Week 10 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

The Children of the Poor

          In the 1920s and 1930s an annual event in Ipswich was ‘the Poor Children’s Outing’.  The rest of us would watch and wave as bunting decorated lorries drove out of town filled with laughing, cheering and singing children (no-one bothered much about health and safety in those days!) on their way to some rural, or perhaps seaside, destination where they’d enjoy a big, generous tea, lots of fun, entertainment and games, before being driven home again, still laughing and singing in the evening.

            My dad (a former Regimental Sergeant Major of the RAVC) who was clerk, veterinary nurse, dispenser and general dogsbody to a local vet, was once deeply offended when a well-meaning client offered him a ticket for the Poor Children’s Outing for me.  Goodness – we weren’t ‘poor’; not in that sense anyway.  There was always food on the table, I was always adequately clad and I went to a secondary school, leaving school to go to work at 16 instead of 14 like most of my contemporaries. We weren’t poor!  I realize now though that it was only my father’s modest army pension that kept us above the poverty line.

Clacton and the other towns on the Tendring Coast have a preponderance of old, retired and disabled or semi-disabled folk like myself.   Some are struggling to survive on the state retirement pension and whatever other financial benefits may come their way.  Many are dreading the coming of April when increased government cuts come into effect, and they will receive the bills for the gas and electricity they have used to keep the winter’s chill at bay.   I had thought of poverty in this area as principally affecting the elderly.  I hadn’t realized the extent to which we have an even more serious problem among families with children.

  It therefore came as something as a shock when the local Clacton Gazette carried the headline One in Three Clacton kids live in Poverty, and I heard on a tv news programme that, in BBC’s Look East Region, the Tendring District is one of those with most child poverty, defined as children in households with less than 60 percent of the average national income. The same issue of the Gazette recorded that although nationally we have had reports of a steady reduction of the number of unemployed, in our area the reverse has happened.   In January we had almost 3,500 unemployed and the number had risen during each of the preceding five months.

Every Sunday morning as I attend Meeting for Worship at the Quaker Meeting House in Clacton’s Granville Road I receive another salutary reminder of the poverty in our midst.   In the entrance lobby of our Meeting House is now a large cardboard box for the receipt of canned or otherwise imperishable food destined for the Food Bank run by our friends in the Salvation Army.  When the box is full our Warden takes its contents to the Salvation Army Citadel where they are gratefully welcomed.  I am sure that we are not the only Christian body that supports the SA in this way.

Clacton’s Salvation Army Food Bank is by no means unique.  Food Banks are nowadays to be found all over the country and there is a steadily increasing need for their service.  61,468 hungry families or individuals were helped by them in 2011 and 128,697, nearly twice as many, in 2012.  This year, especially after the government’s assault on the meagre resources of the poor and disadvantaged that is to take place in April, the number is expected to rise to a quarter of a million.   Food Banks are always run and supplied with food by voluntary effort, frequently though not invariably, by members of Christian Churches.  It is indeed, the duty of Christians to support them; the founder of our Faith told his followers that whatsoever, good or bad, we do to even the very least of our fellow men or women, we are doing to him.

But should the feeding of the hungry be left to charitable giving?   Is it not the responsibility of the State to ensure that none of its citizens needs to starve?  In the House of Lords the Right Reverend Tim Stevens, Bishop of Leicester expressed this concern in a recent debate.  He feels that we are moving towards a situation in which visits to a food bank are no longer seen as an emergency response to an economic crisis but as an integral part of the Welfare State.

That was certainly not my intention when in 1945 I voted, with tens of thousands of other returning ex-servicemen and our wives or girl-friends, to establish the Welfare State sketched out by Lord Beveridge at the end of World War II.  In that year of victory and peace not even in my worst nightmares did I imagine that nearly 70 years later thousands of homeless men and women would be sleeping rough in shop doorways and alleys in Britain’s cities, that there would be beggars on our streets and that the poor would be relying on soup kitchens and food banks to fill their empty bellies.

Successive Prime Ministers; Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron have all contributed to an achievement that, just a few years ago, few of us would have thought remotely possible. They have managed to make the era of Ted Heath and Harold Wilson seem like a Golden Age!

‘If you knows of a better ‘ole – go to it!’

          Four or five years ago, if I had been asked what Triple A or AAA meant I would have probably guessed that it must be the title of a Western ‘soap’ on tv, probably set in Montana or Wyoming in the latter half of the 19^th Century.  Every week we’d see the ‘boys of the Triple A ranch’, dealing with hostile Indians, rustlers, crooked land-owners or whatever.  The Triple A would, of course, be the brand AAA burnt onto the hide of each one of their ‘shorthorns out on the range’.

