Week 9 2014

Tendring Topics......on Line

Spring is on the way!

            Yes, it really is.  Last Sunday (15^th February) here in ‘sunny Clacton’ we had sunshine from dawn till sunset.  It was a weak sun with barely enough heat in it to temper the chilly breeze.  Nevertheless, shining all day on the solar panel on the roof of my bungalow, it managed to raise the temperature of the water in my storage cylinder to sixty degrees Celcius, quite high enough to provide all my hot water needs for the next twenty-four hours!*  And it was only half-way through February and officially still ‘winter’.  Mind you, I still needed to have the boiler going for space heating from mid-afternoon!

`In Southern East Anglia at least, this chilly (but not really cold), very wet and very windy winter really does seem to be coming to an end.   I have daffodils naturalised under the long grass surrounding the eating-apple tree in my back garden.  They have been evident as green shoots for some weeks but yesterday some of them were in full bloom – and here they are.  Known in some parts of the country as ‘Easter lilies’, they are true harbingers of spring.

    

        Nor is it only in the garden that new life has been burgeoning.   On 1^st February I became a great-great uncle when my great-niece Catherine gave birth to a baby boy, Jay Luke Beard.  Here he is with his great-great uncle. Between us Jay and I span four generations and almost a century.  I was born in 1921, within the first quarter of the twentieth century, and Jay first saw the light of day in the first quarter of the twenty-first century – the second decade of the new millennium!

            Jay's life will undoubtedly be very different from mine, but whether better or worse - only time will tell!

*It did the same thing on Saturday 22nd February - we really do  get
more than the average amount of sunshine in Clacton-on-Sea!

           

 

 ‘A Plague on both your Houses’

          Three paragraphs in the latest issue of Private Eye explain why I have no confidence whatsoever in either of the political parties likely to form a government after the next General Election:

            No matter how loudly Ed Miliband proclaims that “those with the broadest backs should bear the greatest burden” the party has no plans for some of those with the deepest pockets to do their bit.

            These are the non-domiciled elite who claim allegiance to somewhere abroad while remaining resident in the UK (often, as in the case of Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere*, for their whole life) and pay the not exactly burden-sharing rate of, er, 0 percent of offshore earnings if they can find an easy way of getting them back into the UK (which they easily do).

            At this stage before the 1997 election, even in the midst of a City charm offensive, New Labour promised to end the non-dom tax break.   That was before, in office, the Party back-tracked as non-doms such as Lakshmi Mittal and private equity broncho Sir Ronald Cohen bankrolled it through subsequent elections with seven-figure donations.  Such plutocrats can look forward to tax haven Britain not loading much on their shoulders, whoever wins in 2015. 

            I really don’t want the United Kingdom to have the very best government that money can buy!

           I am disillusioned with both the Conservative and the Labour Parties and I am sure that I am one of thousands who feel the same.  Nor am I alone in feeling betrayed by Nick Clegg after having voted Lib-Dem. in the last General Election.  The danger is that some – perhaps many – voters, disillusioned with the traditional parties, will vote for UKIP.   Nigel Farage, the Party Leader, wants to sweep away party politics and put Britain first – and what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that thousands of Germans thought in much the same way about Hitler in the 1930s.  The fact that, unlike  Adolf Hitler, Nigel Farage is a socially likeable chap who enjoys a drink and a smoke  possibly makes him all the more dangerous.

               Me? I shall definitely vote Green in the European Parliamentary Elections later this year.   That election is being held by proportional representation and every vote really will count.  If I’m still around for the General Election I’d like to vote Green again, but under our first-past-the-post electoral system a Green vote is likely to be a wasted vote.  Our present Conservative MP’s views are virtually indistinguishable from those of UKIP so I shall probably vote for whoever is most likely to defeat him unless, of course, his most dangerous rival is the UKIP candidate! I think it likely though that the local Ukippers will consider Mr Carswell to be ‘one of us’ and won’t oppose him.

