Week 12 22.3.11

Tendring Topics……on line

Some good news!

Yes, there is some good news for a change. What’s more, it’s good news for Clacton! The recession has cost the town some of its best-known and, it might have been thought, most firmly based businesses. There was the Co-op Departmental Store in Station Road – Clacton’s only departmental store. There was the well-stocked and welcoming Comet Store on the Waterglade retail park off Old Road, the furniture store on the corner of West Avenue and Agate Road, ‘Eyewear’, the opticians on the corner of High Street and Beach Road who had dealt with my optical needs for many years, and Woolworth, fronting onto both Pier Avenue and West Avenue, a national as well as a local institution. There were smaller businesses; the video hire shop almost opposite the former St Osyth Road Infants’ school which I passed by in my mobility scooter almost every day. I could go on.

Some of those gaps have been refilled. Woolworth’s site is now being used by the 99p Store; a business new to the town that never seems to be short of customers. The Co-op Departmental Store was taken over by Vergo. They seemed promising but went into liquidation after only a few months. The Black Bull pub in St Osyth Road was demolished to make way for a Tesco Express.

Other more recent developments have already produced a welcome 60 new jobs with the possibility of more on the way. The carpet shop in West Avenue has been redeveloped as Baldwin’s Department Store. The Proprietor, Kevin Baldwin from Harwich had been the Manager of Vergo and has taken on some of Vergo’s redundant staff. On the Waterglade retail park the former Comet Store is now a branch of NEXT a well-known clothing and homeware chain.

In Jackson Road a branch of Coffee Republic is opening up in April next to the Travelodge Hotel, while on the other side of the road Rock-a-bye Baby, a baby clothes shop has just opened.

Will the young and newly born enterprises adequately replace those that have disappeared? One day perhaps – but not yet I am afraid. The 99p Store, popular as it is, hardly takes the place of Woolworth’s. I haven’t yet had a chance to look in at NEXT, in Waterglade Business Park, but I have been into Baldwin’s Department Store.


Welcoming as the staff were, I didn't feel that it in any way compared with either the Co-op Store or the Vergo Store that replaced it. Still, these new businesses provided some badly needed jobs and the Clacton Gazette, ever optimistic, sees them as the first green shoots of recovery. Perhaps they are. If so, I hope that they are not strangled by rising inflation, rising unemployment and the VAT increase, before they have a chance to develop.

And some more good news – well, sort of!

The redevelopment of the seaward stretch of Pier Avenue has at long last been completed. Pavements have been widened and the carriageway narrowed to make it strictly ‘a single carriageway’. It was work that was supposed to have been finished before Christmas but the appalling weather in December put it back, to the consternation of the very traders whom the improvement was supposed to benefit. They complained that they had lost custom because of the long-winded building work and the reduction of access to their businesses that had resulted.

Here is the result. It was a section of Pier Avenue on which the dust had hardly settled since the previous reconstruction that had been carried out with the same purpose! I suppose that it is an improvement but surely, in a time of austerity, it was hardly worth the time, the money, the energy and the disruption that went into it.

The money, and the workmen’s time, would have been better spent seeking out (they’re not hard to find!) and repairing the potholes in Clacton’s roads and the broken, uneven and dangerous pavements away from the town centre. It wouldn’t have been a glamorous or headline-making enterprise but, I think, one of much more real value to we Clactonians.

‘Labour isn’t working!’

Remember that message on a pre-election hoarding long ago? It was illustrated by a dole queue disappearing into the distance. Then, I think, the number of unemployed was more than a million. Nowadays there are two and a half million unemployed, and the number is rising. The Private Sector has failed to absorb the job losses resulting from cuts in the Public Sector. The ‘experts’ were surprised and disappointed. I wasn’t.

