Week 41 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

A Helping Hand

       

   It is a sad comment on today’s world (or perhaps on my state of mind!) that my heart sank when, responding to a ring on my front door bell, I found two personable young women smiling at me.  Were they hoping to sell me something, seek my financial support for some worthy cause; or try to persuade me to become a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness?   It was none of those things.  They were calling on me and my neighbours  to publicise the help that is available from our local Citizens’ Advice Bureau.  They gave me a flyer, reproduced here, giving contact details and the range of their service and – no doubt noticing I was leaning heavily on a stick! – assured me that if, when I needed help or advice, I couldn’t get to their office they would gladly send an adviser to my home.

            They also handed me a very useful little leaflet entitled Quick Guide to Welfare Reform which sets out the effects of the Government’s recent changes to Social and Welfare Services, how they may affect us and what we can do to help ourselves if we are affected. The leaflet tackles the replacement of Disability Living Allowance with Personal Independence Payments, as well as Social Fund Reform, Universal Credit (replacing a number of currently means-tested benefits) the Benefit Cap, the Bedroom Tax and Council Tax Benefit. In each case brief advice is given on ‘what can I do?’ to those affected.

            Supposing, for instance, you are currently receiving Disability Living Allowance and you get a letter (as, if you haven’t already had one, you undoubtedly will!) from the Department of Work and Pensions informing you that that allowance is coming to an end and asking if you want to claim Personal Independence Payments.  If you fail to claim PIP your payments will simply stop.  Your local Citizens Advice Bureau will help with your application for PIP, with appealing the decision if you are not awarded PIP, with finding out what other benefits may be affected and advising you on coping financially if you have a drop in income.

           

A Nation of Debters!

Nowadays practically everyone is burdened with debt to an extent that was unheard of in my pre-World War II childhood and youth.  In those days if you wanted something badly you ‘saved up for it’ perhaps for months or even years.  My parents had a horror of debt that, to some extent, they have passed on to me.  I remember them discussing far into the night whether or not to buy a radio (in those days it was a wireless set of course!) by hire purchase or, as my dad disparagingly described it, ‘on the never, never’.  They did decide to do so in the end!

            How very different things are today!  ‘Saving up’, was struck a mortal blow with the advent of the credit card.  Do you remember the posters advertising the very first ones?   ‘Barclaycard takes the waiting out of wanting!’  Daytime commercial television owes much of its finance to adverts for those easily obtainable (but less easily cleared!) payday loans – ‘Two or three hundred pounds till next payday – just to get you through a one-off crisis’.   But, of course, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to pay back the whole of that loan plus interest, on your next payday – and the interest will begin to accumulate!

            Then there are debts resulting from government policies.  Student loans, to pay tuition fees and living costs, can amount to £20,000 or more – a debt that can hang over former students’ heads for the whole of their working lives.   House purchase by means of a mortgage loan is strongly encouraged by the government that has the ideological aim of creating \a nation of home owners.  That may be the result in twenty or thirty years’ time.  In the meantime though it creates only a nation of home buyers – a nation of debtors, any one of whom could lose his or her job at any time, default on the mortgage payments and become homeless.

            It is no surprise therefore, to discover that debts are among the most common problems about which Citizens Advice Bureaux are consulted.  They can’t make debts disappear but they can help you to sort out your household budget and perhaps negotiate with your creditors to work out an acceptable way for you to deal with that debt burden.

            Debt is like a cancer.  The sooner it is caught, the more likely it is that there will be a happy ending.  The borrower should consult the local CAB before being ensnared by a loan shark or a payday loan provider.  If you live in the Tendring District phone the number on the flyer at the beginning of this blog.  I think I am right in saying that wherever you live in the United Kingdom there will be a CAB within a few miles.  I know that Tendring Topics….on line has readers in the USA, in Russia, in mainland China and elsewhere in Europe and the world. Debt is a universal scourge that ignores national borders.  I can only hope that there are similar services in their countries for those who need them..

A Housing Bubble?

            I have never pretended to understand economics.  I hope though that I have my fair share of common sense.  It is obvious to me that when the demand for an object or a service increases more rapidly than that service can expand or the objects can be supplied, the price of that service or those objects will rise.

            This is what happened with the housing market in the 1990s.   The demand for houses (spurred on by the political ambition of home ownership for all) outran the supply.   Thanks to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ legislation (that the New Labour Government had lacked the courage to repeal) there was no large stock of publicly owned homes to help keep rents down, so private landlords raised their rents as high as ‘the market’ permitted. The ethical principle of the 'free market'  is, of course, to get as much as you can grab for as little as you can get away with. 