* I had always thought (when I gave any thought at all to the matter) that Lord Rothermere was as British as the Union Jack. Intrigued by the comment in parenthesis in the second paragraph of the Private Eye article, I consulted Google and found that that his father had lived in France and had taken up French nationality. The present Lord Rothermere has inherited the nationality as well as his title and the Daily Mail.

The Expert

‘The bloated and bureaucratic’ Common Agricultural Policy, that hands out over a billion pounds every year to Europe’s farmers and land owners, is a favourite target of such Europhobic dailies as the Sun, Express and Mail. Who am I, knowing virtually nothing about farming and rural estate management to say whether or not these payments are justified?  I was though interested to learn from Private Eye that an increasingly large share of that billion-plus subsidy is paid not for agricultural production but to land-owners who improve the environment or diversify the local economy by providing and overseeing rural activities.

Private Eye records that the Langwell Estate near Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands has attracted £248,000 (nearly a quarter of a million pounds) in such subsidies.  It offers grouse shooting, deer stalking and other similar activities and rents lodges for £4,250 a week during the high season - a sum larger than the total that my family and I spent on half a dozen annual camping holidays in the Scottish Highlands, the Welsh Mountains and mainland Europe!

I was astonished to learn, again from Private Eye, that the owner of the Langwell Estate is Paul Dacre editor of the Daily Mail.  I have to concede that when leading articles in the Daily Mail rage against the huge handouts of ‘our money’ made by the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels who operate the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, the author – quite unlike me – undeniably has direct personal knowledge of his subject.

NHS National Database

          Every household in the country is supposed to have had an official leaflet delivered to them explaining that a national NHS database is being prepared, giving the medical details of each of us held on the computer files of every medical practice nationwide. It also said that we could ‘opt out’ of the scheme if we wished, and told us how to do so.  The scheme had been supposed to come into operation this April but as thousands of people claim that they have never received the leaflet and knew nothing about the database, the launch has been put back to the autumn.

            I do remember receiving the leaflet.  I glanced at it briefly and it occurred to me that there might be some people with medical conditions that they didn’t want to be made available for instance, to friends or relatives, to employers, or to an insurance company. That didn’t apply to me. At 92 no-one is going to offer me life insurance and my afflictions are boringly common – high blood pressure, osteo-arthritis, failing strength, vision and hearing, and other conditions of old age.  I really don't care who knows about them and I didn’t for one moment seriously consider ‘opting out’.

            I think it likely that a great many people who honestly don’t remember receiving the leaflet, did in fact do so, but just thought it was a piece of the junk mail that we all receive every day (special offers at local supermarkets, begging letters from worthy charities, catalogues from mail order firms and leaflets from local entrepreneurs eager to clean windows, tidy up the garden or clean out the roof gutters) I’m sure I’m not alone in consigning most of them  the recycling bin with no more than a cursory glance. It was pure chance that made me decide to read right through the NHS leaflet when it arrived.

Week 43 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

Our ‘free press’ and the politicians……. just who controls whom?

          I have been observing the current quarrel between ‘the press’ and all three main political parties with astonished fascination.  Our free press is, so its representatives insist, the envy of the civilised world.  It is the safeguard of our hard-earned freedoms and must be at all costs protected from interference by scheming politicians.  Ed Miliband’s recent protests against  the Daily Mail’s  vilification of  his father as an ‘enemy of Britain’ is, so it was claimed, an example of attempted interference; ‘Just what one might expect from the son of a committed Marxist’, was implied.

            I knew nothing about Ed Miliband’s dad until recently. However I now know that he was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who subsequently served on a destroyer in our Royal Navy, and took part in the D-day landings on the Normandy beaches. That surely speaks for itself.  I am old enough to remember that the Daily Mail in the 1930s supported the Nazis in Germany, and Hitler and Mussolini’s pal General Franco in Spain.  I remember too the Daily Express, a newspaper with a very similar outlook to that of the Mail assuring us throughout 1938 and the early part of 1939 that ‘There will be no war this year – or next year either!’ There really wasn’t much to be proud of in our ’free press’ in those days.

