Week 49 2013

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘The signal fires of warning, they blaze, but none regard, And    so, through night to morning, the earth runs ruin-ward!’

          These lines, in a poem by A.E.Housman (1856 – 1936) seem strangely prophetic today. In recent months we have seen bush fires burning beyond control in an even-hotter-than-usual Australian summer; unseasonal snow storms in South Dakota burying, and killing, thousands of cattle in deep drifts; hurricanes devastating huge swathes of America’s mid-west in a month usually reckoned to be hurricane-free, and the most powerful cyclone ever recorded killing tens of thousands of men, women and children and rendering hundreds of thousands homeless in the Philippines. Even in the equable British Isles, normally free of the extreme weather conditions experienced in other less favoured parts of the world, we have had hurricane strength winds uprooting trees, damaging buildings and causing loss of life.

            These weather conditions came hot on the heels of the most serious and urgent warning yet from the world’s leading scientists that planet Earth is facing catastrophic climate change largely as a result of humankind’s own selfish activities.  There is urgent need to reduce and ultimately end the production of energy by the use of fossil fuels.  Their burning is one of principal sources of the greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere that are producing these disastrous weather phenomena.

            It wouldn’t be true to say that ‘none regard’ the warning signs of the ruin that the world is facing.  Some people take it very seriously indeed and even top politicians like to go through the motions of taking it seriously when they think there may be a few votes in it.   Remember David Cameron’s slogan at the time of the last General Election – ‘If you want green then vote blue!’ or words to that effect.  The government even took some steps in the right direction – encouraging the development of wind farms, subsidising the insulation of homes and the installation of new energy-saving boilers.  I took advantage of the scheme to have my roof space thoroughly insulated – and have felt the benefit of it.  To finance these schemes they took a relatively small portion of the profits of the energy companies.

            But, of course, energy companies – like all private firms – do not exist for the benefit of their customers but for that of their shareholders. They mustn’t be allowed to suffer.  ‘Healthy competition’ is supposed to be one of the great benefits of the free market economy.  It keeps prices down – so they say.  Strangely enough, despite free competition and the Prime Minister’s urging that we should all ‘shop around for the best tariff’ all the energy suppliers raise them by about the same amount within a period of months.  Now they are claiming that the high prices are largely the result of those ‘green taxes’ and the Prime Minister is talking about ‘rolling them back’, abandoning the grants and limiting the development of wind-farms and other sources of green energy.

            Blog readers are, I am sure, in no doubt about where I stand on this issue.  I believe very strongly that catastrophic climatic change is taking place, and that its progress is accelerating largely as a consequence of human activity.  A first responsibility of every government in the world should be to attempt to slow down and reverse that process.  You don’t have to believe me.  I am a very old man with – some may think – failing faculties and too vivid an imagination!   Below is an extract from an email received from a regular correspondent, a successful business man, who is even angrier than I am.  So he should be.  He is over thirty years younger than me.   Thanks to my age I am unlikely to experience the worst results of the folly and short-sightedness of the governments of the world (politicians rarely manage to see beyond the next election!) but he may  have to endure years of it!

This government just continues to get worse and worse. They are now considering dropping their Green commitment in order to reduce energy bills. I see Australia has voted in a right wing government and already announced plans to do just that. Every time I hear of an environmental disaster in the USA or Australia - and there have been plenty - I feel it serves them right and that actually many more are needed for them to wake up and respond accordingly.  But despite the hardships to some, as long as the good times roll on for the many, they just don't care.   That actually is the problem with democracy, decisions reflect the selfishness of the majority.

The arrogant dismissal of scientific evidence by Ministers who know very little about anything is breathtaking. You will see on the BBC News web site that less than a quarter of the marine conservation areas proposed by the Government's own scientists have been agreed by ministers who said that the "scientific evidence just doesn't stack up" - presumably words fed to them by the fishing lobby. They have the same attitude with recommendations to tax fizzy drinks and use the money to subsidise school meals, to introduce a minimum price for alcohol and removing cigarette displays in shops. In each case the scientific advice given to the Government has been cautious and considered, and made by experts who have no financial investment in their recommendations, but the Government prefers to believe "industry representatives" who are following in the path of the smoking lobby, and have a massive financial investment in stopping any change.