            Now, of course, I know better.   A Triple A rating is the mark of a sound and reliable borrower of money, a borrower who can be depended upon to repay his debts promptly and with all the interest due on them.   If such ratings were accorded to individuals (and, who knows, perhaps they are) I would certainly expect to be awarded one.   I know this because over and over again our Prime Minister, David Cameron, and our Chancellor of the Exchequer have stressed that, thanks to their wise and prudent handling of Britain’s economy the United Kingdom held a Triple A rating of credit worthiness.  This meant that we could borrow money at the lowest possible interest rate. They intended to keep it that way.  But they haven’t managed it.  Because the British economy has suffered a double dip recession and shows little sign of recovery, an international credit agency has downgraded our credit rating by one notch.  This hasn’t yet had much impact on us except that the pound sterling has lost some of its value (have you noticed on the radio and tv news bulletins that the Euro, which a month or two ago was worth only 82p is now up to 86p and climbing).  This can be good news for British exporters since it means that their prices are more competitive but, for the rest of us it means that imported goods – from mainland Europe, the USA and the rest of the world – will all be a little more expensive.  I think that most people, having learned that their credit rating had come down a notch (from the level it held throughout the Labour years about which the government has been so scathing!) would consider the possibility that they were doing something wrong, and try to put it right.  But not Messrs Cameron and Osborne; they believe that the loss of credit worthiness proves that their policies are sound.  We need more of the same medicine. We must dig the hole into which they have pushed us even deeper.

            I am reminded of a well-known cartoon by Bruce Bairnsfather, the satirical cartoonist of World War I.  His famous characters ‘Old Bill’, the walrus moustached old soldier and ‘Bert’, his less-experienced mate, are crouched in a shell-hole in no-mans-land with shot and shell whizzing just a few inches above their heads.  ‘Old Bill’says, ‘Well, if yer knows of a better ‘ole – go to it’.

            I think it possible that, at the next General Election, a majority of voters may do just that.  I only hope that the holes they choose aren't labelled BNP or UKIP!

‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good

So says the proverb and that is certainly true of the horsemeat scandal.  One effect has been to increase the number of people buying vegetarian ‘ready meals’ and  vegetarian meat substitutes generally.  Although I’m nor a strict vegetarian I generally prefer vegetarian meals and am pleased to find that Morrison’s in Clacton’s Old Road, where I do most of my shopping, have increased the range of their vegetarian foods and have made sure that there are plenty of every kind of non-meat dish always available for sale.

There’s an increasingly wide range, and you don’t have to be a conscientious objector to meat-eating (I’m not one of those myself!) to enjoy them.  Newcomers to vegetarian dishes are likely to enjoy Linda McCartney’s vegetarian sausages and country pies, and Morrison’s own vegetarian cottage pies and vegetarian curries.  There’s a far wider range than that but those are just a few meals that I reckon always to have in my freezer.  I don’t possess a micro-wave but none of the above needs to be cooked for more than 30 minutes at 200 degrees C.   Oh yes – and there’s one little tip that I have learned the hard way.   If you have a ‘fan oven’ knock at least five minutes off the cooking time recommended on the packet.

Finally – I happen to shop at Morrisons.  They’re within easy mobility-scooter range of my home and I have found the staff friendly and helpful.  I am quite sure though that other retailers have equally helpful staff and an equally appetising range of vegetarian dishes.

The Bonus Culture

‘Brussels’, so they say, has decided that Bankers’ Bonuses should not exceed their annual salary except with the specific agreement of shareholders.  This seems a modest enough idea, but at once our Prime Minister was up in arms declaring his opposition, and endeavouring to give the impression that he is defending Britain’s independence against the dictates of a sinister all-powerful clique of ‘foreigners’ in Brussels, determined to undermine our national sovereignty.

It was, in fact, the European Parliament – the voice of the European people on which the UK is fully represented – who made what most of us surely feel is a very reasonable demand on a group of people whose greed and incompetence were responsible for the current international economic crisis.   For months our top politicians of all parties have been talking about introducing measures to control the activities of the bankers and the ridiculously high monetary rewards that they award themselves.  Now the democratically elected European Parliament (yes, it does happen to meet in Brussels) has suggested one small step towards that end – and this has been met with a howl of opposition from those same politicians.

I would like to see not just the limitation of bonuses but their abolition.   We should all; road sweepers, dinner ladies, factory workers, farm labourers, civil servants, school teachers and bankers, receive a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.  We should all do our very best in the job that we are doing – and not expect to receive an extra reward for doing our job well.

Doesn’t it ever occur to any one that those who receive these huge bonuses don’t actually do anything to benefit their fellow men and women?  They don’t produce food or clothing.  They don’t build our homes or our factories. They don’t make any practical contribution to the society in which they live. Imagine being marooned on a fertile and temperate, but uninhabited and totally undeveloped island in their company.  You would surely be glad to swap a score of them for just a couple of gardeners or carpenters complete with their tools, plus a few muscular and willing labourers!