            The demand for home ownership increased.  To encourage purchasers, banks and building societies were prepared to lend 95 percent of cost of house purchase – in some cases even 100 percent, with perhaps an additional loan for the purchase of furniture.  On day-time commercial tv, money-lenders touted for custom; ‘Never mind if you’re unemployed, disabled and have a low credit rating.  We may still be able to help you with a loan’.  ‘Then thrived the usurers’, as Shakespeare might well have put it had he lived at the end of the 20^th century instead of the 16^th!

            Inevitably the bubble burst.  Thousands were left with huge debts and homes that had lost their value overnight. Thousands were made homeless, having lost their homes (that they had thought they owned!) and their savings.  Banks and building societies had to seek government help and the government used our money to rescue them.  That – as the former governor of the Bank of England repeatedly told us – is the cause of the country’s financial problems.  It wasn’t the poor, the unemployed and the disabled who produced the financial crisis from which the government is now trying to extricate us, but the banks and the money lenders aided and abetted by a business friendly government.

Once bitten, twice shy.  The money-lenders, having been rescued with our money, were determined not to be caught out again.  There was still a demand for homes – still no great reserve of social housing to keep rents at a reasonable level.   Interest rates have been kept artificially low but lenders could sieve out risky borrowers by demanding a much larger deposit than in the past before agreeing to a mortgage.  Often twenty-five percent or even more of the purchase price was demanded.

Is history about to repeat itself?  When the government first announced their help-with-the-deposit scheme that guaranteed all but five percent of the deposit on a mortgage, I commented in this blog that the demand for homes ‘at affordable prices’ would now outstrip the supply. Those ‘free market forces’ that are so popular in government circles would ensure that  house prices would rise – perhaps as another bubble expanding to bursting point?   Since then the Institute of Directors, the Institute of Chartered Surveyors and the national Chambers of Commerce are among those who have warned of the same danger. 

Has the government heeded?  Not a bit of it.  They have expanded the scheme to include the purchase of existing houses as well as new-builds and at the recent Conservative Party Conference it was announced that the scheme would begin immediately instead of in a year’s time as had been earlier announced.  It does of course need the co-operation of the Banks and Building Societies. Only Lloyds and RBS (over both of which the government can exercise direct control) have so far agreed to take part. In the meantime, house prices are rising.  I suppose that, as a home owner with my mortgage long since paid off, I should be pleased. I’m not!

           

Week 33 2013

Tendring Topics………on line

Clacton-on-Sea – Sea, Sand…..and Social Deprivation?

            Those of us who complain about the increasing crime rate are often assured that it’s all just an illusion.   ‘There’s a perceived increase in crime brought about by sensational press reports and by politicians with an axe to grind. The fact is that there is a steady decrease in reported crime. Year by year Britain is becoming a safer country in which to live’. 

This may well be true in most of the country but it certainly isn’t in north-east Essex.  In Clacton-on-Sea there were 38 robberies in the town during April, May and June compared with only 15 in the corresponding months last year.  In Colchester (which I certainly never think of as being ‘safer’ than Clacton) there was also a rise in robberies but only from 8 to 15.  Elsewhere throughout Essex, just as the wiseacres insist, the number of robberies and other crimes did fall.

I am disturbed by the knowledge that part of that north-east Essex crime wave is taking place uncomfortably close to my home in Clacton’s Dudley Road.  It’s not so long ago that a knife attack took place within view of my front door.  Had it not been for a neighbour giving first aid and summoning an ambulance and the Police it would have resulted in a violent death and a murder charge. More recently there has been a mugging involving ‘grievous bodily harm’ in Old Road, only a few hundred yards away from my home.  Even more disturbing to me personally was a report in last week’s Clacton Gazette of a man who had withdrawn a three-figure sum in cash from Magdalene Green Post Office at 9.30 am one morning.. As he walked home along Coppins Road in broad daylight, three men attacked him and robbed him of his money.  It is from that same Post Office that I sometimes draw three figure sums of money from my bank account.  I too travel home along Coppins Road on my mobility scooter!

Recently elected Police and Crime Commissioner Nick Alston is reported as saying that Clacton’s problems arise from. ‘a toxic mix of multiple occupancy, alcohol, people choosing to live here or being placed here, and unscrupulous landlords’.  Well, yes, but he might have added that another very potent ingredient of that toxic mix is the very high, and still rising, level of unemployment, and the virtual impossibility of  unskilled new arrivals in the town finding work.