A Nation in Debt!

National economic recovery is on the way. Politicians are cautiously optimistic.  Unemployment has dropped to 7.6 percent and the Governor of the Bank of England has said that he will consider raising interest rates if and when this figure falls to 7 percent.   This, I heard a financial expert declare on tv, would be bad news for ‘home owners’.

I am a home owner and I can assert unequivocally that that is nonsense.  My mortgage was long ago paid off and the deeds of my bungalow are in the strong room of my solicitor, not in that of the Building Society that long ago had lent my wife and I the money to buy our home.  I now have money invested in that building society.  Year by year, as inflation has increased and interest rates remained frozen, that money has steadily lost its value.  I and other ‘savers’ have been helping to fund the loans of the home buyers encouraged by the government to ‘get their feet on the property ladder’  If interest rates go up there is a chance that those savings will hold their value – perhaps even increase it.  For debt-free home owners and savers like me an increased interest rate would be very good  news indeed.

For home buyers (I think it is a cruel deception, encouraging a false sense of security, to refer to them as ‘home owners’) the situation is very different.   Interest repayment rates are at an all-time low but, to discourage irresponsible debts, banks and building societies have been insisting on deposits of as much as 25 percent of the purchase price before making a mortgage loan.  The government is giving would-be home buyers a further loan (of our money!) to bring that deposit down to as little as five percent.

The result is that working couples are buying houses with borrowed money that needs the combined wages of both partners to service the repayments.  The loss or reduction of income of either partner, or an increase in the interest rates resulting in higher repayments, could spell disaster.  David Cameron has painted a glowing picture of the pride and satisfaction of the house-buyer holding, for the first time, the key of his own home!   He omitted to mention that it wouldn’t actually be ‘his own’ until he has made that final mortgage payment.  Nor did he dwell on the shame, disappointment and despair that house-buyer will feel if, due to circumstances beyond his control, he is unable to keep up his mortgage payments and is made homeless.

You think it couldn’t happen?   That same ‘expert’ who said that an increase in interest rates would be bad news for home owners, went on to say that an increase of just one percent in the interest rate would result in 30,000 families, who had imagined they owned their homes, becoming homeless.  A report of the Centre for Social Justice says that nearly four million British families do not have enough savings to cover their rent or mortgage for more than a month, and that 26,000 UK households have been rendered homeless in the past five years as a result of rent or mortgage arrears, more than 5,000 of them during the past twelve months.

Mortgage debt is by no means the only debt burden that many of we Brits are bearing.   The Centre for Social Justice says that ‘average household debt, now stands at £54,000’, nearly twice the level of that same average just ten years ago.  That £54,000 is ‘the average debt’.   Since there must be quite a few who like me have no debts whatsoever there must be a very great number of households who owe considerable more than that!   The Centre’s report says that poor people are bearing the brunt of a ‘perfect storm’ of rising living costs, falling real wages, low savings and expensive credit. Households with total incomes in the lowest ten percent of the population have average debts greater than four times their annual income, with average debt repayments amounting to nearly half their gross monthly income. I think it likely that this Christmas – thanks to credit cards, store cards and payday loans – that burden of individual debt, already at an all-time high, will increase dramatically!

 The UK’s economic recovery is surely an empty triumph if it results in our country becoming a land of debtors.  Wasn’t it the late Lady Thatcher who famously claimed that there was ‘no such thing as society’ and declared that it was individuals and families who really matter?  How strange that Lady Thatcher’s political heirs should have managed, so it seems, to set the country (Society?) on the path to economic recovery - but at the cost of getting millions of individuals and families into unmanageable debt!

 

  

Week 40.10 5th October 2010

Tendring Topics………on line

North of the Border!

Although I was born in Tidworth, a small garrison town on Salisbury Plain not far from Stone Henge, and have lived for the past fifty-five years in north Essex (fifty-four of them in my present home in Clacton’s Dudley Road), I still think of myself as a ‘Suffolk man’. My parents moved to Suffolk when I was five. I went to school and to my first job in Suffolk and I served in a Suffolk Territorial Regiment in World War II. After the war I lived and worked in Suffolk from 1948 to 1955. My elder son was born in the county and when I become heated my accent becomes more and more that of a rural Suffolk ‘swede-basher’! Consequently I probably take a greater interest in what is going on across our northern border than most Tendring residents.

