Week 38.10 21st Sept. 2010

Tendring Topics……on line

An Outbreak of Truth – and Common Sense!

Yes, there does seem to have been a worrying outbreak of truth and common sense recently. There is no cause for alarm though. It is probably just a mild attack that won’t spread and from which we can hope for a complete recovery.

Here are a few of the more distressing symptoms: The Governor of the Bank of England, addressing the members of the Trades Union Congress (whom The Sun could have told him were ‘a bunch of loony lefties’) confessed that the current financial crisis was not, as had previously been thought, all the fault of the previous government; nor even that of work-shy receivers of benefit and public services. The causes were the greed and incompetence of ‘the financial sector’, bankers like himself. The members of the TUC were, he went on to say, ‘right to be angry’. Fortunately he refrained from suggesting ways in which those who were responsible for the crisis might be made to pay their share of the cost of its remedy, thus easing the burden of those who were innocent. That would have suggested that his condition was terminal!

Nor was the Bank of England’s Governor alone in showing worrying symptoms. The East Anglian Daily Times, is a very good and reliable regional newspaper. I always enjoy reading it and have recently greatly appreciated its ‘readers letters page’. Its core readership consists of comfortably off residents of small towns and rural communities in Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex. It would, I think, be fair to describe its political position as ‘centrist’ though with a tendency to veer to the right. It has certainly never before, to my knowledge, strayed to the left of that centre line.

Yet below is an extract from a leading article on Tuesday 14th September, below a less-than-snappy headline Greed is not good:

‘Some people appear oblivious to reality and devoid of common sense. Many FTSE 100 firms have cut costs because of the recession – a euphemism that invariably means staff have been axed. Yet executive bonuses are close to pre-financial crisis levels. Average bonuses for directors equated with 100 percent of salary. That displays no sign of empathy with those less fortunate…………

…………It is an affront to their fellow men when those who enjoy comfortable lives abuse their positions. Let’s hope that, one day, they realize it and act rather less selfishly.

. Not exactly a rabble-rousing call to ‘Raise the red flag and man the barricades!’ but, for the East Anglian Daily Times, a worrying lurch to the Left.

So much for Truth; how about Common Sense?

Well, if Honesty is the Best Policy (though it is rather sad if that is the only reason for adopting it!) it follows that the pursuit of Truth must be Common Sense. What I actually had in mind though was that the question of whether or how we should replace Britain’s Trident independent nuclear deterrent may possibly be left until after the next General Election*. To renew it would cost billions of pounds at a time when we are told we must save every penny. I hope that, by the time of the next election a comfortable majority of voters will have realized that Trident isn’t independent (can you imagine it being used, or even used as a threat, without the approval of the USA?) and it hasn’t yet deterred anybody.

It didn’t deter Turkey from invading Cyprus, Israel from invading Lebanon, Georgia from invading South Ossetia, and Russia responding by invading Georgia. It didn’t deter the USA and its allies from invading Grenada, Argentina from invading the Falklands, or Iraq from invading Kuwait. Its use against a non-nuclear state is unthinkable and its use against a nuclear one would result in Mutually Assured Destruction. How appropriate that the acronym for such a policy is MAD!

The armed forces, like every other field of human activity, have to face cuts. Considering all that members of the present government have said about their predecessors starving troops in Afghanistan of necessary equipment, they can hardly look in that direction for savings. It has been suggested that the building of two new aircraft carriers might be cancelled. I hope not – not because to do so would deprive an impoverished area of Scotland of much-needed jobs – but because the giant craft are pieces of ‘defence equipment’ the use of which is not limited to the killing of our fellow men and women.

Aircraft carriers, and the aircraft they carry can be, and have been, used for the relief of man-made and natural humanitarian disasters. They can carry vast quantities of badly needed relief and reconstruction supplies and can be used to evacuate threatened civilian populations. They are the very last items of war equipment that should be considered for sacrifice.

*This now seems to be in doubt. An official spokesman says that it has already been decided ‘in principle’ to renew the Trident programme. Others seem less certain. We’ll just have to wait and see.

A real cause for concern

I have just watched on tv the ‘distribution’ of desperately needed food to a starving community in flood stricken Pakistan. I have put ‘distribution’ in quotes because it was, in fact, a riot demonstrating a practical application of Darwin’s theory of the ‘survival of the fittest’ . Those who were fittest and strongest grabbed the food that they and their families needed. The weakest went hungry – and are destined to become even weaker! Long before the truck was emptied, the driver for his own safety and that of his helpers, drove away – with the truck still full of food-grabbing rioters!