Social Deprivation

The local daily Gazette reports the finding of the Centre for Social Justice that 54 percent of those aged between 16 and 64 in Clacton’s Pier Ward, are on unemployment benefit, the fifth highest percentage in the country.  That’s at the very centre of the town which one might have thought would be its richest area! In Jaywick, part of which is officially Britain’s most deprived area, 35 percent of working age people claim unemployment benefit and 54 percent of the over-16s have no educational qualifications.  They are not alone.  In Clacton overall 41 percent of adults, over twice the national average, have no qualifications!  Nearly one in three Clactonians, the fifth highest in the country again, claims a state pension. I’m one of those one-in-three and I hope that, at 92 and having been a taxpayer for some seventy of those years (and I still am!), no-one grudges my claiming it.

Councillor Peter Halliday, the Council’s leader, is reported as saying that it is important to understand what is causing these problems and how to address them.  He says that high unemployment in the town has been exacerbated by a high number of benefit migrants moving to cheap accommodation either in Jaywick or in one of the old bed-and-breakfast boarding houses being converted into night shelters.  He said that more needed to be done to encourage working people to live in Clacton, rather than the unemployed.

The fact is, of course, that many, perhaps nearly all, of those unemployed ‘benefit migrants’ would very much like to become ‘working people’.  They don’t come to Clacton because it’s easier to get ‘benefits’ here.   They come because the cap on benefits and the ‘bedroom tax’ have made it almost impossible for unemployed – and many low-paid working people – to live in the London area.  It’s a short train-ride from London to Clacton.  It’s usually possible, if you’re patient and try really hard, to get some sort of employment in London.  Incomers don’t realize – or don’t believe – that the employment situation is much worse here.

Many of those who survive on benefits and seem content to do so, have tried in vain so many times to get work that they have given up trying.  Meanwhile, as a result of the government’s austerity cuts and in the interests of ‘efficiency’, machines are replacing flesh and blood, employers are ‘down-sizing’ and ‘rationalising’ and there are fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled or semi-skilled workers to do.  The reason why, as Councillor Halliday suggests, we are short of ‘working people’ is that we are desperately short of work for them to do.

Clacton’ sunny side!  

Younger son (Andy) enjoying himself on Clacton beach half a century ago!

Meanwhile, at least during this extraordinarily hot and sunny summer, Clacton-on-Sea appears on the surface to be flourishing.  Visitors (mostly day-visitors it’s true) are enjoying safe sea bathing from our sandy, gently sloping beaches, strolling through our colourful cliff-top gardens and having seaside fun on the reinvigorated pier. The till-bells of pubs, restaurants and town centre shops are ringing merrily!  I doubt if any of the visitors who throng Pier Avenue, High Street and Station Road in the August sunshine would believe that they are enjoying themselves in a ‘benefit ghetto’!  Those of us who have made our homes here (I have lived in Clacton for nearly sixty years so I surely qualify as a native) wouldn’t wish to live anywhere else.   Here in Clacton-on-Sea it is rarely quite so cold, quite so unbearably hot, quite so wet, quite so overcast as other parts of the UK.   No other seaside resort in Britain has as low an average rainfall as Clacton-on-Sea, Brightlingsea, Frinton-on-Sea, Walton-on-the-Naze and Dovercourt.  The driest spot in the UK is officially St. Osyth – just two or three miles as the crow flies from my front door.

Elder son Pete busy with his school homework almost fifty years ago.

Clacton is a wonderful place in which to live and to bring up children – but we do need better schools for them  (like the ones we had here half a century ago!) and much better career opportunities for them as they grow up. They shouldn't need to go to  London, or even to Colchester, Chelmsford or Ipswich, to get a worthwhile job. Both my sons took it for granted that there would be no satisfying employment locally for them and that they would have to go to London to further their careers

Human Resource Units (or Children of God?)

 Not everyone is clever or skilled.  There needs to be adequately paid jobs for those who are willing enough to work, but lack any particular skill.  Public authorities once met that need but do so no longer.  Do you remember the time when there were uniformed porters at railway stations, conductors on buses and important looking uniformed ‘commissionaires’ at the entrance of cinemas and theatres?  They weren’t very important or very well-paid people but they provided a uniformed ‘presence’ that deterred vandals and hooligans, they answered people’s questions, and they generally made life easier for the rest of us.  Nowadays there’s often no-one manning the ticket office at Clacton Station!  There is a ‘ticket machine’ and notices warning of the penalties resulting from travelling without a ticket.  What more can travellers possibly want?