A few weeks ago I commented on the problems that Essex County Council was encountering in its attempt to save money on a huge scale by outsourcing all its IT services to a giant international corporation. Now I learn that Suffolk County Council is outdoing them. They are putting virtually all their services out to private tender. That really is a revolutionary move – and one that horrifies me. The chief remaining function of the Council will presumably consist of occasionally meeting to consider tenders for the running of schools and further education establishments, social services, highways including footpaths and street lighting, refuse disposal and recycling, consumer protection and so on, and on, and on! The council will, I suppose, still need to employ specialist staff to police all these functions and make sure that they are carried out efficiently – or will that be done by yet another private firm, or perhaps by ‘Big Society’ volunteers?

The idea is, of course, based on the assumption that money will be saved because private enterprise is always more efficient than the public service. It seems to have been conveniently forgotten that the current crisis was not created by any failings of the public sector but by the irresponsibility and greed of financial services – arguably the most prestigious (and certainly the best paid!) area of the private sector!

It is clear to me that private enterprise will only do those jobs more cheaply, thus simultaneously saving money for the tax payers and producing profits for its share-holders, by savage reductions in staff numbers and reducing vital services or cutting them out altogether.

When, in the local government reorganisation of the early 1970s the possibility of Tendring District and Colchester becoming part of Suffolk was under consideration, I was one of a small minority in the area who thought it would be a good idea. (Even I though had to admit it would be just a little odd to have Essex University in an adjoining county!)

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am far from being an uncritical admirer of Essex County Council. However, these moves north of the border now make me feel that by staying in Essex on that occasion we may well have had a lucky escape!

Clacton's Martello Tower

Clacton has, of course, more than one Martello Tower – but the best-known one is on the landward side of Marine Parade West, and in front of Clacton Hospital. It has had a somewhat chequered past but it now seems possible that it will have a brighter future. Tendring Council has just granted planning permission for the provision of a tearoom and a museum within the building, and a ‘petting zoo’ in the large dry moat, likely to be especially popular with young children. This enterprise, expected to be up and running for next spring, is the brain-child of Tower leaseholders Roger Ling and Rosalie Robinson in partnership with Paul Nash, owner of the aquarium on Clacton Pier. Early residents of the mini-zoo will be two alpacas, two pigmy goats and two rabbits.
Nobody except me (one of the penalties of outliving most of my contemporaries!) seems to remember that something very similar was attempted there in the past. It was while my younger grandson, now in his late twenties, was still at primary school. It must therefore have been twenty or more years ago. He, with his dad and elder brother, were staying with us on holiday – and the two boys decided to go and see the miniature zoo at the Martello Tower. They came back in some distress, complaining that the few animals that were there were badly housed and, they thought, badly neglected. Shortly after that the Martello Zoo closed.

There is little chance of the present venture meeting a similar fate. Paul Nash, who has a local record of success with the Pier’s aquarium, will care for the animals and be in charge of the petting zoo. He is reported as being delighted with the news that the scheme now has planning permission, ‘It’s fantastic news and has made me very happy. We will have a big opening, hopefully with a celebrity, and it should be a big day’.

My own most vivid memories of that Martello Tower go back to the late 1950s. When I was first appointed as a public health inspector by Clacton Urban District Council, the two existing inspectors, the council’s cleansing foreman, and I, were expected to be the part-time weather observers, each of us doing one week in four throughout the year. For this we were paid the princely sum of £20 a year, on top of our salaries. £20 was worth a good deal more then than it is now but was still a very small and very hard-earned bonus!