It had been obvious to me that, as I have pointed out repeatedly in this blog, there had never been a chance that it would. Successive governments have compelled local and Health Authorities to get rid of their direct labour forces and put their services out to private contractors. One consequence has been that hospitals no longer employ their own cleaners who were known to the other hospital staff and the long-term patients, and who took a real pride in keeping their wards spotlessly clean. They now have to use the employees of contractors, to whom cleaning a hospital ward is ‘just another job’ for which they get as much as they can for as little effort as they can get away with. That’s the way of today’s world.

Another consequence has been to make it impossible to force economies on the public sector without similarly affecting the private. When, for instance, a local authority decides to save money by switching from a weekly refuse collection to a fortnightly one, it is the private firm actually undertaking the collection that suffers. Building maintenance firms, providers of meals-on-wheels, Hospital caterers, cleaners, a wide range of consultants (all part of the Private Sector) and many others, stand to suffer. Their problems may not arrive immediately. Contracts have to run their course. However, come they inevitably will.

I fear that unemployment has not yet peaked.

Prophecies of doom and gloom!

I don’t know how many times I have published my thoughts on the probable course of future events in this blog and have added that I hoped most profoundly that I was wrong. Cassandra probably felt the same way when she predicted the destruction of Troy! She was right, and all too often I have been right too.

I have been proved right in believing that the Private Sector couldn’t possibly find employment for those rendered redundant by Public Service Cuts. It seems that I was right too in my belief that students financing their years of study with government loans would face a lifetime of intolerable debt. It now appears that the better-paid graduates’ careers become, the more likely it is that throughout their working lives (the time in which they are likely to marry, have and bring up children, repay a mortgage on their homes, buy and run a car, and so on) they will be paying off that debt from their undergraduate days. Those who complete the repayment and clear their debt will find that by that time they have repaid twice as much as they originally borrowed!

I have always believed that nuclear energy production is fraught with unacceptable risks. My particular concern was that it had a particularly dangerous waste product that remained lethal for hundreds of years – and for which no-one had so far produced a safe and satisfactory means of disposal. The experience of Three Mile Island, Windscale, Chernobyl – and now Japan, indicates that operating nuclear plant can produce more immediate perils. No-one can tell when and how the present crisis in Japan will end.

Clacton, and the greater part of the Tendring peninsula lie well within the danger zone of Bradwell Nuclear power station, which may well be brought back into
use in the next few years. Sizewell, in Suffolk and just a few miles up the coast, isn’t very far way.

Bradwell is most unlikely to experience either an earthquake or a tsunami, though it should be remembered that the most damaging English earthquake recorded in at least the past 500 years took place in the Colchester area in 1884! Over 1,000 buildings were damaged, in Colchester, Wivenhoe (the epicentre, where every house was damaged!) and other settlements between Colchester and Ipswich.

I think though that Bradwell’s chief danger is its vulnerability to terrorist attack, perhaps as a commando style raid using inflatable craft launched from an apparently harmless fishing boat moored a mile or two out-to-sea.

I very much hope that I am never in a position to say, ‘I told you so!’

A Prophecy that failed – or did it?

A week or two ago I said that my best guess about the unfolding crisis in Libya was that the United Nations would ultimately sanction a ‘No-fly’ zone over Libya but that this decision would come too late to prevent the slaughter of scores of innocent men and women when Gaddafi’s troops captured the remaining insurgent strongholds. I was wrong. In the end the Security Council acted swiftly. As, despite the promise of an immediate ceasefire, Gaddafi’s forces launched an attack on Benghazi, French and British planes began bombing military targets and the American navy, using Cruise Missiles has joined in.

I am left with a feeling of profound sadness. It is easy enough to start a war but, as we are finding in Afghanistan, far more difficult to end it. Perhaps this one will be the exception. Perjhaps Gaddafi’s forces will decline to fight a war that they must surely lose in the end, and will oust their leader. Perhaps, but both in August 1914 and in September 1939 there were those who insisted that ‘The war will be over by Christmas!’ When Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941 he was sure that a few victorious battles would swiftly bring about the collapse of the Soviet regime.

As with the blitz in England, air attacks are just as likely to unite the country in anger and thirst for retaliation as to induce despair. Western intervention will inevitably bring accusations, however unjustified, that this is another ‘crusade’ aimed at destroying Islam. Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan it will bring joy to the hearts of those who are grooming young Muslims for recruitment into terrorist organisations. The probability of terrorist attacks in Europe and the USA will increase.

A war in the Libyan Desert will inevitably bring a very serious risk of casualties from ‘friendly fire’ among both civilians and combatants. Both sides discovered that in the war in which I was engaged in 1941/’42. There were no defined front lines and a surprise attack could come from any direction. Both sides were making use of captured vehicles, and the desert uniforms of the opposing armies were not readily distinguishable. On many occasions army vehicles, lost in the desert (in a dust storm perhaps) would spot an army convoy that they fondly imagined was ‘one of ours’ and discover too late it was, in fact, one of the enemy’s. This encourages nervous soldiers to ‘fire first and identify the bodies later!’ In the present conflict all military vehicles and heavy weapons used by the insurgents will have been captured from the Libyan Army.

One such friendly fire incident has already occurred. On the very day that the Security Council made its fateful decision, the defenders of Benghazi were jubilant at having shot down in flames a Libyan Air Force plane. Sadly it was, in fact, a plane whose pilot had defected to the insurgency.

The support of western intervention by the Arab League is said to have been an important factor in the Security Council’s decision. It has certainly landed us with some very strange allies in the struggle against Gaddafi! Members of the Arab League include Bahrain, whose ruler has brought in foreign troops to brutalise the peaceful but determined majority who oppose his rule. These foreign troops came from Saudi Arabia, a leading member of the League and a land where the practice of religion other than Islam is strictly prohibited, public floggings and beheadings are part of the criminal law, and women are treated in a way that we in the west would regard as intolerable. Then there is Yemen where we have learned that pro-government snipers have shot and killed a number of peaceful protesters congregating after Friday prayers in a public square.

Those countries are certainly not the first that come to mind as enthusiastic supporters of a campaign to bring freedom and democracy to the benighted land of Libya! They do, of course, have one thing in common. Their autocratic rulers have remained in power for as long as they have with the generous support of Britain and the USA.

I hope and pray, though without a great deal of conviction, that this conflict will swiftly end, and that Libya, together with newly self-liberated Egypt and Tunisia, will prove that Arab and Islamic states can develop into liberal and tolerant democracies.

Week 48.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

Apologies all round!

I am sure that the Australian Government was right to apologise to all those who, as children, had been transported from Britain in the middle of the last century with the promise of a ‘new life down-under’. They were to discover that all their links with home had been severed and that for many of them, the promised new life would be one of exploitation and drudgery. It was surely a shameful episode in Australia’s history – as there have been shameful episodes in the history of all nations.

I am not quite so happy about the forecast that our Prime Minister would also apologise for the same episode ‘sometime in the New Year’. The essence of a sincere apology is that it should be spontaneous and made as soon after the offence as possible. I don’t think either that our guilt is in quite the same category as that of the Australians. It was shameful that the children were cut off from all contact with friends and relatives, in some instances being wrongly informed that their parents had died. Our government should too have followed up the fate of the transported children. That surely would have been a useful task for the ‘Intelligence Services’ to undertake!

I think it likely that most, if not all, of those in Britain who organised the transports really did believe that these children were being given the chance of a better life. Had those ‘disadvantaged children’ remained in England their lives might well not have been materially different from that in Australia. If you have watched the first episode of Andrew Marr’s 'Making of Modern Britain' you’ll know that, for the poor, life in Edwardian Britain was by no means a bowl of cherries!

I can testify that it wasn’t in the 1930s either. At 49 my father, a Territorial Army Permanent Staff Instructor was made redundant (though in those days it was just called ‘getting the sack’) in 1931 when the TA was downsized, rationalised or whatever it was then called. His former commanding officer found him a very poorly paid job with his veterinary practice. That, with the small pension that he received for his 21 years service (non-commissioned of course) in ‘the Regulars’, kept our heads just above the poverty line. The ‘20s and ‘30s, when most of those exiled children were growing up, were years of mass unemployment, of the hunger marches, the Means Test…..and the rise of political extremism.

There had been other, very successful migrations to ‘the colonies’. In the early 1900s an uncle and an aunt of mine, both then teenagers, had emigrated quite separately from Britain to Canada ‘for a new life’. Had they remained in England, the destiny for my uncle would have been that of farm labourer and for my aunt domestic service. In the event they certainly prospered better in the New World than their siblings did in England. My uncle, after serving in the Canadian Army in World War I, became a prosperous farmer. My aunt had a happy marriage and was a comfortably off widow at the end of her life.

The 21st Century seems to have become an age of apology. The Archbishop of Canterbury has, quite absurdly in my opinion, apologised for the Church’s initial reaction to Darwinism. The Australian government has apologised to the Aborigines. Our government has apologised for the slave trade. Yes, of course it was shameful and appalling – but, while they are at it, shouldn’t they also be apologising to Britain’s working people for the appalling working and living conditions they endured during the industrial revolution in this country. Freedom is always to be preferred to slavery, but I have no doubt that at least some African slaves in the New World, were better housed and fed than many ‘free’ British factory labourers. The slave-owner had a vested interest in keeping ‘his property’, alive and fit enough to work. The British factory owner could always tell his wage slaves: ‘There are plenty more where you came from’.

That was when Thomas Hood had put into the mouth of his overworked and underpaid seamstress in ‘The Song of the Shirt’.

Oh, to be a slave, along with the barbarous Turk,
(Where a woman has never a soul to save)
If this be Christian work!

It is in any case impossible to judge those who lived in the 19th or early 20th century by the standards of the 21st. They did lots of things and had lots of attitudes that we today find profoundly shocking. Believe me, they would be at least equally shocked and disgusted by attitudes and actions that we consider acceptable or even admirable today. My own formative years were in the mid-twentieth century so I don’t have to read that in history books. I know!

Nor do I think that there is anything very meaningful in apologising for the actions of ones predecessors. To say that you profoundly regret what they did is one thing. To make an apology is another. That implies an admission of guilt, something that only those who are guilty need feel. Politicians in particular, should limit their apologising to their own errors and misjudgements. Most of them would find that that gave them plenty of scope for contrition, without their having to worry about the sins of past generations

Out of Sight……….Out of mind.

Bradwell’s now-closed nuclear power station is not actually quite out of our sight. From the sea front in Jaywick or St. Osyth its unlovely buildings can be seen in the distance across the wide Colne estuary. It cost millions of pounds to build and it leaves behind a poisonous residue that will take millennia to decompose. Its useful life though spanned only a few decades. I well remember its being built and, of course, we all remember its being closed down – an event at which many of us breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Now though, it seems likely that another nuclear power station will be built on the site, which is one of thirty-one that the government considers to be suitable for that purpose.

I have no doubt at all that additional and alternative sources of energy are urgently needed if we are to halt the inexorable progress of climate change, and to cope with the demands of industry and our ever-growing population. I don’t believe though that nuclear energy is the only or best alternative and, even if it were, that Bradwell would be a suitable site for a nuclear power station.

Nuclear energy production is vastly expensive, highly dangerous and leaves a residue that remains lethal for millennia. No one has yet discovered any way of detoxifying it or even of storing it safely. Wherever in the world and however deeply you may bury it, it is impossible to find a spot where you can say with certainty that the buried materials won’t be disturbed by natural disaster or the folly of humankind during the next – say 2,000 years.

Why is Bradwell a particularly unsuitable site? Apart from accidents due to human error (remember Windscale, remember Chernobyl!) the biggest threats to nuclear power stations come from terrorists and from natural flooding. Rising sea levels and the extreme weather conditions that can be expected as a result of climatic change increase the risk of flooding. As was demonstrated in 1953 the flat Essex coastal plain (nowhere many feet above sea level) is particularly at risk from flooding from the sea.