          Officials who are responsible for the work-force of any organisation used to be known as Personnel Managers or perhaps Staff Managers.   Have you noticed that nowadays they’re known as Directors of Human Resources?  That job title effectively puts men and women, whom we Christians believe to be the children of God, on the same level as cans of beans, bags of cement and gallons of petrol; Human Resource Units (HRUs).  From time to time, like bags of cement and gallons of petrol, they become surplus to requirements and can be discarded when cost effectiveness, productivity and profitability (the three ‘persons’ of Mammon’s Unholy Trinity) demand it.  The maximising of profits is best ensured by Zero Hours Contracts which mean that workers are always available to perform any task required – but the employer has no obligation to provide them with work or to pay them a retainer while they are idle.  The main purpose of any public utility company is no longer to serve the public – but to maximise the dividends of the share-holders.

            There surely must be a better way of organising society than that!

             

Week 15 2013

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new……’

So declared the dying King Arthur according to Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem The Passing of Arthur.  If there is any historical basis for the Arthurian legend, it is that Arthur was a Romanised Briton struggling to save a remnant of Roman civilisation in a country overrun by Anglo-Saxon barbarians.  Many decades were to pass and much blood shed before our land again became a civilised united kingdom comparable with the Britain of Roman times.

 There was a similar end of an old order and its replacement by the new just a week ago, on 1^st April.  The final nails were being hammered into the coffin of the caring welfare state established by my generation in the wake of World War II.  It was being replaced by a new brutal barbarism, devoted to the service and worship of its false god Mammon, to whom it is determined to sacrifice our poorest and most helpless citizens in the interest of a favoured minority.  It was on 1^st April (and how appropriated that it should have been on April Fools Day!) that the government’s austerity cuts, and the radical reconstruction of the NHS increasingly opening its doors to ‘the private sector’, came into force and the direction in which our country is being led became abundantly clear.

I have little doubt that many years and a great deal of suffering will have to be endured before we return to a Britain comparable with that of Clement Attlee, Harold MacMillan, Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, in which Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear for all our citizens were the objectives of all our political leaders no matter how different may have been their means of achieving them.

The Chancellor and his supporters claim that the government’s policies encourage those who work hard to support themselves and their families.  Yet two of the measures that came into force last week will penalise low-paid workers as much as, if not more than, the unemployed.   As a former local authority Housing Manager I find the new ‘bedroom tax’ particularly objectionable. Yes, I know that the government dislikes that designation but I’m afraid they’ll have to learn to live with it just as their predecessors had to live with the ‘poll tax’ that they found equally objectionable and that brought about their downfall.

The bedroom tax clearly labels tenants of ‘social housing’ (Councils and Housing Associations) as second class citizens.  Owner/occupiers can, of course, have as many bedrooms as they like and so can occupiers of publicly owned ‘tied houses’, provided they are posh enough.   Nobody asks how many spare bedrooms there may be at either 9 or 10 Downing Street or at Chequers. It is only Plebs who live in Council Houses who must pay extra – or get out – if they have a spare bedroom to accommodate an occasional guest, or a grown-up son or daughter who sometimes comes home to spend a weekend with  mum and dad.

They have got it all worked out.  Single or widowed, and married or ‘living together’ tenants with no children, need only one bedroom.  If they have one child, two of the same sex, or two of the opposite sex but under ten years old, they need only two bedrooms, and so on.  When I was Clacton’s Housing Manager we used to encourage elderly tenants whose children had left home, to move into smaller accommodation – and many of them did.  We never dreamed of compelling them or of penalising them if they failed to do so. Nor did we ever suggest that they should move into less roomy accommodation until we had such accommodation to offer them.  They may have lived in one of the Council’s houses but it was their home and the (Conservative) Council respected that.

Nowadays those who seek ‘social housing’ are not allowed the privilege of transforming their council houses into ‘their homes’.  Tenancies are all to be ‘short term’ and, unless they are prepared to pay extra for the privilege, they’re just offered minimal shelter from the elements. No, of course the local authority or housing association can’t be expected to have smaller accommodation for those who simply can’t pay that extra ‘bedroom tax’.  ‘They must find that for themselves – or sleep rough as many others have to.  The Salvation Army or some other lot of ‘do gooders’ will make sure that they don’t actually starve – and the weather will surely warm up eventually’.

Another measure that will affect the employed as much as the unemployed relates to Council Tax.  From last Monday thousands of disabled or otherwise disadvantaged house-holders will be liable to pay their full Council Tax for the first time.   This imposition of central government is particularly clever as Councils are permitted to continue any existing rebates provided they can make up the short-fall elsewhere.   Thus it will be local and not central government that gets the blame.