            Top bankers juggle money – lend it, borrow it, bet with it, and make sure that they retain a substantial share of it. Past experience leads them to believe that if, somewhere along the way, they accidentally lose a few millions of it, the rest of us will ‘bail them out’.   Money, whether pounds sterling, euros, dollars, even gold bars (try making anything useful. as distinct from decorative, from gold!) has no value in itself.   All those currencies only represent the harvest of the soil and the products of other people’s labour.

I am quite sure that this truth, which seems so obvious to me, will not be generally accepted within my life-time.   Perhaps in some distant land centuries after the collapse of our civilisation, the historians of a new age of freedom, equality and enlightenment will conclude that it was our obsession with what we thought of as wealth that led to our downfall.

        

   

           

  

           

         

            

Week 5 2012 2.02.2012

Tendring Topics.........on Line

A Matter of Priorities

            Our Tendring District undoubtedly has its problems.  We have, so it is said, fewer graduates and fewer folk with other qualifications than any other district in Essex.  Our town centre shops are threatened with closure. Our unemployment rate, especially youth unemployment, is well above the national average – and rising! We have had four (or was it five?) murders during the past twelve months and a number of scarcely less serious incidents of knife crime. There are potholes in our roads, and our pavements, away from the town centres, are broken, uneven and positively dangerous.  Oh yes – and there’s Brooklands Estate, Jaywick, Britain’s most deprived neighbourhood, still demanding urgent attention..

            It isn’t one – or even all – of these problems though that has brought unanimity to the often-divided Tendring District Council.  It’s the fact that they have been ‘snubbed’ by Whitehall in that the Olympic Torch, on its tortuous progress from its home in Greece to the Olympic Stadium at Stratford, isn’t going to cross the Tendring District’s hallowed soil. The Clacton Gazette records that The decision to leave the district out was unanimously condemned by councillors who tried desperately to make Olympic bosses change their minds. 

            A petition and pleading letters had been sent to Lord Coe, to the Prime Minister,  and to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.  They had even suggested ways in which, with just a little deviation, the Olympic Torch could be brought through part of Tendring – but answer came there none!   ‘It was’, said Councillor Stephen Mayzes rather petulantly ‘very disappointing and I think just plain rude’.   

            Blog readers will remember Councillor Mayzes. It was he who, as Tendring Council’s Tourism Supremo, tried to prevent one of Europe’s most prestigious leisure organisations (the Camping and Caravanning Club of Great Britain) from holding a rally, during the school holidays, on the playing field of the Coastal Academy!  He also decided that the Holiday Coast’s summer season ended on 31^st August and saved the taxpayers a few pounds by withdrawing the beach patrols and closing the Tourist Information Offices.  You will recall that we experienced an Indian summer, with hundreds of visitors at the end of September and into October!

            Not a man to admit defeat, Councillor Mayzes is now organising his own event, in which he hopes teams from local schools and athletics clubs will carry an imitation ‘Olympic Torch’ in a relay round the Tendring District.  ‘We will create our own torch and a route round Tendring.  I want to get all of our schools and athletes involved, and I think it could really get people excited about the Olympics and our local talents’.

            Who knows?  It might take off.  It won’t achieve anything though, except perhaps soothe hurt feelings in the Weeley Council Chamber. I think it’ll also make the council look petty and small-minded, or perhaps just plain bonkers!   It certainly won’t do anything to solve any of the very real problems with which Tendring Council is faced.

 ‘Be bloody, bold and resolute!’*

            Oh dear – it’s supposed to be unlucky to quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth!  Those words of advice to Macbeth  from the three witches describe pretty well though our Prime Minister David Cameron’s advice to the world’s financial experts at Davos, particularly those of the EU and the Eurozone.  They have to be bold and take urgent drastic steps to escape financial disaster.

            Certainly David Cameron was following his own advice.   It was only the day before that he had learned that growth in Britain’s economy was even lower than the already low figure that had been predicted, that unemployment – particularly youth unemployment - in Britain had reached its highest level for decades, and that the National Debt, the reduction of which had been the principal objective of his government, had risen to an unprecedented one trillion pounds! (It's a good job my laptop possesses a 'spell-check'. I have never before had occasion to type 'trillion'!)  It must have taken real courage - the uncharitable might say ‘arrogance’- after that, to fly to Switzerland and lecture other governments about how to handle their financial affairs.

            A couple of days earlier I had listened on Radio 4 to a BBC correspondent in Sweden, a country that resembles our own in many ways.  It is geographically on the edge of Europe. It is a constitutional monarchy. It is a member of the European Union but, like us, is not within the Eurozone.  It has however the great disadvantage of having a far more extreme climate than ours and, in particular, a much darker and colder winter season.

            Yet Sweden seems to have been virtually unaffected by the European financial crisis.  There have been no cuts in public services or in benefit payments to the poor and disabled, no great surge in unemployment and no talk of an uncontrollable financial deficit.  There were no summer riots, no ‘Occupy Movement’ demonstrations in city centres - and no need to heap blame on the previous government or the Eurozone.  From the correspondent’s report I gained an impression of a country at ease with itself.

            There may be all sorts of reasons for this, but here are three that I am sure are among them.   Sweden is a land of high taxation but the tax is levied fairly and, Swedes believe, is used wisely and to everyone’s advantage.  There is no enormous gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor. They‘re not burdened with  a ‘special relationship’ that drags them into illegal and unwinnable wars and results in their having totally useless and vastly expensive nuclear-armed submarines permanently patrolling the world’s oceans.

            I believe that world politicians who would really like to know how best to run their country’s economies could do worse than to investigate the Swedish model.

             *Those who are familiar with Shakespeare’s play will know that that piece of advice from the three witches was followed by Macbeth – and led to disaster.

             

An Awful Example

          A friend of mine once remarked that no-one was ever completely useless.  Even the most unpromising could serve as awful examples, to draw attention to the causes of their plight and to encourage others to avoid them.  I am sure that my friend had in mind elderly human wrecks brought low by alcohol, drug abuse and general dissipation – summarised by Marlene Dietrich in her song in the classic ‘western’, ‘Destry Rides Again’ as, ‘cigareets, and whisky, and wild, wild women’!

            They, of course, are the awful examples at the bottom of the social scale – but there are awful examples of the effects of greed and selfishness at the other end of the social scale too.  In recent years wages and benefits have fallen behind inflation (have declined in value) while the profits, salaries and bonuses of the wealthy have increased in leaps and bounds.   Those of us who have protested about this and sought to change it have been in a minority – though a growing one.  Now, thanks to the well publicised awful example of the top officials and senior board members of the Banks, that minority has become a very vocal and increasingly influential majority.

            It was neither the Eurozone nor the last Labour Government that created the current financial crisis (though the New-Labour Government didn’t take the steps that might have prevented it) but the greed and incompetence of the Bankers.  That is not my judgement; I am not competent to make one, but that of the Governor of the Bank of England who is surely in a position to know.

            Now it is the bankers, not necessarily the ones who caused the crisis but others with the same ethos, who are receiving (I can’t bring myself to say earning!)  million-pounds-a-year-plus salaries and who are claiming even more enormous bonuses.  It is as though they draw their enormous salaries just for turning up at their offices fairly regularly but expect a bonus for actually doing the job to the best of their ability!

            I remember, in 1938 when I was a junior clerk (office boy really!) in Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department, hesitatingly telling the Medical Officer of Health after some minor blunder that, ‘I did my best, sir’.  Glaring at me he announced ‘I am not interested in your best Hall. I want the best’.   I suppose that had I been a potential successful banker, instead of creeping away wishing that the earth would swallow me, I’d have replied confidently that, ‘in that case sir, I would expect a substantial bonus at the end of the year’.

            Public opinion has, quite rightly, been outraged by the bankers’ attitude.  A public debate on the subject was threatened in the House of Commons.  There’s little doubt that this would have resulted in a cross-party condemnation of the bankers’ greed.  Rather than face that, both the chairman and the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, in which the government representing us taxpayers holds a controlling interest, have returned their million pound bonuses!

            The government says that it has no right to interfere with salary negotiations between banks and other private enterprises, and their employees.  Quite so – but they do have a responsibility for maintaining adequate public services and health and welfare provisions.  These were part of the fairer, more peaceful world for which thousands of us thought we were fighting in World War II and for which we voted in1945, but which we have seen systematically whittled away by successive governments since.

            The government does have the right and the duty to impose taxes upon its citizens to pay for these services, and has a moral duty to impose those taxes fairly upon us all.  The simplest, most straightforward, and fairest way of taxation is by means of an income tax properly graded so that it takes from rich, the poor and the ‘squeezed middle’ about which we hear so much, an equal proportion of their income.  None of us likes paying income tax but it is the only tax that is levied according to our ability to pay it.  No-one has ever starved to death or been rendered homeless or destitute by having to pay income tax.

            To be ‘fair’ (a concept to which the government pays continual lip service!) there needs to be many more income tax bands than the three – standard, higher and highest - that exist at the moment.  The very poor would pay little or none and the very rich might be expected to pay as much as 90 percent (not of their entire income of course, but of income in excess of perhaps a million pounds a year) in tax.  At the same time that the new properly graded system is introduced there would need to be watertight regulations preventing the tax evasion and – currently legal – tax avoidance that at the present time rob the Exchequer of millions of pounds a year.

            Both private firms and public authorities could then have an absolutely free hand in rewarding their senior staff.  We, members of the public would know that the greater part of any really excessive award would be coming back to us either in public services or in the reduction of our own tax burden.

……and an anecdote.

          This was sent me by a blog reader:

          The Chief Executive of a Bank, a Daily Mail reader, and a recipient of social security benefit are seated round a table on which there is a plate with 12 biscuits.

            The Banker pockets eleven of the biscuits and then turns to the Daily Mail reader with a word of warning, ‘You’d better watch out – that scrounger is after your biscuit’.


Postscript - Gallant knights and Noble Lords 


I am shedding no tears and wasting no sympathy over Mr Fred Goodwin's lost knighthood.   I do have a couple of questions though.

Wasn't Fred Goodwin one of the greatest of those great financial geniuses who threaten to depart from Britain   if we dare to increase their tax liability?   What a pity we didn't think of doing that before he took control of the RBS.  Who knows - we might have shaken out a few more very expensive supermen (and superwomen) whom we could well spare.

If Fred Goodwin, who has never been convicted or even suspected of any criminal activity, can so easily be stripped of his knighthood, how is it that the former leader of Essex County Council, a convicted criminal  under further investigation by the police, remains the 'Noble Lord' Hanningfield?

            

Week 3 18.1.11

Tendring Topics…….on Line

The Cost of Disillusion

As we move into the second decade of the third millennium, I don’t remember ever before experiencing such general disillusion with all politicians and with all political parties, as there is today.

The Conservative-dominated coalition leaps in impetuously to right wrongs, redistribute power, build a fairer society – and ends up either bogged down (rather like the French cavalry at Agincourt!) or producing the direct opposite of their stated intention. They were going to save millions of pounds by getting rid of all the Quangos, until they discovered that for the most part Quangos were doing a worthwhile job. The most that could be done was merge some of them or pass their functions on to some other body.

They were going to abolish the bureaucratic NHS Primary Care Authorities and hand their responsibilities over to ‘the doctors’ in their areas. But ‘the doctors’ have plenty to do caring for the sick. They don’t want to take on the administrative tasks of the PCAs. They are combining into area consortia, creating little bureaucracies of their own.

They were going to stem the great flow of overseas immigrants – but farmers and others couldn’t function without the foreign workers prepared to undertake tasks that no Brit cared to do. They were going to reduce the power of the government and hand it over to ‘local communities’. They haven’t handed over a single function of central government but they have taken power away from local authorities – the elected representatives of local communities!

They were going to curb the power of the bankers – especially those whose irresponsibility and incompetence had been the immediate cause of our financial woes, who had been saved from bankruptcy with our money, but who were proposing to continue handing themselves five-figure bonuses. If only the government had been prepared to back up fiery words with effective action! The confrontation between bankers and the government was reminiscent of the medieval struggles between church and state – except that the conflict is now between the representatives of the British people and the High Priests of Mammon. The struggle isn’t quite over as I write these words but, whatever face-saving words may be used to make defeat sound like victory, I have little doubt that it will be Mammon who will come out on top.

The Lib-Dems? They had to pay too higher price to become junior partners in a coalition government. Instinctively ‘green’ and ‘Europhile’, they find themselves allied with Climate Change denying Europhobes like our (Clacton) MP, and compelled to support policies to which, up to the day of the election, they were strongly opposed. Student fees, for example, and control orders for suspected terrorists. Poor old Vince Cable was humiliated for saying, in what he had imagined was a private conversation, that he had ‘declared war on Rupert Murdoch’ (well, It was certainly time someone did!). He was replaced by someone whose impartiality had been demonstrated by unequivocal support for the Murdoch media empire!

Altogether I can see little hope of either coalition partner changing ‘The good old law, the ancient plan, that he shall take who hath the power – and he shall keep who can!’

As for the Labour Opposition – I think that Ed Milliband is probably doing his best to breathe new life into his Party. However, I can’t forget that under New Labour the yawning gap between the incomes of the rich and poor widened; we were dragged into two unwinnable wars by blindly following the most reactionary American president in living memory; the infamous ‘Right to Buy’ legislation that had turned urban municipal housing into slums and destroyed rural communities, remained on the statute book; while New Labour’s leaders took their holidays in the palatial residences of their multimillionaire friends! No wonder Lord Mandelson, who – with Mr Osborne, our present Tory Chancellor – had enjoyed the hospitality of a millionaire friend on his luxury yacht, told the press that he ‘had no problem with billionaires!’

I very much fear that the time is ripe for the emergence on the scene of a young, energetic and charismatic politician, with brawny and heavy-booted supporters, who will promise to get rid of venial and self-serving politicians, and the ‘alien riffraff taking our jobs and threatening our culture’, cut our ties with Europe, establish comradely links with Sarah Palin’s ‘Tea-Party’ warriors in the USA, and lead Britain on a new path – toward the kind of future that would have brought joy to the hearts of Hitler and Mussolini! We must be thankful that so far at least, neither the BNP nor UKIP have leaders of that malignant quality.