The Essex coast with its inlets from the sea, and many sparsely populated coastal areas could also be particularly vulnerable to a well-funded, well-planned and resolute terrorist attack launched from an apparently harmless private yacht or fishing vessel moored off-shore. How good would the defences of a nuclear power station at Bradwell be against a suicidal and well-armed landing party? The ease with which determined anti-nuclear campaigners have managed to gain access to such power stations for propaganda purposes, suggests to me that they would be unlikely to be adequate.

The government has indicated that the planning processes may be streamlined to ensure the rapid approval of the new proposed power stations. That means that our right to protest will be limited. Bradwell is, as the crow flies or the nuclear fallout cloud drifts, just a few miles to the windward of Clacton. I hope therefore that our protests will be at least as well orchestrated and well publicised as those made recently about the proposed provision of a few perfectly harmless on-shore wind turbines!

Our MP

Our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, certainly has a knack for getting himself into the news. When the MPs expenses scandal first broke he was a leader of the pack demanding the resignation of the speaker. His image as a latter-day St. George was slightly dimmed by the, mostly good-humoured, amusement that was evoked by the revelation that his own expenses had included a ‘love seat’ settee for his second home.

Last week in this blog I commented on his independent spirit in going it alone, against majority political and scientific opinion, in declaring his conviction that concern about mankind’s role in the climatic change that is painfully obviously going on all around us, is ‘all hot air’.

This week a letter from a Dave Bolton of Park Road, Clacton, in the Clacton and Frinton Gazette reveals that on 5th November Mr Carswell broadcast on the BBC World Service his intention of campaigning for a referendum on the UK remaining part of the European Union, despite David Cameron' assurance that such a referendum would be pointless.

He argued that the former referendum was now invalid because those ‘over 52 years of age’ (either he, Mr Bolton, or the Gazette subeditor, must have got that wrong; he surely meant under 52) had not had a chance to choose through the ballot box. Mr Bolton points out that neither had those under 52 seen the devastation caused by a European war, the prevention of which was one of the purposes of the formation of the Union. It has certainly achieved that. War between members of the EU is now surely quite unimaginable.

Mr Carswell might have also pointed out that many of those who voted in that now-distant referendum may well have changed their minds since then. I certainly have. I voted NO to what was then the EEC on that occasion, but would most certainly vote YES to membership (preferably of a more closely integrated EU) in any future referendum.

Global Warming is just hot air, the slightly tarnished sword of righteousness against self-seeking MPs, a new referendum on EU-membership……! I wonder if Mr Carswell has ever considered the possibility that he might be a member of the wrong political party? Careerwise, this could be a good time to switch. I have just heard on BBC evening news that UKIP is looking for a dynamic new leader.

Two Postscripts

Last week in this blog I expressed my contempt for the Sun newspaper’s blatant exploitation of the grief and anger that had prompted Mrs Janes, the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, to complain about her name being wrongly spelt in a letter of condolence sent her by the Prime Minister. My younger son tells me that, on its website, the Sun also spelt her name wrongly in exactly the same way as the Prime Minister! The Sun celebrated its fortieth birthday last week. I suppose we may hope that one day it will grow up.

My suggestion that there should be a White Poppy Day, on which white poppies (sold in aid of civilian victims of war) might be worn world-wide on an internationally agreed date of remembrance and repentance for the civilian victims of war in every time and place, also provoked comment. I was reminded that white poppies, sold by the Peace Pledge Union, are already worn by many people on and around Remembrance Sunday as a sign of their commitment to peace.

The commitment to world peace of my wife and myself was, I think, no less than theirs. For several years we each wore a white poppy as well as a red one under the impression that the proceeds from their sale went to some charity supporting wounded civilians. They don’t. They go to the Peace Pledge Union, a worthy cause and one that I support in other ways. On Remembrance Day though, I want to remember my fallen comrades. I don’t like its use (as has happened in the past!) for recruitment to the armed forces – but I don’t like its use for peace propaganda either!