And the wider picture

            Just as the members of the government are penalising the poor for failing to move into non-existent smaller homes, they are penalising the unemployed for failing to take up non-existent jobs.   The cap on benefits and restriction of cost-of-living increases to one percent when inflation is over twice that rate are all justified as helping to break the ‘dependency culture’ and encourage the unemployed to work for their living.   The biggest and best encouragement that the poor can have is for there to be plenty of properly paid work for them to do.  Not until that situation exists is the government or the popular press entitled to denigrate the unemployed as ‘work-shy’. How extraordinary that those who believe that the poor can only be persuaded to work by holding over them the threat of homelessness and starvation, simultaneously believe that the very wealthy can only be persuaded to give of their best by the promise of substantial bribes,  euphemistically referred to as bonuses!

            I am glad to see the Christian Churches in this country united in their support of the poor.  Paul Morrison, public issues policy adviser of the Methodist Church told the BBC in a recent interview that the benefit cuts are a symptom of a popularly held belief that the poor ‘somehow deserve their poverty’.  Christian Churches accused politicians and the news media of promoting six myths about the poor:

They are lazy.   They are addicted to drink or drugs.   They are not really poor.  They cheat the system. They have an easy life.  They were the cause of the deficit.     These are false claims that all Christians have a duty to challenge.

An ‘Old Hand’ for a New Job!

In 1974 the Tendring District Council was newly formed from the amalgamation of Clacton, Frinton and Walton, and Brightlingsea Urban Districts, the Tendring Rural District and the Borough of Harwich.  As the new council’s first Public Relations Officer I soon realized that the councillors from Harwich, of whatever their political allegiance, exercised an authority and an influence well beyond their numbers on the new Council. 

That was nearly forty years ago but it seems probable that the recent victory of John Hawkins in a District Council by-election will continue and strengthen that tradition.   Mr Hawkins had been Chief Executive of the Tendring Council. He retired in 2010 after thirteen years in the Council’s top job.

During his election campaign as the Labour Candidate for the vacancy, he had said that he would use his knowledge and experience of local government within the Tendring District to give Harwich a strong voice on the council.  It was after my own retirement from the Council’s service that John Hawkins was appointed to the post of Chief Executive,  so I have never met him.  I wish him well though and I have little doubt that, now that parliamentary style politics have been introduced into the Council Chamber, his experienced voice will strengthen and hearten ‘the Opposition’.

‘Brain Upgrade’ needed?

Do you have a feeling of apprehension when you go to close down your computer and a notice appears on the screen urging you not to switch off because one or more updates are being installed?  The computer will switch itself off when the process is complete.

        I know that I do, because experience tells me that when I  switch on again, something (who knows what?) won’t be quite the same.  I know that whatever it is will make my computer more secure and/or more efficient.  It may also mean though that I will have to perform a familiar task in a different and unfamiliar way – and, at my age, I just don’t like change!

That’s why this cartoon, forwarded to me by my fifteen-years-younger-than-me sister-in-law, speaks to my condition (as we Quakers say)

           

Week 6 2013

Tendring Topics.......on line

April Fools!

 1^st April is traditionally the day on which we get surprises – many of them unpleasant ones.  Most will disappear though, as with a triumphant cry of ‘April Fool!’ the surprise is revealed to be a hoax.

            Sadly, there will be nothing good humoured or ephemeral about the unpleasant surprise that, for many of us, will be manifest from the first day of April this year*.  This is the day on which the government’s economic measures, designed – so they say – to reducing and ultimately eliminating that deficit about which we hear so much, begin to take effect.  The immediate effect will be to make the poorest and most vulnerable of our fellow countrymen and women even poorer and more disadvantaged than they are at present.

            From that day, there will be no Disability Living Allowance.  This will be replaced by a new allowance payable only to those who can demonstrate being capable of no work whatsoever.   Others will lose the £208 disability living allowance currently paid to them and go instead onto the £112 job seekers allowance payable only for as long as they are actively seeking any work of which they may be capable.

            Then there’s the ‘bedroom tax’ that will mean that families in social housing with a spare bedroom will have the choice of paying extra rent or of moving into smaller accommodation.  The poor are not permitted to have an unused bedroom for the occasional use of adult sons or daughters or other friends or relatives. They’re not really being offered much of a choice because there won’t be smaller accommodation available for them.

            And don’t let us forget that the government is withdrawing from local authorities the funding that made it possible for them to reduce or waive altogether Council Tax on properties occupied by the unemployed or the disabled.  I have just watched on tv an unemployed (but seeking employment) middle-aged woman in Cornwall in tears because she says that she is already living frugally to the very limit of her meagre income.  ‘How am I going to find the money for Council Tax;  by giving up heating….or eating?’