Footnote – The clear winner of the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election was disillusion. 48 percent of the electorate voted. This means that those who didn’t vote (52 percent) were in a majority. Your guess about the motives of those who did vote is as good as mine. I think it likely though that a great many of the votes secured by the winning candidate were cast against the coalition partners rather than for New Labour.

Disaster strikes Ipswich?

As I switched my tv set on a few mornings ago, the news reader was saying ‘…and Ipswich has been inundated, with 2,000 families rendered homeless’.

I wasn’t at my brightest at that time but it was amazing how many thoughts flashed through my mind in what was probably less than half a minute. I was back in memory to January 1939. Heavy snow and prolonged frost had been succeeded by a rapid thaw with torrential rain. The Gipping Valley had been inundated. The wooden road bridge at Sproughton, a few miles up stream from Ipswich, had been swept away. My family’s home was safe enough but there was severe flooding of low-lying streets in parts of the town. Was this scene from the past being re-enacted with even more flooding than before?

Of course not. I had momentarily forgotten that there is another Ipswich, in Queensland, Australia, not far from Brisbane. That was the town that was under water. It was, in fact, part of an inundated area in north-eastern Australia larger than the combined areas of France and Germany!

Australia is part of the Commonwealth with which we have historical and cultural ties. Some of us have friends and/or relations there. It is hardly surprising that it has been the flooding there that has received most British news media coverage. It is though by no means the only part of the world to have endured almost identical disaster. Sri Lanka and Brazil suffered far more human casualties than Australia and although the flood waters have now receded in Pakistan, the havoc that they wrought remains – and is likely to remain for months, perhaps years, to come.

This is no coincidence. Although the Meteorologists, wary of making a false prediction, say that it is too early to be certain of the cause of these floods, it seems to me to be evident that global warming is responsible. The vast expanse and volume of water in the southern oceans (Atlantic, Pacific, Indian) has warmed up, resulting in more evaporation and a moisture-filled lower atmosphere. At the same time adjacent land masses – South America, Australia, the Indian sub-Continent – have warmed up even more. The warm air above these land masses, rises and is replaced by moisture-filled air from the ocean. As this moisture-filled air cools, particularly when flowing over mountains, the water vapour precipitates as torrential, and potentially devastating rain. It is what happens already in the southern Asian Monsoon.

Climate change deniers delighted in telling us that the bitterly cold weather we experienced in November and December proved beyond doubt that Global warming was a myth, propagated by scaremongers. On the contrary, our icy weather may well have been a result of world-wide warming. We know that the polar ice-caps are melting. Tens of thousands of gallons of fresh water, only just above freezing point, are being precipitated into the North Atlantic daily. I don’t know whether, as some believe, this is affecting the flow of the Gulf Stream on which North-Western Europe’s normally equable climate depends. I am quite sure though that it must have a cooling affect on the waters of the North Atlantic, thus making our winters colder.

I think it likely that weather in Britain will become more extreme. At least until all the polar ice cap disappears, our will winters continue to become colder. Our summers will be cool and cloudy while the prevailing wind direction remains from the west or south-west. When it changes to coming from an easterly or south-easterly direction it will, perhaps only briefly, become abnormally hot.

Unless or until we take Climatic Change seriously that is the future to which we can look forward.

Double Opportunity for Harwich

Last year Tendring Council failed to secure a government grant for Harwich because Essex was considered to be too prosperous a county. Perhaps, overall, it is, but the Tendring District certainly has areas of severe deprivation, parts of Harwich, Clacton and Jaywick among them.

Harwich at least, could have a brighter future. The Council has launched a £5 million bid to attract the wind farm industry to the town. The idea is to build a skills and business centre to support an ever-growing industry. The ultimate aim is to make Harwich a major centre for the maintenance and manufacture of Wind Turbines. The historic port is internationally known as a staging post between England and the Continent and is well placed to serve the now-established wind farm offshore at Clacton and the developing farms both to the north, in the Thames estuary and off the coast of Kent. Councillor Neil Stock, the Council’s leader, says that such a development could result in up to 40,000 jobs and add hundreds of millions of pounds to Harwich’s economy.

The home. in Kings Head Street, of Christopher Jones, master of The Mayflower

To turn this dream into a reality the Council is again applying for a grant – this time from a £1.5 billion regeneration fund established by the government to help areas hit by public service cuts. Mr Stock says that this time they are quietly optimistic as they prepare a compelling case for a grant.

I very much hope they succeed, not only for Harwich but for the future of Western Europe. Quite apart from the need for sources of reliable renewable energy to combat climate change, we have to realize that the world’s reserves of oil and gas are finite. Alternative energy sources must be found well before they run out, or become so difficult to secure that they become prohibitively expensive.

In the meantime are you happy about the fact that most of our oil comes from the always volatile Middle East and our gas from reservoirs in Siberia?