            With regard to the present concerns of ‘the press’, my own anxiety is almost the exact opposite of theirs.   Unless UKIP triumphs in the next General Election, I don’t really think there is the least possibility of our press coming under government control in any way comparable with that of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or the USSR.   What is a matter of concern is the way – often quite blatant – in which the owners of the press have manipulated and bent the minds and wills of our top politicians.

            I have little doubt that the credit/blame (delete as preferred) for the creation of New Labour lies as much with Rupert Murdoch as it does with Tony Blair and Lord Mandelson.   Remembering The Sun’s boast that, ‘It was the Sun wot done it’ when in 1992 persistent vilification of Neil Kinnock by that newspaper led to an unexpected defeat of the Labour Government, Tony Blair and a few of his colleagues moved the Labour Party’s policies far enough to the right to win the approval of the head of News International.  While Tony Blair was in control, the Sun supported New Labour. Rupert Murdoch acknowledges his own over-riding influence on the political outlook of The Sun, but claims that the editor of The Times has complete freedom of action.  No doubt, but the editor of that once-illustrious publication is well aware of the owner’s views and would be very foolish to ignore them.

            He who pays the piper calls the tune.  On a much more humble scale, I had complete freedom of action when I wrote Tendring Topics (in print) for the Coastal Express. No-one even dreamed of telling me what I could, and what I could not write.  However my awareness of the fact that adverts from Estate Agents and Used Car Salesmen kept the free weekly on the road, made sure that any criticism in my column of either occupation was very limited and discreet.

            Mrs Thatcher courted the good will of Rupert Murdoch and other senior figures in the News International Empire. So did Tony Blair and so, to a greater extent than either of them, did David Cameron and senior members of his government.  John Major was an honourable exception – and John Major suffered for it at the hands of the The Sun.  Of course there were no written agreements between any senior politician and the rulers of the press.  It was just that they were all good friends and the political leaders knew what their friends’ views were (on Europe for example, on immigration, on anything that might cause inconvenience to the extremely wealthy) and bore them in mind when formulating party or government policy.  They were also, of course, well aware of which policies would and which would not produce positive headlines in the Sun!

            It is sometimes claimed that the newspapers have little effect on the way that people vote.  I simply don’t believe this is true.  The newspapers do influence public opinion, and can do so without publishing a single word that isn’t true.  Out of the thousands of newsworthy events that occur every day, most are probably politically neutral.  Of the ones that aren’t, the editor who wishes to succeed in his profession gives those that support the owner’s views, headline and ‘feature article’ treatment.  News stories that oppose those views are either ignored altogether or tucked away half-way down an inside page.   When did you last read a positive story about the European Union, about Green Energy or about the contribution that immigrants make to our economy in the Sun, the Daily Mail or the Daily Express?   Remember that the Sun, arguably the most noxious of the three, has over seven million readers – the largest readership of any daily in the UK.   Of course a sizeable proportion of those seven million believe every word they read – and vote accordingly.   

            Lord Leveson in his report, touched on the way in which newspaper proprietors and their senior staff may influence politicians but, as far as I am aware, offered no solution. I don’t believe that very wealthy individuals, who need not even be British citizens, should be able to control such a powerful means of moulding public opinion. Perhaps a national newspaper or regional newspapers, could be run by an organisation similar to the BBC, which (since it is criticised from both the left and the right) probably gets the balance of its news bulletins and discussion programmes about right.

            I wouldn’t like to see national newspapers under the control of politicians.  But they are at least answerable to us at election time.  I would prefer that to their being controlled by a foreign cosmopolitan billionaire, who is answerable to no-one but himself and owes no loyalty to Britain or to British traditions and culture.

The British Red Cross Society

          A few months ago Ingrid Zeibig, a German friend of mine, sent me a photograph that brought vividly to the forefront of my mind events of nearly seventy years ago when I spent eighteen months as a prisoner of war in Italy, followed by a further eighteen months in Germany.  Particularly in Italy, where I was in a large POW Concentration Camp in northern Italy I learned what constant nagging hunger meant and what could be its consequences.