            But, of course, we don’t have to go to Cornwall to find examples of extreme hardship.   In Tendring, because benefits for the elderly have been ring-fenced and our district has a very high proportion of old people, the withdrawal of this funding will mean a loss to the Council of two million pounds!  The Clacton Gazette carries a report of a sixty-year old who has worked all his life but is now full-time carer to his stroke-stricken and disabled wife.  They have been exempt for Council Tax but have been told that they will now be expected to pay the full amount.  How are they to find it?   They are just one couple among thousands suffering similarly nationwide.

            In this instance the Government has been particularly clever/cunning (delete as preferred).  Local authorities don’t have to withdraw this subsidy on unemployed and disabled liability for Council Tax.  They needn’t do so if they can raise the money involved in other ways – by such means as cutting libraries or sports centre services, reducing the frequency of collection of refuse and recyclables, or postponing the repair of highways and footpaths.  This will cause antagonism between the working population and the unemployed and disabled, both of which groups will resent the exemption of us oldies from these austerity measures. And it will be local government, not national government that has to make the final decision.  Thus it will be ‘That lot in the Town Hall’ not ‘them in Westminster’ who will get the blame.

            Just to add insult to injury, 1^st April will also be the date on which the seriously wealthy – those with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year - will have their higher rate of income tax reduced!  We’re all in this together?  Now that is an April Fool hoax!

*I have just learned that our water and sewerage charges (from the privatised water companies) are to go up by an average of £13 per annum from April. This will mean nothing to the lucky minority who will be having their income tax reduced at the same time.  It won't mean very much to me.  But there are those for whom it will be the final straw that breaks the camel's back 

‘Making sick people sicker’

            A few weeks ago there was condemnation from both sides of the House of Commons of the way in which thousands of sick and disabled people had had their benefit axed after the private company Atos, that the government has employed to ‘weed out slackers and scroungers’, had wrongly found fit to work.   There had been a number of deaths, including suicides, by people who had been assessed as fit for work following what was described as ‘a demeaning process that was making sick people sicker’.

            Private Eye, a publication that probes deeply where others walk hastily by, has learned that, despite these revelations, the government has tabled amendments to the employment and support allowance legislation which academics and campaigners say will lead to even greater suffering by the genuinely ill. 

 Private Eye reports that:  ‘Plans include withdrawing benefit if an assessor decides that a claimant’s ability to work could be improved by aids, such as guide dogs, walking sticks or prosthetic limbs – whether or not the claimant has access to them or can use them. Atos assessors already have the power to carry out an ‘imaginary wheelchair test’ by which they decide that a person could work if they used a wheelchair – even if they do not have one.  Under the changes, due to take place without public debate, people will also lose benefit if the assessor decides that adjustments could be made for them in the workplace – whether or not those changes have been made.’

            MP Tom Greatrex is reported as saying, ‘The fact that people can be assessed as fit for work on the basis of an imaginary guide dog, without taking account of the availability of guide dogs and the time taken to train both dogs and users, highlights just how far the Department of Work and Pensions seems to be prepared to go to find people fit for work without the support they need to make work a reality’.

            All of the above reminds me that my blue ‘disabled parking’ badge (that I use infrequently and only when my sons or a friend give me a lift) expires in July.  I shall have to apply for it to be renewed. Previously they were prepared to take the word of my doctor that, to use today’s new-speak, my mobility was strictly limited. I understand that there are new, more stringent, eligibility criteria nowadays. I may have to appear before government employed assessors. I certainly don’t look forward to parading my disability before those who are employed to try to catch me out   I really can’t walk safely, even the shortest distance, without a stick – and I’m much happier when I have a companion to take my other arm, or there is some furniture or perhaps a railing, with which I can steady myself.  I hope that will satisfy the assessors.  If I have to be even worse than that to qualify for a blue badge there would really be no point in my having one – because there would be no way I could walk from the parked car to the shop, cinema or church that would have been my destination.

A Dubious Triumph

          Both my sons were pupils at Clacton County High School in the 1960s and early ‘70s.   One went on to Cambridge and graduated with a good degree.  The other decided not to seek university admission but to leave school at 16, take a job and study for a professional qualification in his spare time.  He did so very effectively, taking the two parts of the Institute of Housing’s examination for professional Housing Managers and passing both at his first attempt.  Both my sons have had satisfying and socially valuable working careers.

            Consequently I have always held Clacton County High School in warm regard and was delighted when, referring to the CCHS, the Clacton Gazette carried the headline Valuable triumph – School among the country’s top performers.