The 2012 Olympics may well give Harwich another economic opportunity. The port is already well-known on the Continent as a gateway into Britain. It could become Britain’s main staging post to the Olympics. From the town there are direct rail and road routes to the Olympics stadium at Stratford, avoiding the need to pass through London. I hope that our Tourist Authorities will publicise that fact among our mainland neighbours and EU partners, and make sure that there is adequate first class hotel accommodation for those who wish to use our area either as a staging post or a base.

Harwich’s historic ‘Three Cups’ Inn. Lord Nelson and Emma, Lady Hamilton are said to have stayed there and in the 14th Century, Queen Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer are said to have obtained horses here before going on to defeat her husband King Edward II. Has Harwich a bright future as well as a colourful past?

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Christmas is coming!

Christmas is coming……..and as sure as that there will be Carols from Kings and the Queen’s televised Christmas message, there will come a headline-grabbing little lecture calculated to dampen down and spoil the faith and joy of others. Sadly, it is often delivered by a no doubt well-meaning cleric.

This year, it is the Bishop of Croydon (did you know that there was one?) who, it seems, dislikes our traditional Christmas carols. Many of these, he says are the product of Victorian sentimentality and nothing to do with God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ. Particularly the subjects of Episcopal displeasure are two of the best known and, I think, most loved of carols; ‘Away in a Manger’ and ‘O come, all ye faithful’.

The lines in ‘Away in a manger’ to which the Bishop takes exception are, ‘The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes’. The point is presumably that the Church has always taught that Jesus was wholly human as well as wholly divine and that, as a human baby, he would have woken up crying. Perhaps …. .but if a baby is warm, full of milk and comfortable, and wakes to hear the gentle lowing of cattle, he may well remain silent on waking. Perhaps the Bishop has had an unfortunate experience of parenthood, but human babies really don’t cry all the time.

There are actually two lines of that carol that do make me feel uneasy. ‘I love thee, Lord Jesus look down from the sky, and stay by my side until morning is nigh’. I tell myself though that it is a carol intended for children. It is difficult enough for an adult to understand that Jesus can be ever-present while being outside time and space as we know them. ‘Above the sky’, is however a metaphor easily understood by children.

‘O come all ye faithful’ with its echoes of the Nicene Creed is surely the most magnificent of all the carols, and the one with which every carol service should end. The Bishop says it should be ‘O come all ye faithless’. I think he means that our message should be to those outside the Church. And so it should be, all through the year. Surely though, on the anniversary of the day that ‘the Word was made flesh’, if on no other, the faithful are allowed to be ‘joyful and triumphant’!

There are plenty of other hymns that do have lines that set my teeth on edge. How about ‘sufficient is thine arm alone and our defence is sure’, sung with gusto at an Army Church Parade, 'Take my silver and my gold, not a mite will I withhold’, sung by a comfortably-off middle-class congregation and ‘The vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus his pardon receives'? Surely there must be contrition as well as belief. St. James in his Epistle says ‘the devils also believe – and tremble!’

Lord Bishop, do have a look through the rest of the hymnbook by all means, but please leave our Christmas carols alone!

A Fateful Decision

I was delighted when Barak Obama was elected as President of the US. I hope that it wasn’t simply because he wasn’t George W. Bush. It was obvious though that he was going to have a fight on his hands in a country where any good work carried out by a public authority is liable to be denounced as ‘communism’!

Since his election he hasn’t disappointed, and he has certainly had to fight every inch of the way. He has, for instance, made it clear that (unlike George W. Bush – not to mention our own MP, Mr Douglas Carswell!) Mr Obama does accept the threat from global warming and humankind’s responsibility for this danger. He is, in fact, attending the Conference of World Leaders and leading scientists that opened in Copenhagen this week to discuss climate change and how best to combat it.

He has ordered the dismantling of the rocket sites in central Europe that the Russians regarded as a threat (well, wouldn’t the Americans have regarded Russian, or Chinese rockets sited in Canada or Mexico as something of a threat?). At home he is desperately trying, despite ferocious opposition, to ensure proper health care for the millions of US citizens who simply can’t afford adequate insurance cover.

Is he making another wise decision in deciding to send another 30,000 US troops to Aghanistan, or is it one that he will regret for the rest of his political life? The time that he took to consider this issue suggests that he is well aware of the possibility of disaster. Generals commanding armies stalemated by their enemies are always confident that, if only they had more troops and equipment, they could make one final push and sweep on to victory. They are not always right though!

Supposing the Taleban are defeated and their fighters simply disappear from the scene? No doubt their leaders are well known and may well be captured or killed. There must be hundreds of rank and file though. Most of them could just disappear among the Indian sub-continent's teeming millions and concentrate on terrorist acts there and elsewhere. They could, of course, reappear in Afghanistan when the Brits and Americans decided that they had won and withdrew their troops.