       
           Now, my doctor would probably tell me that I am overweight. Then my face fell in, my ribs protruded, and my weight fell day by hungry day. Scarcely a week passed without one of my fellow-prisoners dying of hunger related disease.  During that time we had the opportunity of having our photographs taken and sending home to our parents or wives.  My mum took one look at mine and tore it up.  She couldn’t bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow I had become. What kept us alive and never completely devoid of hope during that dreadful time, was the delivery to the camp of food parcels from the British, or sometimes the Canadian, Red Cross Society.  Each parcel contained tins of meat or fish, dried or condensed milk, margarine, a tin of jam or honey, tea or coffee, sugar and biscuits.  We were supposed to get one each, every week, but in Italy delivery was very spasmodic and sometimes we’d go for weeks without a parcel.  Then, when they arrived, the Italian guards insisted on opening each parcel and piercing every food tin so that its contents had to be consumed almost immediately.  We all believed that this was done out of spite and envy but, on reflection; I suppose it was to prevent our saving food to eat if we escaped!

           

There’s Ingrid with a genuine World War II Red Cross Food Parcel originally intended for a hungry POW!  I could practically see – and taste – the contents.

In Germany things for me (though by no means everyone had the same experience) were much better.  I was at a small working camp. Our guards weren’t bad chaps, our rations were better (they realized that they wouldn’t get much work out of us if we weren’t better fed!), the Red Cross parcels came regularly and were distributed unopened. And, of course, when you’re working with food, as we often were, you don’t go hungry!  I have tried always to support the British Red Cross and have often thought of those food parcels and how pleased we were to see them.  The photo that Ingrid sent me was of her with one of those parcels!  She was visiting Colditz Castle (now it seems to be a museum) with a friend, and the parcel – just as I remembered them from my POW days - was among the exhibits.

            I received that photo some months ago but I was reminded of it last week when I learned that the British Red Cross was again distributing food parcels to the hungry – but this time to the hungry in our own country. And Freedom from want was one of the ‘four freedoms’ for which we thought we were fighting in World War II! How shameful that one of the world’s wealthiest countries – that can afford to give tax hand-outs to its wealthiest citizens and patrol the world’s oceans with nuclear submarines - has an underclass that depends on Food Banks and Red Cross Parcels for survival, that this winter will have to decide whether to eat or heat, and spends its coppers ‘having fun’ with the national lottery in the forlorn hope of escaping from soul-destroying poverty to extreme wealth!

           And top politicians have the effrontery to claim that we’re all in this together!

           

             

           

           

             

Week 43 1.11.2011

Tendring Topics…….on Line


‘You read it first….here!’

That may not be quite true. The idea of narrowing the gap between rich and poor has been around a long time and blog readers may well have seen and been attracted to the idea long before I became an enthusiast. Many years ago though, when I was writing Tendring Topics (in print) in the Coastal Express, I recall saying that my idea of a good Budget was one that narrowed that gap and a bad Budget was one that widened it. It follows that I have seen many more bad budgets, even during the reign of New Labour (now there’s something for which Ed Miliband should have apologised!), than I have seen good ones.

Over the years I have changed or modified my views on a great many issues, but the desirability of levelling incomes throughout the United Kingdom is a cause from which I have never wavered. For a long time I seemed to be one of a tiny minority, but within the past few weeks tens of thousands world-wide have shown their support in the only way open to them – in mass demonstrations. They started in Greece and Spain but have spread throughout the world, one of the largest and most vociferous taking place in New York, the very heart of the capitalist world. There have been few or none in Scandinavia – a prosperous corner of northern Europe where that gap between rich and poor is already narrow. We have had them in Britain too, and very peaceful and well mannered they have so far been. Their best-known manifestation has been the tented camp at the entrance of St Paul’s Cathedral. A headline in the Daily Mail announced the ‘The portrait of a very middle class protest: A poet, a mother and even an extra from Downton….just who is at the Tent City demo?’ Goodness, was the voice of Middle England going soft on Loony Lefties?

Daily Mail aficionados will have been reassured by Richard Littlejohn’s feature in the inside pages. It began in unwontedly conciliatory mood, ‘It would be understandable if the crowd demonstrating outside St. Paul’s was comprised of self-employed small businessmen and women’, but went on, ‘Predictably, though, it was the usual gormless rent-a-mob you always find on these anti-globalisation demos – Toytown Trots from Mickey Mouse Universities, social workers, lecturers, full-time mature students and Swampy wannabes’. He seems to have visited a different demo from whoever wrote the news story!

Mr Littlejohn’s most offensive rant was reserved for a member of the clergy, ‘None of these demos is ever complete without a daft vicar from central casting. Playing the Derek Nimmo character on this occasion was Rev Giles Fraser, who asked the police to move off the steps of St Paul’s and declared his support for the protesters’.

George Bernard Shaw once remarked that the Daily Mirror was for those who couldn’t read, and the Daily Mail for those who couldn’t think. That was before Mr Littlejohn’s time. The Sun may have replaced the Mirror as the choice of the illiterate but it’s nice to know though that at least one pre-war British tradition is unchanged!

Later News

I am very sorry that, as a result of the demo outside St Paul’s, the cathedral has closed to the public. I suppose that the Health and Safety reason must be that the presence of the demonstrators, even if they tried to co-operate, could prevent fire or other emergency workers gaining ready access to the building in an emergency, and could hinder a rapid evacuation if required.


I am sorry not only because I think it wrong for the public to be prevented from attending any place of worship, but because I support the cause of the demonstrators. Preventing free access to the Cathedral is unnecessarily alienating folk who might otherwise be expected to support those protesting against the rule of Mammon.

Since writing the above, the Cathedral has been at least partially opened to the public and the Cathedral Authorities and the Bishop of London are holding discussions.  I do hope that it isn't all going 'to end in tears' - or in violence. 

The Money-Lenders


Everyone tends to watch more daytime television after retirement than they ever did while going out to work. I am no exception. Six or seven years ago it seemed to me that daytime commercial tv was largely financed by ambulance chasing ‘no win, no fee’ lawyers, and by financiers eager to lend large sums of money to folk who, in their own interest, should never be allowed to borrow it! ‘Never mind’, the adverts insisted, 'if you’re old, haven’t got a job, have a low credit rating or have been refused a loan elsewhere, we may be able to help you.'


Times have changed. No longer do we see the adverts from those benevolent moneylenders eager, so it seemed, to throw good money after bad. Nowadays they offer only relatively small ‘payday’ loans. It is all so simple and straightforward. You are getting along nicely until, half way through the month, there’s a sudden crisis; a problem with the laptop, a leaky pipe or water storage tank, a blocked drain, an unexpected – and important – visitor. It is a crisis that can easily be solved with two or three hundred pounds but, alas, you’ve only just got enough money to last until payday, still a fortnight away.

An easy-to-arrange payday loan will see you through! £300? – no problem; it’ll added to your bank account within the hour. You’ll know how much interest you have to pay right away. It will seem quite a small sum though, expressed as an annual rate of interest, it could be very large indeed. Payday comes, you repay the £300 plus interest, and all is well.

Except, of course, that you had needed the whole of your month’s pay for the rent or the mortgage, the fuel bill and the food bill for that month – and you have just got rid of £300 plus a bit extra, of it. The solution? You could apply for another payday loan, perhaps from a different lender, - and another, and another! Of course, if you have a few hundred in a savings account, you can pay off your debt and that’s that. But if you had a few hundred in the bank you wouldn’t have needed to borrow in the first place. It seems that the only people who can safely apply for a payday loan are those who don’t really need one!

Learning that millions and millions of bail-out euros are being poured into the Greek economy while, at the same time, unemployment in Greece gets steadily worse, hundreds of thousands of Greeks are reduced to abject poverty, some scavenging restaurant kitchen waste to find thrown-out food to feed their families, made me realize that on a much bigger scale, Greece is in the same position as those domestic borrowers who need a little financial help just till payday.

Not a single euro of those millions of the bailout money extracted from the wallets, handbags and bank accounts of ordinary working people throughout Europe, goes to help the Greeks. Every single cent goes straight back to the French and German bankers who made the loans, and thence into the pockets of their shareholders. When Ireland had similar, though mercifully smaller, problems, British taxpayers made a very considerable contribution to bail out the Irish Republic. This was not out of friendship and fellow feeling for our Irish neighbours, but simply because it had been British banks that had made rash loans to Irish enterprises. It was British bankers and their shareholders, not the Irish, who benefited from our apparent benevolence.

Our contribution to these bank bailouts together with the cost of wars in Iraq and Afganistan and of our support for the revolution in Libya, make a very considerable contribution to the size of the budget deficit for which the Government prefers to blame their New Labour predecessors.

A puzzled viewer wrote to the BBC recently pointing out that when a ‘rogue trader’ speculated with money with which he had been entrusted and lost it, he was arrested and prosecuted and punished. However, when banks do much the same thing with money with which they have been entrusted – nobody is prosecuted and punished. Instead we have to bail them out!

Under-occupied Properties?


A few weeks ago I commented in this blog on the bright idea of regenerating Brooklands Estate, Jaywick by encouraging retired folk to move into the township’s properties, described as ‘rabbit hutches’ and quite unsuitable for families but fine for elderly retired singles or couples. I thought that it was a stupid and insulting suggestion, and said so.

Now a similar idea has surfaced and appears to have gained some credence. It has been noted that some such elderly couples and singles (often widows or widowers like me) selfishly continue to occupy three-bed-roomed properties after their children have grown up and left home, thus denying bedrooms to the needy. They should be encouraged (no-one has yet suggested compulsion!) to move into one-bed-roomed homes, quite adequate and much more appropriate to their needs.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that when grown-up offspring leave home they usually do so to get married (or these days, I suppose, to find a partner!) and start a family. Most of them from time to time come back, with their families, to visit Grandpa and Grandma. Are they really to be told on these occasions that as their ageing parents are now living in a one-bedroom flat (a kind of ‘pending file’ as they await the grim reaper!) they’ll have to find themselves an hotel or bed and breakfast accommodation when they visit for more than a day?


88 Dudley Road, Clacton. New Years's Day 1979


My wife and I certainly welcomed and accommodated our sons and families when they visited us for the weekend or longer. Nowadays, old and living alone, I can cope only with ‘day’ visitors. However the smaller former bedroom of my small – but three bedroomed – bungalow is now my ‘office’ where at a desk, surrounded by a printer, a scanner and book-cases, I am writing this blog.

The other ‘spare’ bedroom is now a store-room, used for the storage of items which – if I were still capable of climbing a ladder – would be up in the roof space. There is no inducement that would make me voluntarily leave the home in which I have lived for sixty-five years, in which five years ago my wife’s life came to an end, and in which I hope that my life too will end.

I suggest that before looking for unused bedrooms, those who are keen to remedy the housing shortage look for all the empty houses, the second and holiday homes unused or used only occasionally. In 1947, when I was undergoing my practical training as a Sanitary Inspector (nowadays they are Environmental Health Officers!) in Battersea, we would look out for empty houses and report them to the Council’s legal department with a view to commandeering them to solve an even worse housing situation than exists today.

That surely would be a possibility worth exploring. Empty houses are rather easier to spot than empty bedrooms!

Degrees of Wickedness


It was quite wrong to kill Colonel Gaddafi after his capture. That is unquestionable. However I don’t feel that his murder, carried out it seems by a young irregular soldier just after the heat of battle, was quite as wicked as:

The massacre, again by anti-Gaddafi militia, of 50 pro-Gaddafi fighters whose bodies were found in Sirte with their hands tied behind their back.

The deliberate killing rather than capture, of Osama Bin Laden. 

The computer assisted assassination, by unmanned ‘drone’ aircraft controlled from a base thousands of miles away, of individuals believed to be leaders of Al Q’aida.

There must have been sighs of relief in Whitehall when, thanks to Colonel Gaddafi’s murder, it was realized that there would now be no risk of the former Libyan leader making public exactly how much help his torturers and death squads had received from MI6 and its political masters in the days when Tony Blair and Gaddafi had been photographed warmly embracing each other.