That Martello Tower was the Council’s Weather Station. A ‘Stevenson’s Screen’ housing wet and dry, and maximum and minimum thermometers, was installed within a low fence on the grassy slope between the tower and Marine Parade West – near the top and just to the left of the path in my photograph above. A rain gauge was provided on the miniature golf course that in those days existed between the Martello Tower and the Hospital. On the roof of the Tower was a sunshine recorder. This consisted of a glass sphere, 4 or 5 inches in diameter (rather like a fortune teller’s ‘crystal ball’) contained within a framework holding a specially treated strip of cardboard, marked out in hours and minutes. As the sun moved across the sky the glass sphere acted as a magnifying lens, concentrating the sun’s rays onto the card, the progress of a burn-mark on the card giving an accurate record of the hours and minutes of sunshine.

Every evening at 6.00 p.m., Christmas Day and other public holidays alike, the weather observer on duty had to cross the drawbridge, unlock the door to the tower, climb the internal stone steps to the roof (there was no coastguard station there in those days) and change that cardboard sunshine record. It was a pleasant enough job on a summer’s evening but in December or January, by the light of an electric torch, in a howling gale and with rain or snow blowing in the air, it was not a job for the frail, the imaginative or the claustrophobic. It was all too easy to imagine that the ghost of one of the Duke of Wellington's 'redcoats' was watching from the shadows, deciding whether or not this intruder was one of Napoleon’s spies, intent on mischief!

‘All is safely gathered in……

……….e’re the winter storms begin’, says the well-known harvest hymn and most Christian churches will have celebrated their harvest thanksgiving services during the past few weeks.

During my childhood when ‘going to church on Sunday’ was rather more usual than it is today, churches would be packed for the evening ‘Harvest Festival’ service even if on most other Sunday evenings there were plenty of empty pews. We sang the well-loved harvest hymns We plough the fields and scatter…, Come, ye faithful people, come….., All things bright and beautiful….. and, in prayer, we would thank God for his bounty. Keen gardeners among the congregation (my father among them) would have vied with each other to grow enormous potatoes, vegetable marrows and pumpkins, long and perfectly formed runner beans, succulent cabbages and cauliflower, rosy apples and other garden produce with which to adorn the church on that occasion. These offerings were subsequently all passed on to local children’s homes or to hospitals in the area where they were much appreciated.

It is a practice that continues today as these pictures taken in St. James' Parish Church in Clacton last Sunday (3rd October), the day of the church's Harvest festival, demonstrate.

It is surely a good thing for Christians to gather together once a year to thank God for the harvest – and to give some of our surplus to those who need it. We become so used to buying all our food from the nearest supermarket that we tend to forget that everything that we eat and drink comes ultimately from the soil. We have lost the certain knowledge of former years that when a harvest failed, hunger, hardship and death followed. Then, our forebears knew all too well how much reason they had to be thankful when the harvest had been a bountiful one.

In some parts of the world a failed harvest is as devastating today as it was to our forefathers. In today’s global economy widespread crop failure affects us all, even if only by worldwide higher prices. This year climatic change has brought drought and bush fires to the Russian steppe, aborting or destroying crops and compelling the Russian government to embargo grain exports to ensure that there was sufficient left to feed its own people.

That same inexorable climatic change, largely the result of humankind’s own activities (even if our MP thinks otherwise!) has brought about devastating floods in Pakistan, drowning crops over thousands of acres of farm land and resulting in widespread homelessness, sickness and death. It will take all our efforts for several years to help the victims and restore normality – and who can be sure that there will not be equally devastating floods again next year?

Meanwhile, a short distance from the devastated areas a man-made catastrophe rumbles on in neighbouring Afghanistan and threatens to spread beyond that country’s borders. Every week brings its toll of British and American casualties, and every week innocent civilians are killed as our forces strive to destroy an elusive and unidentifiable enemy.

If only all the money, the resources and the energy that is devoted to death and destruction there, could be redirected to the succour of suffering humanity! Just think of the difference that those helicopters, the military transport and the thousands of fit, young, able-bodied young men and women (not to mention the ingenuity and energy expended in making and planting ‘improvised explosive devices’ and creating ambushes!) could make if they were redirected to Pakistan and used to save lives instead of to take them, to rebuild homes instead of destroy them!

Then we really would begin to see the fulfilment of the prayer that, even in this secular society, is uttered daily by the many thousands of faithful Christians:

‘Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven’