Week 28 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

A prophetic blog reader!

            A fortnight ago I published in this blog an email received from a regular reader on the subject of the jihadist extremists in the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and Africa.   It contained the following sentence:

The day surely cannot be far away when they succeed in overthrowing the government of a major country, or carve out a completely new country by annexing bits of other countries.

            Today it seems that that is happening.  The Isis invaders of Iraq and Syria have declared the areas that they have occupied to be a new Islamic Caliphate under their control in which ‘Sharia Law’ will be enforced.  The Shia Iraqi President desperately needs western help but apparently is not quite desperate enough to be prepared to widen his government to represent a truly united Iraqi nation.  That, he says, would be a negation of democracy – that word again.  It clearly means whatever its user wants it to mean!

            We have seen the inspiring spectacle of hundreds of young Iraqi Shia militia volunteers marching up and down with automatic rifles on their shoulders shouting words of defiance against the fighters of Isis.  I’m afraid they’ll discover that there’s a big difference between posturing at patriotic gatherings safe in the middle of Baghdad and actually facing a resolute enemy, with mortars and shells bursting all around you, comrades killed and wounded, and machine-gun fire sweeping the battlefield.

            I think it unlikely that 300 American troops can train an Iraqi army to a standard in which they can defeat those Isis fighters in the few weeks – or perhaps only days – available to them.  It would surely be disastrous for the UK or the USA to become more involved in this conflict than they already are. When we and the Americans withdrew our forces from Iraq after that disastrous and illegal invasion, I wrote in this blog that I thought it likely that within a few years Iraq would be divided into three separate states; an independent Kurdistan in the north, Shia Muslim with close ties to Iran in the south and a Sunni Muslim state in the centre.  It really took someone as ruthless as Saddam Hussein to hold those three opposing factions together.  Already there is virtually an independent Kurdistan in the north and it seems apparent that Sunni and Shia Muslims can’t and won’t live together in peace.  They’ll learn eventually (just as Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians in Europe eventually learned to live together) but we can’t, and shouldn’t try to, hasten the process by force of arms. 

            I wasn’t surprised to learn that very few members of this Isis Army that is trying to take over Syria and Iraq are actually either Syrians or Iraqis.  They are a hotchpotch of fanatics convinced that they’ve got God on their side, from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kosovo, Chechnia and, to our shame, from the United Kingdom and, no doubt, from wherever else there are Muslim communities with a few fervent jihadists or malcontents among them.

            But just as the members of Isis are from a number of different countries there is quite a surprising array of countries opposing them. I remember that when during World War II the Fascist government of Italy was overthrown and the Italians changed sides – we couldn’t bring ourselves to call them ‘allies’ – they were co-belligerents.  Perhaps we’ll have to use that expression again, though most of those concerned aren’t actually fighting yet.

            One that definitely is, is the army of President Assad in Syria.  We seem to have conveniently forgotten that Isis had its origins in Syria and was one of the groups that we were supporting in their efforts to topple President Assad.  The Syrian army is no doubt grateful that Isis has transferred its main attention to Iraq, but Isis definitely intends Syria to be part of its new Islamic Caliphate! 

Then, of course, there’s Iran.  It seems but yesterday that Iran was considered by ‘the west’ to be the centre of all evil in the Middle East.  'We' were quite sure they were  trying to make weapons of mass destruction (just as 'we' had been sure Saddam Hussein had been doing the same in Iraq!) and had to be stopped at all costs.  However Iran is now definitely keen to support Iraq’s Shia government against a Sunni invasion – and we’re welcoming that support.

Finally, Russia has supplied the Iraqi government with some second-hand jet fighter aircraft!   Who knows?  If Iraq has the trained pilots to fly them they could make the air strikes on Isis targets that Barak Obama is so reluctant to authorise, unnecessary.      

            What a muddle!  And most of it brought about by the interference of foreigners in the affairs of both Syria and Iraq.  I think it likely that if all those in Syria and Iraq who are not citizens of those benighted countries were to go home, the natives – those who haven’t yet either fled or been killed – would find a way of resolving their differences and living at peace with each other.

A footnote

Reviewing, in the Radio Times a tv programme about the 'Bay of Pigs' episode in 1961 that ended in total disaster, when the USA sponsored an armed attempt by Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and oust Fidel Castro, Gill Crawford quotes an unnamed US academic as saying: 'Every country has a right to figure out its own destiny......every time we intervene........we produce consequences that are ugly and resonate for generations'.

 If I may quote the Book of Common Prayer, I'd like every American President and every British Prime Minister, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest, that quotation.

The Idol with Feet of  Clay!

            A recent story-line in Holby City  BBC 1’s popular hospital ‘soap’ related to a terminally ill man in his nineties who came into Holby City Hospital accompanied by his granddaughter in her late twenties or early thirties.  She obviously loved him dearly and was very proud of his Polish origins and of the fact that, after coming to England in the immediate aftermath of World War II he had worked in the Fire Service, saving the lives of others at the risk of his own.  He was brave, loving, kind and generous. He was admired, not only by his grand-daughter, but by all who knew him.

            Except - that research revealed that he wasn’t Polish at all but German, and as a young man during World War I he had been a member of Hitler’s dreaded Waffen SS.  He had been a guard at a concentration camp, where he had been feared by all for his cruelty and disregard for human life.  At the end of the war he had stolen the identity of a dead Polish prisoner, in whose name he had come to England and found work in the Fire Service.  Neither his English wife nor his grand-daughter had known anything of his Nazi past and that he was, in fact, a still-wanted war criminal.

            I felt something like the shock and horror and – in the first instance – disbelief, that the grand-daughter felt on learning of her well-loved grandfather’s past, when I realized that Rolf Harris, a tv personality for whom I had felt warm and sincere admiration, had for decades been an abuser of any personable young girl who had the misfortune to make his acquaintance.

            Somehow, although I was shocked at the endless string of offences of which Jimmy Savile is  said to have been guilty, I really didn’t feel the same about him.  My early 20^th century sensibilities had been suspicious of his hairstyle and his very professional showbizzy manner.  Although I watched several of his ‘Jim’ll fix it’ programmes  and had felt admiration at his apparent working as a hospital porter, I wasn’t all that surprised when he was revealed as having been a predatory paedophile.

            I really had been taken in by Rolf Harris though. He was just as much part of the ‘showbiz’ scene as Jimmy Savile but somehow he always managed to give the impression of being an extremely gifted amateur.  And he certainly was gifted, both as an artist (he wouldn’t have had the opportunity of painting the Queen had he not been) and as an entertainer.  He gave hours of innocent pleasure to thousands of viewers and listeners and, like Jimmy Saville, did a great deal of work for thoroughly deserving charities. He had even played a leading role in a film warning children of the danger of paedophiles!

            All of that though counts as nothing compared with the now-revealed activities that have led to his downfall and exposure as an abuser of young women and girls.  I feel desperately sad and sorry for Rolf Harris’ victims, and for the thousands who have seen their idol shattered. Was Rolf Harris' prison sentence too lenient?  I reckon that he found his very public shame and disgrace, after years of adulation, a harsher punishment than any number of years in prison.  There's a couple of lines from Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol that may come to his mind:

All that we know who lie in gaol is that the walls are strong,

And every day is like a year - a year whose days are long!

Supporting Clacton’s Tourist Industry

          It isn’t very often that I find myself eye to eye with our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell – a right-wing, climate-change-denying Europhobe; a Crypto-Ukipper if there ever was one!  However I am right behind him in his support of a campaign for the reduction of VAT payable on such tourist-specific items as accommodation in hotels, guest houses and caravan sites and on, for instance, the attractions on Clacton Pier, from the current 20 percent to 5 percent.               

            I believe that the Chancellor could recover the cost of this from income tax – perhaps by making all ‘state benefits’ (including the Attendance Allowance I get because of my very limited mobility!) subject to that tax.  It is the nature of income tax that no-one is ever asked for more than they can afford to pay, whereas VAT hits the poorest the hardest and the very richest the least because, of course, the VAT on any purchased goods or services is a much smaller proportion of the income of the wealthy purchaser.

            Clacton-on-Sea does not attract the very wealthy.  In fact it attracts precisely those whom the government claims to support – the hardworking man or woman who can just afford to take his or her family for a seaside holiday on Britain’s sunny east coast but for whom a few extra pounds one way or the other make all the difference. 

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Week 3 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

Climatic Change

          A fortnight ago I commented in this blog that four damaging storms in the one month of December were more than just coincidence.  I had no doubt that they were part of a world-wide pattern resulting from global warming and climatic change.  If the New Year has brought in any change it has been a change for the worse.  Cornwall and Wales have had an almost continuous battering by wind and sea for day after day.

There have been deaths and flooding both from the surging sea and from drenching rain falling on already sodden ground.   The Somerset Levels have filled with flood water and supplies have  had to be taken by boat to some inland communities.  Meanwhile, a blast of Arctic Air is producing polar conditions through Canada and the northern half of the USA with hospitals having to deal not only with hypothermia but frostbite!  Temperatures lower than those at the South Pole have been recorded! Our tidal surges, damaging gales and floods are just a small part of a global problem.

            This had all been foreseen.  As I pointed out in my blog; The signal fires of warning, they blaze but none regard.  And so through night to morning, the earth spins ruinward’.  A Cambridge University professor, interviewed on tv explained that as long ago as the 1980s, scientists had warned the world’s governments that climatic change, largely the result of human activity, would produce extreme weather conditions world-wide – and so it has.  Desperately trying not to appear to criticise the government, the professor said that of course the prime minister and chancellor had wider economic issues to consider. He did regret though that they had found it necessary to cut the grant to the Environmental Agency, striving to alleviate some of the worst effects of these extreme conditions.  A much-travelled Blog reader, on his way to Cornwall on business, sent me this email:

This kind of weather is exactly as predicted in my Climate Change booklet I got from the UN in Geneva.

Flooding and Wind disasters have gone up around the world massively in the last 10 years, and are set to continue to get worse as there is more and more heat energy in the atmosphere.

But your MP thinks it’s all a load of rubbish! Let’s hope his home is flooded out.

Well, I do try to avoid having such uncharitable thoughts about our MP and I don’t think it at all likely that either of his comfortable homes will be flooded.  I do wonder though if he has now considered the possibility that the Australian authority on whom he based his climate-change-denial might just possibly have been wrong and virtually all other scientific opinion right.

Whatever else our Prime Minister may be, he is certainly neither stupid nor ignorant (though his grasp of 20^th century history sometimes seems to be a bit shaky!)  I have no doubt that he is well aware of the accelerating effects of climate change and of the urgent need for all nations in the world to work together to counter them.  However he is constrained by the need to hold his Party (which has its fair share of ‘neanderthalers’) together, to keep on the right side of the millionaires who control the popular press, and to do nothing to imperil his Party’s chances in the now-not-so-distant General Election.   Today (8^th January) he has publicly conceded that the extreme weather we are experiencing may be the result of global warming.  The next few weeks could make it clear whether David Cameron really is a great statesman with his country’s, and the world’s, interests at heart – or whether he is just another successful politician.

Our Iron (hearted?) Chancellor

            I do wish that George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, could manage to have a less self-satisfied smile on his face as he tells us that, despite the growing economy and falling jobless figures, we’ll have to endure increasing austerity for two years after the next general election.  This will involve making further billions of pounds of savings, a large proportion of which will have to come from ‘welfare’. His previous forecasts have been mostly wrong so we can always hope that this one will be too – not least with regard in the assumption that he’ll still be chancellor after the next election.

