NHS) is clearly not nearly as good as it was as recently as five years ago.   If it were much better than it had been when the coalition government took over, I am quite sure that it would be trumpeted as one of the government’s successes.  As it is, I’m not quite so partisan as to proclaim that ‘It’s all the government’s fault’.  I don’t suppose that it is – but the government, with its continual ‘targets’ and its reorganisation of the NHS so as to increase the field of local GP responsibility, has certainly played a major role in this deterioration.

            We need to attract many more qualified doctors to the Tendring Area – and this can’t be done just by offering them more money.  For goodness sake – our coast has the lowest annual rainfall in the British Isles and more than the average amount of sunshine.   It’s a lovely place to bring up children (my late wife and I have done it and I write from personal experience!) and it’s only about an hour and a half from London by road or rail.  It really shouldn’t be difficult to attract young doctors here.

            Is the new all-Conservative government taking any steps to encourage this?  Not as far as I know but, of course, they’ve only been in office a few weeks.  During those few weeks though, Prime Minister David Cameron has found time to promise that within a couple of years we should be able to consult a doctor any day of the week and all hours of the day!  Can David Cameron really inhabit the world that I do?  I, and I suspect a great many other local people, would be happier if he were to concentrate his efforts on the – surely much more easily achieved – objective of making it possible for us to see the doctor of our choice between 8.00 am and 5.00 pm on Monday through to Friday in every week!  That surely shouldn’t be too much to ask

 Home Ownership

            So the Government plans to go ahead with its determination to ‘buy votes with other people’s money’ by extending their ‘right to buy’ scheme from council house tenants to the tenants of housing associations.  They justify this by the alleged fact that 86 percent of the public have aspirations (that’s the OK word just now) to become homeowners.  Presumably this claim follows a public opinion poll on the subject conducted among those not owning or buying their own home.  If they were just asked Would you like to own your own home? I’d have expected that even more than 86 percent would have answered positively.  No-one particularly likes paying rent, having to observe tenancy rules and never knowing when and why they may be given notice to quit.  Neither do adults, particularly with young children, like being homeless or having to share with ‘mum and dad’.   Of course they’d much prefer having their own home.

            But that’s not what they are being offered.  What they are being offered is the possibility of home ownership (you’re not ‘the owner’ till you hold the deeds of the home) after repaying a large loan month by month over a period of twenty years or more.  During that period you’ll be responsible for paying council tax and for carrying out all repairs and internal and external decoration.  If you default in making those regular monthly payments (and who knows what’s going to happen in twenty years?) you’ll run the risk of homelessness for yourself and family, and the loss of much – even perhaps all – of the money you’ve already paid. That prospect might, I think, considerably reduce the number of potential home buyers on whose aspirations the government claims to base its policies.

            As a former local government Housing Manager I have always objected to council tenants being treated as second class citizens.  But I don’t think they should be given special privileges or financial benefits either.  Most Council tenants were happy to remain as tenants until the possibility of buying their homes ‘on the cheap’ was offered them. Under former governments they enjoyed payable rents, security and reasonable tenancy conditions.  All structural repairs and maintenance was the council’s responsibility. I am sure that Housing Association tenants are the same.

            The sale to Housing Association tenants of their homes at discounted prices is  still only one of the 'intentions' of the government.  I think that they may find themselves facing a few expensive legal challenges on the way to its fulfilment.  To David Cameron and his pals in Westminster, Housing Associations and local authorities are much the same thing.  They both owned lots of rented houses in which not-well-off people enjoyed secure tenancies ‘for life’ or at least for as long as they paid their rent and observed their not-usually-very-onerous tenancy conditions.  Both provided ‘social housing’ which they had a responsibility to keep ‘fit for habitation’ and neither made a substantial profit from their house ownership.

            In fact there is one crucial difference between Council Houses and those owned by Housing Associations.   Council Houses were built with public money – from the rates and from central government grants.  It could be claimed that a more than usually stupid government had every right to require local authorities to sell them off at bargain-basement prices.  A similar case can not be made for the compulsory sale of Housing Association property. Those homes were not provided from the rates and taxes of earlier, more responsible, governments and local councils.  They were provided by charitable giving, mainly from the generosity of very wealthy and benevolent 19^th century business men, for the purpose of providing the ‘working classes’ with comfortable, secure and healthy homes at affordable rents.

            George Cadbury and George Peabody must be among many wealthy Victorian philanthropists who are turning in their graves at the thought that, for electoral advantage, the homes that they provided for the poor may be compulsorily sold off at bargain basement prices.  They probably would have had sufficient foresight to see that such homes would eventually fall into the hands of profiteering landlords – and be let at ridiculously high rents to tenants who would only be able to pay them by means of Housing Benefit from their local authority!

            If, of course, it is found that the government can legally compel Housing Associations to sell off their properties with a substantial discount, there can be no reason why they should not extend the ‘right to buy’ to many thousands of tenants who are charged unreasonably high rents, have no security of tenure, and who fear that asking the landlord to carry out repairs will only lead to their losing their homes.  They are the tenants of private landlords.  Surely the ‘right to buy at a discount’ should be extended to them to them before it is offered to Housing Association tenants who are already satisfactorily housed?