            Reading on however, I discovered that the CCHS wasn’t in the top flight of schools for its GCSE or ‘A’ level results but had achieved one of the highest ‘value added’ scores in the country.  Very creditable, of course, but it may say almost as much about the abysmal ignorance of some of the pupils when they came to the CCHS aged eleven as it does about the standard of education that they later achieved.

            The Gazette published ‘league tables’ showing the actual exam results of ten north-east Essex educational establishments.  No-one would expect Clacton’s Comprehensive Schools’ results to equal those of selective schools like Colchester Royal Grammar School and Colchester County High School for Girls – but it was disappointing to see them at the very bottom of the list!   Right at the bottom was Clacton Coastal Academy, formed by the amalgamation of Bishop’s Gate College and Colbayns High School.   Only 36 percent of their students taking GCSE’s achieved 5 A* to C Grades at GCSE or their equivalent, including English and Maths.  Next above them was the Clacton County High School with just 51 percent.

            Needless to say the Head-teachers of both schools cite the controversial changes in the marking of GCSE English exam papers during the year in explanation – but these changes surely affected Colne Community School, Brightlingsea (72 percent) and Tendring Technology College, Frinton (69 percent) as much as they did the Clacton Schools.

            It is certainly an achievement to have raised the standard of children of low achievement at primary school – but if this result was achieved by neglecting the encouragement and support of high flyers, and there must surely be some of these (as there were in 1970 when Clacton County High School sent no less than four of its sixth formers to Cambridge) it was a somewhat hollow triumph.

Week 49 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

Be careful what you wish for!

          Do you remember how recently it was that we were all worried about Britain’s devastating drought?   Not much more than six months ago we were warned about the dreadful effects of a drier than usual autumn and winter.   It would, we were told, take weeks of steady rain to replenish reservoirs, fill rivers and bring underground water supplies to their normal levels. Quite early in the spring the use of hose-pipes for watering domestic gardens or washing the family car was banned in a great many areas.   We all yearned for soft refreshing rain.  In churches and places of worship throughout the UK rain was the object of many a heartfelt prayer.

            Oh dear!  What happened was like one of those fairy stories in which a wish is granted by an apparently benevolent witch.   The wish is fulfilled but with consequences that had not been foreseen.

            We had our rain, buckets of it, throughout a thoroughly wet summer.  Rivers filled and overflowed. Homes were flooded. For a brief period in some areas there were simultaneously hose pipe bans and floods!  Soon though the Water Authorities realized that they had, in a few weeks, received several normal months’ worth of rain.  Hose pipe bans were lifted and the faithful began to pray for a dry and sunny late-summer and autumn so that, at Harvest Thanksgiving services they could sing confidently, ‘All is safely gathered in, ‘ere the winter storms begin!’

But in many parts of the UK all was not safely gathered in, or at least harvest time had not brought the abundant crops for which farmers and gardeners had hoped. Autumn brought more heavy rain and now – at the beginning of winter – we have been having yet more.  Once again there have been flooded homes in the West Country, in Yorkshire and in the North-East. Some unfortunates have had their homes flooded three times in as many months.  This south-eastern corner of East Anglia, although having much more rain than usual, has escaped the floods.  Our Essex Sunshine Coast really is a good place to live!

New Year’s Day 1979. My motor caravan outside my bungalow in Dudley Road, Clacton. I hope that we don’t get a repeat of the weather!

What next?  As I type these words the sky has cleared but the temperature has dropped several degrees and the immediate weather forecast is ‘dry - but much colder!’   Oh dear, I do hope we don’t get standing snow.  It is the one circumstance guaranteed to keep my mobility scooter in its shed (or, as I prefer to put it, my ‘iron horse in its stable’!) and leave me house-bound!

I have distrusted forecasts of any kind on the front page of the Daily Express ever since in 1938 and early 1939 when their headline assured us that ‘There will be no war this year, nor next year either!’  In 2011 they kept up the tradition by forecasting icy weather just before that Indian Summer in October.  I have an uncomfortable feeling though that this year, as they forecast a bitterly cold and ice-bound winter – they may be right!

The Government - and the Press

I sometimes think that politicians must be made of sterner stuff than the rest of us.  During the past year we have seen disastrous failures in Government functions that, had I been the senior politician responsible for the department concerned, I would have felt demanded my immediate resignation.  However, the politicians concerned have simply shrugged their shoulders, blamed the disaster on the civil servants involved, assured the public that ‘lessons have been learned’ and carried on as though nothing had happened.