Once again the poor (they’re the ones who’ll be affected by cuts in the welfare budget) will be the ones to suffer.   The lengths to which Mr Osborne will go to prevent the really wealthy from experiencing even the slightest inconvenience is really astonishing.   You’ll recall that one of his early acts as Chancellor was to reduce the tax payable by those liable for the highest rate of income tax.  That’s people with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year (roughly £2,885 per week!)   I am tired of hearing the oft-repeated tale that if the government dares to ask the wealthy to pay the same proportion of their income in tax as the poor, they’d simply up sticks and leave the UK.

                                                                           

Let them go if they want to; but I suggest that those who care so little for their native land that they’ll live abroad rather than pay their fair share of meeting its financial needs, should automatically lose their British citizenship – which would be restored to them only after they had paid the income tax for which they were due.

Here are some ideas to raise a few extra million (or possibly billion) pounds that, unlike his austerity measures, would make no-one homeless or unable to feed their family or buy them the necessities of life:

Restore that extra payment on the highest band of income tax and reduce the level of liability for that tax from £150,000 to £100,000 a year, a figure that is much more than twice the average income in the UK. This is surely a very moderate and reasonable suggestion.

Make all universal state benefits liable for income tax. Those, like myself, with a supplementary pension from our former employment, already pay tax on our state retirement pension, so why shouldn’t we pay it on winter fuel allowance, attendance allowance, free tv licences, free bus passes and so on?  This would mean my paying a little more income tax  for my fuel allowance, attendance allowance (paid because of my limited mobility), and tv licence – but it wouldn’t seriously impair my living standard.   Others might have to pay rather more but folk whose income was so low that they were not liable to pay income tax would be unaffected.

How much those two measures would raise for the exchequer I don’t know. They would, of course, raise much more if we had a properly graded income tax system in which we all paid a percentage of our gross income in tax.  However much or however little it raised, it would make those with low or average incomes (those hard-working taxpayers top politicians are always on about!) feel that perhaps we are all in this together and the whole thing isn’t just a ‘Robin Hood in reverse’ conspiracy to rob the poor and give to the rich, as it seems to be at present.

‘What’s in a name?’

            ……..asked love-sick Juliet Capulet in what is probably Shakespeare’s best-known play.  There can be quite a lot, as our Clacton MP Douglas Carswell may have found out when he invited readers of his Newsletter to describe him in two words.  I wonder what he was hoping for – Clacton’s Crusader, the People’s Voice, Brussels’ Scourge perhaps?   I wonder if they were among those that he received.

            Hardly surprisingly, his request was greeted with derision by his opponents. Norman Jacobs, described in the Clacton Gazette as a ‘respected historian and Labour supporter’ said that the two words that came to his mind were ‘diddly’ and ‘squat’, words that had been used together by former Tendring Council leader Peter Halliday to describe his opinion of Mr Carswell’s contribution to the town.  I have been acquainted with Norman Jacobs for some years, often supporting his point of view – sometimes opposing it.  I really believe that he could have done better than that – and I wondered if I could.  Stringing words together into a readable narrative is the only real skill I have ever possessed.  Could I summarise our MP’s qualities in just two words?

            The two characteristics that come to my mind whenever Douglas Carswell’s name is mentioned are his fervent Europhobia and his conviction that, if climatic change is taking place, it is part of a natural cycle and nothing whatsoever to do with human activities.  It follows that all this business about finding renewable sources of energy and reducing the ‘greenhouse gases’ in the atmosphere is waste of time and money.

             ‘Climate change denying Europhobe’ uses twice as many words as those requested in Douglas Carswell’s invitation.  Then it came to me – I’m not really sure if it is one word or two but it certainly sums up succinctly my view of our MP.  How about Crypto-Ukipper,* a Conservative MP who prefers Nigel Farage’s outlook to that of David Cameron?

* Ukipper is pronounced You-kipper. You won’t find it in any dictionary yet, but give it a year or two………

           

             

           

Week 48 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

Too near to home!

          A couple of weeks ago I remarked in this blog that we could all consider calmly and dispassionately failures of the NHS in London, Liverpool, Glasgow or other similarly distant regions.   The situation was very different when a local hospital – in our case the Colchester Hospital – was involved.  Its failures could, and possibly have, affected the lives and health of people we know, close friends and relatives, people who are very dear to us.  The NHS is not the only field of human activity in which a distant threat can seem much less real and much less sinister than those close at hand.  I have written on a number of occasions about the fact that the incidence of crime, which is becoming less in other parts of Essex is increasing in Clacton-on-Sea.  When I learned of a near-fatal knifing within sight of my Dudley Road bungalow, of a customer being attacked and robbed after drawing cash from his account at Magdalene Green Post Office (where I draw cash from my account from time to time!) and of a break-in just a few houses away from mine, I began to feel that Clacton’s crime-wave was getting uncomfortably close to my home. A fortnight ago a tiny ripple from that crime-wave penetrated it!

            It was Saturday night, the 9^th November. The next day would be Remembrance Sunday.  There were two paper poppies pinned to my jacket lapel – a white one expressing my support for peace campaigners world-wide, and a red one in memory of good friends and comrades killed in World War II, particularly perhaps the fifty who had been taken prisoner at Tobruk and were torpedoed by a British submarine while being transported to Italy.  I too had been captured at Tobruk, but  had been transported to Italy on a different ship and had lived to tell the tale.

I went to bed soon after 10.00 pm and was asleep within minutes.  At about midnight (I glanced at the clock as I got out of bed) I was awakened by my door bell ringing and an urgent knocking on the door.  I slipped on my dressing gown and  made my way to the front door.  ‘Who is it?’ I asked cautiously.  A young and rather tremulous female voice asked me to please open the door and let her in.  The owner of the voice sounded frightened and I opened the door.  Rather to my surprise three girls apparently about 15 or 16 (I am not much good at guessing ages) came thankfully in.  They were courteous, well-spoken and very grateful. They claimed to have been pursued by a group of drunken youths and were asking me for temporary refuge.

I asked them if they’d like me to call the Police.  Oh no, they said.  They thought that once they had been seen to enter a house the youths would go away.  They sat down in my sitting room.  One of them visited the bathroom and it struck me that they ought to contact their mums to let them know they were safe.  Put it down to my age that it didn’t even occur to me that at least one of those girls would almost certainly have been carrying a mobile phone!   One of them said that she would like that, so I gave her my cordless phone and she left the room so (in my innocence I thought!) that we wouldn’t hear the conversation with her no-doubt anxious and angry mum.  She returned after a few minutes very pleased with herself.  Her mum would pick them up and would be with them within minutes.  They would go out and meet her.  With profuse thanks, they made their departure.  I breathed a sigh of relief, went back to bed and – once again – was asleep within minutes.

            However I woke at about 2.30 am quite convinced that there had been something suspicious about the incident.  Almost immediately I noticed that my wallet that had been on the bedroom tallboy, was missing.  I searched the pockets in which I might, just possibly, have left it – though I didn’t think so.  No – it was gone.  There hadn’t been very much money in it – perhaps £20 or £30.  There was a book of stamps, my European Union Health Service card – and my VISA credit and debit cards!

            It was by then getting on for 3.00 am.  I belong to the Co-op Bank which, despite its recent troubles, maintains a 24 hour customer help service.  The assistant I contacted couldn’t have been more helpful.  He stopped at once the use of both cards and told me that my debit card had been used (certainly not by me) shortly after midnight.   The bank would refund the money drawn on that occasion.  New credit and debit cards would be issued within a few days – and so they were.

            On Sunday morning I had to decide whether or not to inform the police.  The loss of my credit and debit cards would cause me only in minor inconvenience for a few days.  The theft of the money was a different matter but I didn’t even know how much it was, and its loss certainly wouldn’t cause me serious hardship.

            In the end I decided that I would report the matter to the police in the hope of discouraging the perpetrator or perpetrators from repeating their act on someone less resilient, with fewer or no ‘emergency reserves’, and perhaps without a supportive family and friends.  Two very helpful and sympathetic detective-constables called to see me, had a friendly chat and took an official audio-and-video recorded statement from me.  Since, they have phoned me to report progress, which is considerable. I don’t think though it would be right for me to reveal the details.  What will come of it in the end?  I would like the person or persons guilty to be deterred from trying to repeat the act elsewhere.   I would not wish though to be the cause of a juvenile acquiring a criminal record that, in today’s economic climate, would make it unlikely that they would ever be able to find honest work.  For such a young person there might well be no future but one of crime and/or prostitution; not a fate I would wish on a juvenile (or on anyone else come to that!) however foolish or greedy they may have been.

Footnote

            Clacton’s Europhobic Climate-Change-Denying MP, Mr Douglas Carswell has given the Clacton Gazette his thoughts on the local crime prevention scene.  A week or so ago blog readers will recall that he was demanding a new style of policing for our town.  It would involve more ‘stop and search’ (though he didn’t make it clear what the police were supposed to be searching for) and ‘coming down hard on the bed-sit guys’.

           
                 His latest thoughts strike a more confident note. He says that the election of Nick Alston as Police and Crime Commissioner has had a major impact on policing in the town. ‘Because we now have a single individual we can hold to account we are starting to get a much more responsible style of policing.............because we have got a locally-elected commissioner, we have seen the police start to take knife crime seriously here, it is working’.  As far as Clacton, Mr Carswell’s constituency, is concerned, I would have thought that Mr Alston’s election has – if anything – had a negative effect.  Clacton’s crime rate has actually gone up during the year that has elapsed since his appointment.  If the government had really wanted local voices to be heard about the appointment of Chief Constables and local policing strategy, they could have instructed the local authority of each Police Area (usually the County or Unitary Authority Council) to appoint a small all-party committee to undertake that function.* This would thus have saved hundreds of thousands of pounds and ensured genuinely local democratic control of the police.

            The Clacton Gazette reports that Mr Carswell’s was one of the loudest voices calling for the introduction of the commissioner role in the first place  He first wrote a paper advocating locally elected police chiefs in 2001 – and now it is law.

            Mr Carswell comments that ‘There was a disappointingly low turnout for the election itself, but two out of every three people are now aware of the fact that there is a police commissioner.  I suspect that in a few years time when we next have an election for the role of police and crime commissioner there is going to be a massive turnout’  I find it rather extraordinary that, after all the publicity, one third of the electorate is not even aware that we have a crime commissioner!  In fact, at that election of a crime and police commissioner to which Mr Carswell refers, there was a record low turnout nationally, and the turnout in Essex was the lowest of the lot.  The only way we’ll get a ‘massive turnout’ in a future election is if the electorate is given the choice of voting for the scrapping of the whole daft ‘jobs for the boys’ business!

* Yesterday (25th November) I heard on the tv news that someone much more authoritative and with much greater knowledge of the situation than I have, is suggesting much the same thing.

The Co-operative Bank

            I first opened an account with the Co-op Bank in 1956 when I came to Clacton as a Public Health Inspector. The Public Health Department was at the rear of the Town Hall at one end of The Grove.   The Co-op Bank then had a branch office at the other end. That’s why I chose them. In fifty-seven years I have never had reason to regret that choice.  There is no longer a branch within easy reach but I can contact them easily by phone or by their website.  I can pay in cheques and draw out cash from my account at any post office.  They will arrange direct debits and similar regular payments, and their cheques can be used for payment for goods or services or as Christmas and birthday gifts to young relatives or friends.  That’s all I need.

            Now they are in trouble because someone was stupid enough to appoint a  Methodist Minister with no relevant banking experience as their chairman. Had he been a saintly Methodist Minister it would still have been stupid. It seems though that their choice, Rev. Paul Flowers, is very unlikely to be awarded a halo!