It was an incident that underlines the need for ‘the West’ to do much, much more, not only to provide more help for Pakistan but to ensure that aid is distributed fairly and competently. The situation is dangerous, not just for the people of Pakistan but for all of us. How long do you suppose it will take Taliban fanatics to persuade a starving population that all their troubles, the deluge and its aftermath, are God’s punishment for their government’s support of the infidel British and Americans? The remedy, they will urge, is in their own hands!

Don’t forget that Pakistan is a country that has nuclear weapons and, thanks to unstinting military aid from the west, the means to use them. I reckon that the fact that both India and Pakistan and, not too far away, Israel, actually possess nuclear weapons is something that should be giving us many more sleepless nights than the fear that Iran may, just possibly, be trying to acquire them!

It seems but yesterday………

And, in reality, it wasn’t very long ago, that Clacton’s Pier Avenue had its layout altered, its pavements widened and re-laid, and was provided with new vandal-resistant street furniture. There was also the famous or infamous town centre water feature, about which I wrote – over-optimistically it seems! – last week.

I think that we Clactonians have now accustomed ourselves to the new town centre. As a mobility scooter user (and there are nowadays quite a few of us!) I very much appreciate the wide, smooth-surfaced, footpaths.

Work in progress in Pier Avenue (Sept. 2010)

Now though, believe it or not, they’re at it again! Tendring District and Essex County Councils are spending £325,000 narrowing the seaward section of Pier Avenue to a single lane, widening footpaths, improving street lights and CCTV, and planting trees.

Admirable, perhaps – but aren’t we supposed to be at the very beginning of a financial crisis in which we have all been warned to expect cuts in or the abandonment of essential public services, never mind new projects that are, at best, of dubious benefit.

If the two councils really have over a quarter of a million pounds ‘in the kitty’ that simply must be spent on Clacton’s highways, I would have thought a better objective for their prodigality would have been the repair of the broken, uneven and dangerous-to-pedestrians footpaths in many parts of the town.


Right - footpath in Clacton's Anchor Road (Sept. 2010)

Twice the Prime Minister’s pay packet!

Once again we find the Prime Minister’s salary used as a benchmark for wealth. Joanna Killian, Essex County Council’s Chief Executive, is said to have a salary of £285,000 a year, almost double his! Ms Killian, who has held the post with the County Council since 2006, was also appointed Chief Executive to Brentwood Borough Council a year later. That £285,000 must be the salary for both jobs. She surely can't be drawing another six figure salary from Brentwood!

It seems too that she is a firm believer in ‘no expense spared’. In 2009 she used a council credit card to pay for a staff member, who had been struck down with food poisoning at an office event, to take a room at Claridges Hotel in Mayfair. She also spent £270 on champagne for two officials from Kent County Council who had helped with an Essex project and £55 (just small change really!) on flowers for another colleague.

I am not all that interested in comparing her salary with that of the Prime Minister. He does, after all, enjoy other worthwhile perks. I wonder how it compares with other professionally qualified colleagues at County Hall. They all, I am sure, do difficult and important jobs serving the public. They couldn’t do her job – but then I’d be very surprised if she could do theirs. One of the reasons why there is such an enormous gap between the highest and the lowest paid employees of the council is the practice of paying staff percentage pay increases. This enables top earners to claim, ‘I had just the same pay increase as my secretary and my PA’, while pocketing thousands of pounds more. With every national percentage pay increase the gap between the highest and the lowest widens. As I have pointed out before in this blog, five percent of not-very-much is very little. Even one percent of a six-figure salary can be a considerable sum.

One thing that I find really extraordinary is that Ms Killian should simultaneously be chief executive of Essex County Council and of Brentwood Borough Council. When I was appointed Clacton’s Housing Manager and again when I became Tendring Council’s PRO (both infinitely less important and infinitely less well paid than a CEO!) it was stressed that I should devote all my time to my work and could not take any other paid employment. I had to get the Council’s permission to pursue my freelance writing, which was by that time earning me a few hundred pounds a year. They agreed when I explained that my writing was a hobby and that, unlike most hobbies that cost money to pursue, mine actually made a little money. They would certainly never have agreed to my taking on a part-time job with another authority!

Quite apart from the principle involved there must surely have sometimes been a conflict of interest. In my experience County Councils and their constituent District and borough Councils don’t always agree.

Mind you, I had been astonished – a few weeks ago - when I learned that the wife of the County Council’s Head of Communications (now on leave of absence) was a senior officer in the same department (she has now resigned). Essex County Council is clearly a law unto itself in these matters!

Week 34.10 24th August 2010

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Mammon’s Servants?

A month or two ago I expressed my disquiet at the fact that at Clacton’s new Coastal Academy pupils were being offered material prizes, not for outstanding work or extramural activities, but for simply turning up at school on time most days, attending classes and generally behaving themselves. I contrasted that attitude with the situation in developing countries, where education is so valued that children will walk barefoot for miles to sit on mud floors and attend to every word that their teachers utter.

Today’s adult world offers children a thoroughly bad example. Bankers, for example, who receive what most of us would consider to be an extremely handsome salary, have to be offered even more handsome annual bonuses if they are not to up sticks and exercise their talents elsewhere. The same threat is made if it is suggested that their salaries and bonuses might be subject to special taxation. They are, of course, among the first and loudest of the patriots who accuse public service workers of ‘holding the country to ransom’ when they strike for a pound or two extra pay!

It might have been thought that the public service at least would have been free of this extra-payment-for-doing-the-job-properly culture. Not so – top Civil Servants also get ‘performance bonuses’, and the plague has now spread to local government. A few weeks ago I mentioned that at a time of savage cuts in services and an income freeze on rank and file staff, the members of the Essex County Council had awarded themselves increased ‘allowances’ and had also paid out handsome cash bonuses to a favoured few top officials!

The practice has now spread to Tendring District Council. It appears that in addition to the Chief Executive, his Deputy and his Assistant (the Council’s three highest paid officials) there are four departmental chiefs, on salaries of £65,000 a year, who are designated as ‘Performance Champions’. Nigel Brown, Council Spokesman (once my job but I’m glad I haven’t got it now!) explained to the Gazette that the authority’s constitution authorises the Chief Executive to appoint four designated heads of service as ‘Performance Champions’, with a range of additional responsibilities. They may be granted an ‘enhancement in salary’ (a bonus in plain English) not exceeding twenty percent of their salary and for not more than three years. This year they are each getting £13,000 despite a general Council wage and recruitment freeze. What is it for? Making some of their colleagues redundant perhaps?

If that is the Council’s Constitution it is high time that it was amended. An unnamed ‘Council insider’ is reported as having told the Gazette: ‘It seems wrong. They are already well paid and are getting a payment which seems to be made behind people’s backs, especially when others may lose their jobs. Surely they should already be performance champions if they are heads of their service’.

Do ‘top people’ have to be bribed, as well as paid, to give of their best these days? I would have hoped that the satisfaction that comes with a good job well done would have been a sufficient incentive.

Pakistan’s Floods…..and other Charities

Worldwide, the response to the appeal for aid for the victims of Pakistan’s catastrophic floods has, so we are told, been disappointing. Among the reasons suggested for this are appeal fatigue, Pakistan’s perceived association with Islamic terrorism, and a suspicion that Pakistan is a country in which money donated to help the many would be in danger of being siphoned off to further enrich the few. I think that ‘appeal fatigue’ is probably the nearest to the truth. The fact is that there have simply been too many natural and man-made disasters in the past few years; earthquakes, tsunamis, civil wars, floods, mudslides, avalanches – there has been no end to them. Some of them are on going. Haiti is going to need charitable aid for years to come. There is no sign of an end to the humanitarian crises in the Sudan, in central Africa and in the Gaza strip.

Meanwhile, the appeals for Charities nearer home continue to land on our doormats, getting ever more desperate as the world-wide financial crisis reduces their income, and support once regularly received from central and local government dries up. Christian Aid, Oxfam, Cafod, War on Want, The Red Cross, The Salvation Army, charities supporting the very young, the very old, the chronically ill, the dying, the blind, the deaf, the disabled, the homeless, alcoholics, drug abuse victims, ex-service men and women, the RSPCA, the NSPCC, the PDSA, the Lifeboats, the Air Ambulances, the hospitals, the Hospices and so on, and on, and on.

They’re all thoroughly deserving but none of us can hope to support more than a handful of them. All are no doubt hoping for a multi-millionaire patron (the British Legion must be delighted to have found one in Tony Blair!) but all of them know that it is from the masses of generous ordinary people that their continuing support comes. It really isn’t surprising that some people have found that Pakistan is ‘an appeal too far’. Nevertheless the response from the British Government and the British people has surely been generous. We are said to have funded, either officially or through charities, a quarter of the aid that has so far reached the stricken area.

I have wondered why we haven’t heard of a few millions being donated from Pakistan’s wealthy co-religionists in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States – the purchasers of racehorses, country estates and football teams in this country. And isn’t it surprising that Pakistan’s government should have found the millions required to manufacture, develop and maintain a nuclear arsenal but has apparently been unable to prepare adequately for devastating floods – a much more likely peril than nuclear attack. But, of course, that was not a matter about which the unfortunate flood victims were consulted - and if we ever suffer a natural disaster and need international support, the same will be said about us.

Late News - I am pleased to learn that the Pakistan Flood Disaster Appeal is gathering pace and that useful sums of money are now being received. Like Haiti though, it is going to take years to bring Pakistan back to ‘normal’. While it is very unlikely that Haiti will suffer another equally devastating earthquake in the near future, there is no reason at all why Pakistan should not experience a similar inundation next year – or the year after. We really must do something about world climatic change, even if it does upset our local MP and his supporters!

A letter to the Press

I am, let me confess it, an opinionated old man – and I don’t keep my opinions to myself! As well as writing this blog every week, I sometimes find myself writing letters to the Readers’ Letters Pages of the press. Local blog readers may have noticed my occasional contributions to the Daily Coastal Gazette and the Clacton Gazette.

On Wednesday of last week (18th August) the East Anglian Daily Times published one of my letters. It was in response to a correspondent who, while admitting that he wasn’t around at the time, wrote about the relationship between Britain and the USA in World War II. Well, I had been around at the time. I agreed with much of what he said but felt that he had an exaggerated idea of the number of British girls, and married women, who succumbed to the charms of American Servicemen, forgetting their boyfriends or husbands in the forces overseas.

Some, of course, did. Many more though certainly did not. Among them was my girlfriend Heather Gilbert, whom I had met as a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl on the day Britain declared war on Germany. She loyally waited for me for the four years that I was overseas, including three as a POW in Italy and Germany, despite the fact that we were not engaged and had no more than a verbal ‘understanding’, and that there was no certainty about when, if ever, I would be home again. With my letter I attached a photograph of Heather in 1942, aged nineteen, to make the point that she would have had no problem finding another boyfriend, American or British, had she wished to do so. The photo had been sent to me at my work camp in Germany and I had been particularly pleased to see that in her lapel she was wearing the miniature Royal Artillery cap-badge brooch that I had given her when we had said goodbye.

In my letter I also mentioned that I had been a member of the 67th Medium Regiment RA, an East Suffolk Territorial Regiment that had been successfully in action in the Egypt/Libya frontier area from November 1941 till June 1942 when we had been part of the Tobruk garrison overwhelmed by the tanks of Rommel’s Afrikakorps.

Within twenty-four hours the letter produced surprising results. There was a phone call from a relative of a former member of the 67th who was researching the regiment’s history. There was another phone call from a former member of the regiment who, like myself, was nearly ninety! We hadn’t known each other. He had been at regimental HQ and I had been a member of a gun team, but it was good to have a chat about old times. We’ll be in touch again.

There was a totally unexpected letter from another nearly nonagenarian whom I had known well as a boy in Ipswich but hadn’t seen or spoken to for some seventy-five years! He was living within half a mile of his childhood home and was anxious to renew contact.

I was most pleased though – and emotionally overwhelmed – by the postcard below from a Mrs Henderson of Norwich. I only wish that she had let me have either her postal address or phone number, so that I could have thanked her, and told her how much her message had meant to me.

Heather would, of course, have been delighted but also totally astonished. She never spent a great deal of time or money on her appearance. The only ‘make-up’ that she ever used was a little face powder if she thought that she had a shiny nose. She very rarely visited a hairdresser and would certainly never have dreamed of going to a manicurist or a ‘beauty parlour'. She made certain that she was always neatly dressed and prepared for any occasion and any company. While she wasn’t as self-sufficient as the Amish teenage girls recently featured on Channel 4 tv, she was an expert with a sewing machine and with needle and thread. That photo was taken in 1942, in the height of World War II and of the blitz, when she was working in central London and living with her parents in the often-bombed suburbs.

She retained her beauty (and her loyal and loving nature) into old age. I was very proud of her though I fear that, as with so many things in this life, I didn’t fully realize how much she meant to me until I lost her after sixty years of marriage. Thank you, Mrs Henderson, for seeing how beautiful she was – and for telling me so.