Reaction to the phone hacking and corruption scandal that has engulfed the press, the police and the politicians during the past year has been somewhat similar. All the press have been tainted but at the centre of the scandal was News International, a news media empire ruled by Rupert Murdoch, Australian by birth and a citizen of the USA by adoption.   Successive British Prime Ministers have courted his favour and that of his lieutenants in the hope of ensuring favourable headlines in the Sun, the News of the World and other publications under his control.   This hope was not unjustified.  ‘It was us wot done it!’ boasted the Sun after one of Mrs Thatcher’s electoral victories.

I have long believed that New Labour with its rejection of democratic socialism and traditional Labour Values and, in government, its willing acceptance of the leadership of the most right-wing American President of the last century, was created for no other reason than to persuade Rupert Murdoch to switch his media Empire’s political allegiance from the Conservative to the Labour Party and thus  make Tony Blair’s emasculated party ‘electable’.

David Cameron followed in Tony Blair’s footsteps, appointing Andy Coulson, one of Rupert Murdoch’s former lieutenants as his personal spin-doctor and becoming a close friend of News International’s Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks. Both these former employees of News International now face criminal charges in connection with alleged phone hacking and other scandals related to press abuse of its powers.

The Leveson enquiry investigated objectively and comprehensively the whole range of Press Activities, interviewing Rupert Murdoch and his senior lieutenants and former lieutenants,  Prime Minister David Cameron, Tony Blair and a great many others. David Cameron told victims of the phone hacking and other abuses of press freedom, that he would accept the verdict of the Leveson Enquiry in full, ‘unless it was completely bonkers’. As part of the verdict would inevitably criticise the Prime Minister himself for the closeness of his relationship with members of the News International organisation, I would have thought that his best course of action would have been to accept Lord Leveson’s verdict and recommendations in full, hurry through any legislation that might be necessary to implement those recommendations, and hope that the electorate would soon forget the whole sorry affair.

But that isn’t going to happen.  David Cameron has evidently forgotten his pledge to News International’s victims. While accepting Lord Leveson’s insistence on the need to have a strong and wholly independent (both of politicians and of those involved in the press) body to regulate press behaviour, he is strongly opposed to that body having the statutory underpinning needed to enforce its decisions.

The reason for this, so it is said, is to protect the freedom of the press – a future government might use any such legislation as a springboard to curb press freedom.  What total rubbish!   Does Mr Cameron really imagine that a government of the future determined to muzzle the press would give two hoots about decisions that might have been made a decade or so earlier?  Can you imagine Hitler, in 1936, having the least interest in whatever a democratic German government had decided in the 1920s?    In any case, how ‘free’ is a press where editorial policy and political direction of a large part of it are dictated by a cosmopolitan multi-millionaire with no roots here and owing no loyalty to this country, its culture and its institutions?

Until we give more thought to the ownership of the press we should worry less about having a government-controlled press and worry rather more about having a press-controlled government constantly ‘adjusting’ its policies in the hope of gaining a few more votes at by-elections as a result of positive headlines in the tabloids and the support of the press moguls!

Robin Hoods – in reverse

There is no field in which the members of the government have revealed what are, I fear, their true colours than that of housing.  It is there that their Robin Hood in Reverse policy of robbing the poor to benefit the rich is most clearly exposed.

In order to level off to some extent the difference between the proportion of their incomes that poor and very wealthy people pay in taxation, it has been suggested that there should be extra higher bands of Council Tax liability and/or an extra ‘mansion tax’ paid by those whose homes are valued at over £2 million.

Both ideas have been vetoed by David Cameron.  He really doesn’t think that those who have worked hard and saved all their lives for their homes, should be penalised for doing so. How many people who live in homes worth over £2 million acquired them by working and saving hard all through their lives?   You’d need to enjoy a salary of £50,000 every year for 40 years to earn £2 million, never mind save it!

When considering housing at the other end of the social scale, government attitudes are very different.  Council tenants, and tenants in receipt of Housing Benefit, are to be charged a ‘bedroom tax’ for every empty bedroom. No, they are not allowed to have a spare bedroom for occasional visitors. Those financially squeezed Daily Mail readers can’t be expected to subsidise the hospitality of ‘benefit scroungers’.

Never mind the fact that some of those tenants will be old people who have paid taxes all their working lives and are struggling to live on the state pension plus any benefits to which they may be entitled.   Others will be employed, but on or near the minimum wage.  They need the housing benefit, not for themselves, but to add to the wealth of rapacious landlords.  Nobody, says the government, will have to pay the bedroom tax.  There is the choice of moving into smaller accommodation (if they can find any) or taking in a lodger.

            A listener to the BBC’s Breakfast Programme, when hearing about the proposed ‘Bedroom Tax’, enquired how many spare bedrooms there might be at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country home, which is also publicly owned.