            However, I don’t see news pictures of depositors queuing up to withdraw their money, as they did from other banks a little while ago.  I haven’t heard a word of the government having to let the Co-op Bank have millions of pounds of our money to keep it afloat.  I don’t see senior officials of the bank departing with millions of pounds in ‘golden handshakes’.  Someone is trying to retrieve £30,000 from Rev. Paul Flowers, someone else £70,000.  Goodness, that’s petty cash in top banking circles.

            I think I’ll stick with the Co-op Bank.  I am confident that its troubles will pass.

  

Week 46 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

Hitting the target – but how and at what cost?

          We can read about NHS scandals in London, Liverpool or Glasgow without feeling anything more than disapproval and perhaps a little relief and satisfaction with the thought that, ‘thank goodness, that sort of thing doesn’t happen down here!’  That, of course, makes it all the worse when that sort of thing definitely does happen here and makes the headlines in the press and in the radio and tv national news bulletins.

            Colchester Hospital, our local major hospital, where most of us find ourselves at some time or another, if not as ‘in-patients’ at least seeking specialist advice or diagnosis, has featured in the national newspapers on several occasions recently.  At first it was just that an above average number of deaths had occurred there.  Not, in itself, a cause for great concern – it is the nature of an ‘average’ that there will be as many above it as below it.  Just last week though the allegations were much more serious. They were about the quality of cancer care. Members of the staff had complained that they were being pressured or bullied by ‘management’ to record false figures for the records relating to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.  The police had been informed!

            That was much more concerning.  During the past six years I had had three operations on my ears for cancer of the skin and cartilage. They were successful though I am still required to attend the hospital at six monthly intervals to make sure that my ears were still OK and that the cancer hasn’t spread to the glands of my neck. Much more serious, a very good friend of mine has had major surgery for cancer at Colchester Hospital followed by a month of out-patient radio-therapy at Colchester and Southend Hospitals, all  during the past six months,

I am not in the least worried about my own situation.  Although my ears were cancerous and I was told that the condition in one of them was ‘very aggressive’ prior to the operation, I have so far been treated as a ‘plastic surgery’ rather than a cancer patient.  At ninety-two my life is, in the nature of things, approaching its end. I think it very unlikely that the problem with my ears will get even a mention on my death certificate! The situation is very different for my friend who is many years younger than me, and for other folk who have been treated for cancer at Colchester Hospital during the past year. For all their sakes I can only hope that there will be a happy and expeditious conclusion to this present crisis and that very few, or not any, patients’ conditions have deteriorated as a result of it.

            The hospital is now ‘in special measures’, the cause of the present crisis is being investigated and steps will no doubt be taken to prevent a recurrence. My own knowledge of the situation is limited to what has been published in the local and national newspapers and announced on radio and tv.   I shall be very surprised though if at the root of the crisis has not been a determination on the part of senior members of the hospital’s professional and administrative staff to hit unrealistic ‘targets’, set at  a high level by people obsessed by statistics and quite ignorant of circumstances ‘on the front line’.

            It must surely be obvious that if an emergency department, and all hospital departments sometimes have to deal with unexpected emergencies, is staffed and equipped only to deal cost-effectively with ‘normal circumstances,’ it will not be capable of dealing with abnormal circumstances when they arise.  There must be sufficient slack to accommodate sickness, holiday absences, staff training, medical and surgical emergencies and so on.  It is ridiculous to expect a consultant to deal with a given number of patients in an hour, or a day. Nor can a midwife or obstetrics nurse deliver a given number of babies in a given time.  The minds of ‘human resources’ managers and time-and-motion experts may work like that, but nature doesn’t!

            Surprisingly Iain Duncan-Smith, the Government’s Work and Pensions Minister (whose knowledge of the conditions in Colchester’s Hospital is unlikely to have been much greater than mine) is reported as having said much the same thing while visiting Colchester on a totally different matter in the height of the crisis.  He too felt that determination to reach ‘targets’ was at the root of Colchester Hospital’s troubles.  Targets, he said, are useful but we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be controlled by them.  Perhaps he was prompted by his own signal failure to hit the targets that he had set himself in carrying out his sweeping welfare and benefit changes, notably the introduction of ‘universal credit’.

            Well, Mr Iain Duncan-Smith is a senior member of a government that has sometimes seemed target obsessed.  Perhaps he’ll pass the news on to his colleagues and persuade them that patients are more important than targets and the well-being of individual men and women more important than statistics.

Clacton’s Problems ……… Contrasting Attitudes

          Clacton-on-Sea is unique in many respects, most of them positive.  We are the only seaside resort in East Anglia still holding an annual Air Show attracting thousands of visitors. We are the holiday resort with the lowest average annual rainfall in the United Kingdom.  Our miles of safe, sandy beaches, cliff-top gardens and lively pier aren’t unique but are the equal of any in England, and much better than most!  We have a lot of which to be proud  - I have lived here for 57 years, well over half my lifetime, and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world.

            There is a downside though.  While every other district in Essex has a falling crime-rate, ours is rising!   Part of the cause of that is the scarcity of jobs for young people and older alike, made worse by the fact that former prosperous hotels have, thanks to nationally changing holiday habits, been converted into cheap bed-sits. At the same time in the Brooklands area of Jaywick, flimsy properties intended only for temporary summer holiday use, have been used for all-the-year-round living accommodation.  They are cheap to buy or to rent.  Coupled with our proximity to London, these factors have attracted people unable to afford the steadily increasing cost of living in the capital, down to Clacton where they may hope to find cheap accommodation – but can’t find work.

          

           Clacton’s MP, Europhobic climate-change-denying Douglas Carswell has a totally predictable solution to the problem.  ‘We do have a specific problem in the centre of Clacton – and it needs a different style of policing.  Part of that has got to mean police do more stop and searching (but what are they supposed to be searching for?) and be more aggressive with the bedsit guys’.  A nice thought as the ‘season of good will towards all men’ approaches!  I reckon Mr Carswell would have felt really at home in medieval times when migrant ‘sturdy beggars’ were flogged and then driven out of town and told to go back  to the village or town from which they came.

          

            A quite different attitude is that of a group of  unemployed  sixteen to  twenty-five year olds  (I’ve no idea whether or not they include any ‘bedsit guys) who have been helped by the Prince’s Trust to set up an empty store in the town’s Pier Avenue to distribute warm clothing, bedding and food to people in need throughout December.

            The Clacton Gazette quotes Ryan Kavanagh, one of their members, as saying, ‘The idea is to help people less fortunate than us.  If they are struggling through the winter months they can come in and we help them as best we can.  This is especially important in Clacton, where there aren’t many places for people to go if they’re unfortunate enough to living on the streets or need help’

The new ‘Winter Warmer’ shop opens on 2^nd December and the volunteers are busily painting the shop, putting up new shelves, creating a new sign and making everything spic and span for opening day.

They would welcome donations of clothing, shoes, blankets, toys or food.  Donations should be taken to the Citizens Advice Bureau base in Carnarvon Road.  I wonder if Mr Douglas Carswell MP, will be making his way there with donations from one – or both – of his comfortable homes.

Immoral Earnings?

Two long feature articles in a recent issue of Private Eye reveal in some detail the lengths to which two extremely wealthy men, Lord Rothermere owner of the Daily Mail and  Richard Branson, head of the Virgin Empire, go to avoid paying to the UK taxes that lesser mortals (like you and I) pay without question, if without enthusiasm.

Remembering that the Daily Mail recently declared Ed Miliband’s dad, who in World War II served on a destroyer in the Royal Navy, as ‘The man who hated Britain’, Private Eye  described Lord Rothermere as ‘The man who hates (paying any tax in) Britain’.   I find it incredible that some immensely wealthy men and women (Lord Rothermere and Richard Branson are clearly not alone) do not feel it their duty and their privilege to pay a sum that they will hardly miss for the privilege of British citizenship. This has made it possible for them to amass, keep and increase their great wealth while many of their fellow countrymen, men, women and children, rely on charity to feed and clothe themselves and to keep warm in the winter.  

It seems almost equally incredible that there is a small army of solicitors and accountants who derive their own inflated incomes from devising schemes to avoid the even wealthier having to hand over any of their wealth to the government!  It’s all above board and perfectly legal but it is surely ‘living on immoral earnings’.

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Week 45 2013

Tendring Topics………..on line

'.........and from the easy speeches that comfort cruel men'

              As far as I know G.K.Chesterton, Edwardian author and poet and creator of the Father Brown detective stories, wrote only one hymn.  In it he asks for divine deliverance from, 'Lies of tongue and pen, and from the easy speeches that comfort cruel men'.

           At the end of the political party conference season an angry blog reader wrote bitterly to me about the way various groups had been singled out and falsely demonised at one of the conferences, as responsible for  all our economic woes - the long-term unemployed, the allegedly not-so-disabled, occupiers of under-occupied social housing, people living on ‘benefit, young people neither at school nor in work, illegal immigrants, legal EU immigrants, and so on……and on. 

            More recently we’ve had another scapegoat to explain whose fault it is that it’s so difficult to make an appointment to see your family doctor, why hospital wards are understaffed and why accident and emergency patients, needing immediate attention, sometimes may have to wait for hours to get attention.  It’s nothing to do with hospitals having had to downsize their nursing and medical staff to meet government economic targets.  Of course it isn’t!  It’s all those foreigners – health tourists – who come to Britain with the sole purpose of exploiting our free National Health Service. They go home directly they’ve had expensive treatment that we have paid for with our taxes.

            An official government report claimed that the NHS is spending up to £2 billion a year on ‘foreign visitors and short-term migrants’ and £300 million of that figure is spent on ‘health tourists’.  Health Minister Jeremy Hunt said that we couldn’t afford to run an ‘international health service’ and that less than 50 percent of chargeable foreign nationals are identified.  Funny thing – like most old people I’ve spent quite a lot of time in doctors’ and hospital waiting rooms in the past year or so, and the only obvious ‘foreigners’ I’ve encountered (and have been pleased to see!) have been the foreign doctors who make up for the fact that we’re no longer training enough professionals each year for those jobs.

            Needless to say Clacton’s Europhobic and climate-change-denying MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, has leapt onto the populist bandwagon.  Having read reports in the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph that ‘an EU study has found that 600,000 unemployed migrants are living in Britain at a cost of £1.5 billion to the NHS alone’, he claimed that ‘a wave of benefit migrants….a tsunami of economic refugees’ are causing a huge burden on the NHS.

            None of the allegations are true.  Evidence from the London School of Tropical Medicine and the University of York, quoting research commissioned by  the government itself, showed that, contrary to Jeremy Hunt’s claims, twice as many foreign visitors pay to use the NHS as exploit free health care and that the UK is a net exporter of patients seeking treatment.    Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Social and Economic Research claims that evidence shows that EU migrants, like migrants in general, on average pay in more than they take out.

            You’d never dream, from the allegations of the Health Minister and a sycophantic press that British visitors to mainland Europe (health tourists?)  enjoy exactly the same privileges when visiting other EU countries as other EU citizens enjoy in Britain.  During the past seven years I have visited mainland Europe on nine or ten occasions, staying for several days in Belgium and in Germany and visiting five other countries that are members of the EU, and one non-EU country. Always in my wallet I have carried my small plastic European Health Insurance Card (they’re free, and you can get an application form for one from any post office) that throughout the EU entitles me to exactly the same medical treatment as any citizen of the country I am in.

            I am fortunate in that I have never needed to use that card, but its possession has allowed me to visit countries in mainland Europe without taking out the very expensive (at my age!) health insurance that would be prudent if I were visiting the USA or any other Non-EU country.  Nor should it be assumed that health provision in other European countries is necessarily inferior to that in our own.  My grandson Nick,  founder and Managing Director of an international tourism publicity consultancy, spends a great deal of time in Brussels.  He has used the Belgian health service on a number of occasions and he tells me that, although different, it is in no way inferior to ours.