We are desperately trying to transform the Afghan government’s army into a force that can stand up to and defeat the Taleban without our help. Are we absolutely sure that they will want to? We gave covert financial and practical support to the ‘gallant Mojihadin’ in their guerrilla war against the Soviets only to see them transform themselves into ‘fanatical insurgents’, every bit as determined to get rid of us as they were the Russians. The western trained Afghan policeman who turned his weapon against his trainers, and the Muslim medical officer, who in the USA, is accused of suddenly murdering his comrades, could be straws in the wind.

Why are our forces in Afghanistan? Is it to introduce the Afghans to the joys of freedom and democracy; to encourage the education of girls and to ensure justice for women; to encourage religious tolerance? Hardly. It is surely to protect ‘the West’ from terrorist attacks like those in New York, London and Madrid.

I think it likely that the best way to do that might be to withdraw our troops completely from every Muslim country. That is what both extremist and moderate Muslims would like us to do. It would, at a stroke, remove a factor that turns ‘moderates’ into ‘extremists’ and feeds Al Quaida with a constant trickle of enthusiastic recruits. It would release NATO troops for their job of defending the peace of Britain and Mainland Europe.

A Question of Mobility

I have remarked before that although I feel far from comfortable with the zeitgeist of the 21st century, I am more than thankful for the many twenty-first century blessings that help to make life worth living, even in old age. None of my family lives very near and I would have little contact with them were it not for the telephone (particularly perhaps the mobile phone), my laptop and the Internet. And, of course, my sons living in London both have fast cars with which they come to see me regularly. Failing eyesight makes me less inclined to read than I once was (though oddly enough, using my laptop doesn’t seem to tire my eyes!) but radio, television, a video tape recorder and a DVD Player make good the deficiency

I think though, that the modern convenience that makes the biggest difference in my life is my electric mobility scooter, my ‘iron horse’. Luckily I have a shed large enough to house it, to which a kind neighbour has taken an electricity supply so that I am able to keep its batteries charged. I use it almost every day…..for shopping, for going to the Post Office, to Church and to the Quaker Meeting, for keeping doctor’s or optician’s appointments, for visiting friends and, on occasion, for going to the seafront for a breath of fresh air.

As the months pass I find myself less and less able to walk. Were it not for my ‘iron horse’ I would be totally housebound, able to leave home only with a taxi or when someone was able to give me a lift in his or her car. My electric scooter gives me freedom and mobility. It is the possession that I would be least willing to give up.

For all of those reasons I was totally shocked when I read in the Clacton Gazette that lack of funding is compelling Clacton and Tendring Shopmobility, a charity that has served local elderly and disabled local people for over a decade and a half, to close down for good on New Year’s Eve.

Shopmobility, based in Clacton’s Pier Avenue, rents out mobility scooters to those who need them for short periods at cut-price rates. It has provided a first class service to people like myself who are unable to purchase a scooter of their own (they are quite expensive!) or who would have nowhere to store it if they did purchase one. Last year they rented out scooters no less than 4,000 times and their membership almost trebled!

Shopmobility is staffed by volunteers but it does cost £45,000 a year to run. Earlier this year its management applied for lottery funding which would have secured its future for five years, but they were unsuccessful. Nor would Tendring Council help them despite the fact that the charity expects to be in a position to support itself within two years.

Shopmobility’s manager, Julie Hewes-Gardner, says, ‘People are distraught. Many will now be housebound. They won’t be able to get out to the shops and banks, or to socialise’.

I wonder on what Tendring Council is spending our money that is more important than brightening the lives of some of Clacton’s least privileged and most vulnerable residents? It is tempting to denounce them as Scrooges but that is hardly fair on Ebenezer Scrooge. He did, you’ll recall, mend his ways just in time for Christmas. There’s little sign of the Council doing anything of the sort.

Bankers’ Bonuses

Those with brilliant brains at the top of the Banking World will, so they say, desert us and sell their brilliance elsewhere if they do not receive their accustomed astronomical ‘bonuses’ on top of their already more-than-generous salaries.

I think that the instant reaction of most ordinary people is ‘let them go – and good riddance. If they are that brilliant, how is it that we had to bail them out with millions of pounds of our money?’

I think though that the threat raises a more fundamental issue. Most people whose work demands skill and experience, work primarily because they enjoy exercising those qualities. The only skill that I have ever possessed is that of stringing words together to produce the kind of material that I hope others enjoy reading. It was very nice when I was paid for doing so. Nowadays, I am not. My income is however sufficient for my quite-modest needs and I exercise my writing skills, in producing this weekly blog for instance, because doing so gives me satisfaction and pleasure.

Can it be that those whose skill lies in the manipulation of finance, come to believe that this is life’s only reality, and that work has no purpose or meaning beyond the acquisition of more and more money, from whatever source it may come? If so, I feel truly sorry for them. Despite their great wealth they are poverty-stricken indeed!