            Access to the whole of Europe’s health services is, of course, one of the privileges we would automatically lose if, in any future referendum, a majority of us were stupid enough to vote to leave the European Union.

‘Fair’s Fair!’ – but what is ‘Fair’?

          I never for one moment imagined that in any confrontation between our elected Members of Parliament and representatives of the energy suppliers I would find myself agreeing with an argument of the energy suppliers.  I do believe though that one of their contentions – that the cost of the government’s ‘green energy’ measures should be drawn from general taxation, rather than from the fuel bills of energy users – is wise and reasonable.

            I would however urge that it should be funded from income tax rather than from VAT and customs duties on alcohol, tobacco, petrol and the like. VAT, customs duties and fuel bill add-ons are ‘indirect taxes’ which take no account of ability to pay.  The multi-millionaire filling the tank of his Rolls Royce (or getting his chauffeur to do it!) pays exactly the same price and the same amount of tax for his petrol as the agricultural labourer filling that of his battered second-hand Ford.  Obviously that tax is a far greater proportion of the farm labourer’s income than is that of the multi-millionaire.  Income tax is a ‘direct tax’ that does something to restore that balance – and could do much more if the tax was really calculated as a fixed proportion of every adult’s income.

            There are clearly two opposing views of what is and what is not ‘fair’.  The Chancellor and his supporters consider that it is ‘fair’ for everyone, rich and poor alike to pay more-or-less the same amount towards the provision of services for the whole community such as the NHS, Social Security, policing, refuse collection and so on.  Indirect taxes help to secure this. ‘The rich man in his castle’ pays in VAT exactly the same amount as ‘the poor man at his gate’ for his purchase of goods or services, or in excise duty when he fills his car or buys himself ‘a pint or a wee dram’.  Thus the  chancellor and those who agree with him are able to claim with absolute sincerity that the tax system is fair and that ‘we are all in this together’.

            I believe that our contribution towards services that benefit the whole community should not be regarded as an imposition, but paid with patriotic pride as our annual fee for the privilege of  British citizenship.  This annual payment, the equivalent of today's 'income tax', should be levied on every British adult, rich or poor as a percentage of his or her gross annual income (before any of it can be diverted to 'charitable trusts' or off-shore tax havens!)   The percentage required would be calculated annually.  I can only guess what it would be but I’d be surprised if would be much in excess of 25 percent.   Only thus would we become a ‘fair’ community in which every paid-up citizen had a financial stake. Then we would truly be able to say that, We’re all in this together!’

The Great Storm!

            A remarkable feature of the storm that lashed southern and central England on Monday morning 28^th October was the accuracy with which it had been forecast by the Meteorological Office.  For almost a week we had been told of its approach, the time of its arrival and its predicted path across the southern half of our country.  We were advised about the amount of damage likely to be sustained, the possibility of local flooding,  trees being uprooted, structural damage and interruption of electricity supplies, road traffic and rail services.  The forecasts were correct in every respect. Possibly because of that, only four deaths attributable to the storm were reported nationally. In Clacton-on-Sea trees were uprooted and there was some structural damage to property but – as usually happens – we suffered rather less than most of southern England.          

The Helter-Skelter – before the storm.

The most spectacular – and nationally reported – damage that we sustained was to Clacton Pier where the Helter Skelter was blown over and severely damaged.  Once before, in 1956, a similar storm had uprooted trees, damaged buildings, blown the Helter Skelter into the sea and sunk pleasure boats moored off the beach.  I remember it particularly because at that time the Council’s public health inspectors, of whom I was one, were responsible for recording and reporting details of each day’s weather to the Met. Office – and preparing a brief local weather forecast to be displayed early each morning on a notice board near Pier Gap  and the memorial garden. Any member of the public sufficiently determined and physically strong enough to struggle against the howling gale to the notice board on that particular morning would have read ‘Sunny intervals, risk of rain at times, breezy’

           

             

           

           

Week 22 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

‘God hears the embattled nations sing and shout –

‘Gott Straffe England!’ and ‘God save the King!’

God this, God that, and God the other thing!

‘Good God’, says God, ‘I’ve got my work cut out!

            This mildly irreverent rhyme was written by Sir John Squire, early twentieth century satirist, in 1916 the year of the Battle of the Somme in World War I.   ‘Gott straffe England! (God punish England!) was the refrain of a ‘Hymn of Hate’ widely – though not universally – popular in Germany during those war years. It declared England, rather than Russia or France, to be Germany’s principal foe   Both Britain and Germany were nominally Christian countries and both claimed God to be ‘on their side’.  Both armies had military padres to offer their troops spiritual comfort and perhaps to assure them that their cause was the one that had divine blessing and approval. Throughout World War II the belt buckle of every German soldier was inscribed with the words ‘Gott mit uns’ or ‘God with us’?

           The now virtually unknown words of the second verse of our National Anthem were once sung with gusto.   I remember them. They told God exactly what was expected of him!

O Lord our God arise!

Scatter her enemies, and make them fall.

Confound their politics, 

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On thee our hopes we fix.

God save us all.

            This attitude persists today. The brutal murderers of that British soldier outside the army barracks in Woolwich last week declared the Muslim refrain Allah Akbar (God is Great) as they waited for martyrdom, or the opportunity for yet more killing, with the arrival of the police.  Every suicide bomber believes himself to be giving his own life as a worthy sacrifice to God if, at the same time, he manages to kill a few infidels.

            Nor is this attitude, if not its practice, completely eliminated among Christians.  Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was reported to have been outraged when Archbishop Runcie prayed for the Argentine as well as the British victims of the Falklands War.  Only last week correspondents to the local daily Gazette proclaimed that God had intervened on the side of the western allies in World War II – by calming the sea to enable the remnants of our army to escape via Dunkirk and, on at least one occasion, preventing enemy bombers from taking off to bomb England!  Can those correspondents possibly believe that God was supporting the British and American bomber crews who incinerated thousands of innocent civilians in the bombing raids on Dresden on 13^th and 14^th February 1945?

            The God revealed to us in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ is the loving father of all mankind.   To suggest that he wills any act of violence by one of his children against another is the ultimate blasphemy, the ‘unforgiveable sin’.  Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, bless those that curse them, and do good to those who are spiteful towards them.  To those who rummage through the Old Testament  for justification of this, that or the other act of violence, he said that the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament  is encapsulated in the one commandment, to treat other people as you would like them to treat you. I understand that other world religious faiths include the same or a similar injunction.

            Can you imagine Jesus Christ, as we know him from the four Gospels, giving his blessing to suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices, cluster bombs, land mines, unmanned drones controlled from a distant country assassinating those deemed to be enemies of that country, or submarines roaming the oceans armed with weapons capable of destroying whole cities? 

There will, I suppose, always be those who are so consumed with hatred,  fear or envy that they will resort to violence, or plan to resort to violence against their fellow men and women.  Those who do so should not delude themselves that their thoughts and actions have the approval of God!

Some Afterthoughts

          One of the men believed to be involved in the killing of that young soldier in Woolwich  told a bystander that he was hoping to ‘bring war onto the streets of Woolwich’.  Those who have attacked mosques and Islamic Centres in reprisal for the murder are behaving exactly as the murderers had hoped.  Almost equally stupid was our Prime Minister’s assertion that the actions of these cold-blooded murderers ‘had nothing to do with religion’.  Of course they were to do with religion – a false religion that most of us are quite prepared to accept is as contrary to the tenets of Islam as the reaction of those who attack Islamic centres is contrary to Christianity.

            However, when asked why the murder suspects had not been more closely watched by the security forces since their radical views were well-known, an official spokesman replied that there were thousands who held similar views and it was impossible to monitor them all.

             That I do consider a very alarming piece of information.

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Clacton’s ‘Benefit Ghettos’

          When my wife and I were house-hunting in Clacton for our small family way back in 1956 we quickly realised that we couldn’t afford to buy a home near to the seafront.  The properties  within a few minutes walk of the sea, mostly large Edwardian houses offering holiday accommodation during the summer months, were well beyond our means.  We settled for the modest bungalow in Dudley Road (once described in Clacton Town Hall’s Council Chamber as ‘working class residential’) where, fifty-seven years later, I am writing these words.

            How astonishing therefore to find that those once ‘posh’ roads near the seafront in Clacton’s Pier Ward are now a ‘Benefits Ghetto’ with a staggering fifty-four percent of residents living on state benefit.  It is claimed to have the fifth highest number of folk-on-benefit in the country. Even in the town’s Golf Green Ward which includes Jaywick, Britain’s most deprived area, only forty-eight percent of residents of working age are living on state benefits. Douglas Carswell, Clacton’s Conservative MP says that, ‘this just shows the need for welfare reform.  I don’t think that William Beveridge and Clement Attlee when setting up the welfare state all those years ago, wanted to see half the people living in Pier Ward to be living at someone else’s expense.  There are government changes coming in which will see people who are on jobseekers allowance expected to look for a job.  Frankly that hasn’t been happening.  People who are young and fit and able to work will be expected to work’.  Perhaps Mr Carswell can suggest where those job-seekers should look for work in an area where jobs are notoriously scarce and where there are at least a dozen applicants for every vacancy.

            William Beveridge and Clem Attlee, were they alive today, certainly wouldn’t have expected to see two and a half million unemployed in Britain sixty-five years after the end of World War II.   Clem Attlee would have been horrified at the way in which the aspirations of those who had fought and won the war have been treated with contempt by successive governments.  In particular he would have had difficulty in believing that after ten years of New Labour government the gap between the incomes of the richest and poorest in our land was wider than it had been at any time in the twentieth century.

            The fact is that the decline of Clacton as a holiday resort, largely as a result of cheap air travel, has meant that there is no longer the demand that there once was for boarding house holiday accommodation.  The owners of buildings that had been used for this purpose found that they could manage quite nicely by letting out single rooms cheaply all the year round as bed-sitters for those who could afford nothing better.  It became known that there is usually cheap bed-sit accommodation available in Clacton – and homeless and jobless people from all over the country found their way here; just another example of the functioning of 'market forces'.  

            Government Cuts in the public services and the attempt to persuade ‘the big society’ to do for nothing some of the tasks formerly undertaken by paid labour, have played their part in reducing the number of jobs available for both skilled and unskilled workers.  Public and private enterprises alike are cutting the number of their employees to the bare minimum – and below!  Recently I noticed that the Public Conveniences on Clacton Station were locked because of vandalism and misuse.  Those who needed to use the Convenience were advised to get a key from one of the station staff. They'll be lucky to find one!  It isn’t so long ago that the constant presence of uniformed station staff acted as a deterrent to miscreants of all kinds.  But Profitability, Productivity and Cost Effectiveness (the unholy trinity driving market forces!) demand that employees must be profitably occupied every minute of their working day. No wonder hospital emergency departments are unable to cope with the demand put upon them, public property is constantly vandalised, public buildings defaced by graffiti, litter blows about our streets, there are potholes in our roads and broken paving makes our pavements dangerous to pedestrians.

            In the coming months we can confidently expect even more refugees from the imposition of the Housing Benefit Ceiling and the Bedroom Tax in London, to arrive among us.  Many of them will hope, almost certainly in vain, to find work as well as cheap accommodation. A few will be content to exist on ‘benefit’.  It is about those that we’ll read in the tabloid press.  There is little point in castigating them.  They are the product of our wonderful ‘free market economy’ that encourages everybody  (billionaire tax-dodgers, Bank Executives with their bonuses and miss-sold insurances, money lenders, expenses fiddling Councillors, MPs and Noble Lords, slum landlords, loan sharks and, right at the bottom of the pile, lowly benefit scroungers), to grab as much as they can for as little as they can get away with.