Week 32 2012

Tendring Topics.........on Line

Two Grandsons……….and ‘The World-Wide Web’!

Nick and his Belgian girl-friend Romy in a Brussels Restaurant

            Since the death of my wife in 2006 my two grandsons, Chris and Nick have played an important, and very positive, role in my life.  Nick, who holds an honours degree in photography from Westminster University, was for some years the European Travel Commission’s On Line Sales Manager and subsequently the ETC’s acting Executive Director.  He is now the founder and managing director of SE1 Media Ltd, a consultancy for all involved in tourism and world-wide travel. 

         It was he who established the blogspot www.ernesthall.blogspot.com and web site www.ernesthall.net  on which, every week for the past four years, I have published this blog.  I now know from Google that I have readers in the UK and throughout the world – in Russia, the USA, most western European countries and as far afield as Peru,  Australia, China and Japan.

Heather Gilbert (destined to become Heather Hall) as I first knew her, aged fifteen. A line drawing by elder Grandson Chris

    His elder brother Chris earned an Honours Degree in art after studying in Boston, USA and Camberwell College of Art in London.  He has for several years lived and worked in  Taiwan, teaching English to children and adults.  He speaks Mandarin fluently and a couple of years ago was declared Teacher of the Year by the educational organisation that employs him.  It was Chris who first involved me with the internet.  I had never touched a computer before I was eighty and when I first had one I used it strictly as a word processor and for sending and receiving mostly family emails.  He realized how much I was missing his Grandma and how much I needed some creative activity to fill the gap left by her death.             

For that first Christmas, using an old photograph as a reference he made me a  pencil drawing of Heather as the still-fifteen year old schoolgirl that she had been when I first met her.  That pencil drawing stirred my memory in a way that a photograph could never have done. I was deeply grateful and have it framed in my home today.  He then remembered that I had an enormous collection of photographs both recent and from years past.   He arranged for me to have a Flickr site on the web where I could post copies all of my photographs, each with a commentary, for all the world to see.

Chris receives his 'Teacher of the Year' award. 

And so I have done!  Over the years I have scanned into my computer and posted on my Flickr pages some four hundred photos, many taken by me but some by others; a few from years before my time!  Some are of historic interest.  There is, for instance, a photo that I took on holiday in Jugoslavia in 1980 of the famous Turkish pack-horse bridge in Mostar before it was destroyed in the Civil War, others of the sea off Clacton-on-Sea beach when it froze over during one memorable winter, glimpses into boys’ and girls’ classrooms in primary schools in the 1930s, one of a passenger hovercraft on Calais beach in the 60s, and one of my father in 1901 as  one of Queen Victoria’s redcoats,  a dashing newly recruited trooper in the 17th Lancers!

 Nor is it only pictures of obvious public interest that attract viewers’ attention.  Here is a very ordinary picture of my wife and I in 1991 when I was seventy and she was 67.   Only yesterday (2nd August) I received the following email from someone whose memory had been stirred while browsing through my photographic collection.  Here is the picture and what she had to say about it:

What a lovely picture. This is how I remember you at the Quakers Meeting house in Clacton. I'd recently lost my dad and was seeking solace. Heather and Ernest, you were both so welcoming and friendly thank you.  I'm sorry to read that Heather is no longer with us.x

            Thank you dear viewer! 

If you haven’t yet made the acquaintance of my Flickr site, here is the web address. www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea   Perhaps, if you have half an hour or so to spare, you too would find something of interest there: Chris gave me that rather romantic Flickr identity because, so he said, all the appropriate but more mundane, names were already in use

Some thoughts on Higher Education

            Blog readers may be interested in the thoughts on ‘Higher Education’ of a regular fellow reader who had attended state primary and secondary schools, had gone on to University and had done well both there and later in life.  These thoughts were inspired by the contention of another former fellow graduate that, ‘Since LEA grants have been abolished Cambridge Uni has once again reverted to being the social network where public schoolboys make their connections to further their future privileged lifestyles. Perhaps I'm exaggerating but I'm sure that those of us from the state sector, who went there to tackle the academic subjects on offer, raised the standard’.

            My correspondent has a rather more positive outlook than that on private education in ‘Public Schools’.   He believes that:   Yes, there is a lot of social networking for the furtherance of privilege, but I couldn’t help but feel that the “upper class” had actually had a better education – not necessarily in their specialist subjects – but in just about everything else that matters:- self-confidence, eloquence, ambition, breadth of knowledge, general knowledge in the arts (even though they were scientists) and social skills. Frankly, these are  things that don’t demand an IQ of 150 or cost a lot of money to impart, and state schools would do well to take on board.

 State schools tend to turn out a handful of brilliant geeks with no breadth of knowledge or social skills at all, together with a huge number of people who don’t meet the first criteria for public contact work - which is being well presented, polite and able to converse intelligently with customers, speaking grammatically without resorting to swear words or text speak. Later the ‘brilliant geeks’ can’t understand why they  don’t get to be Managing Directors, Cabinet Ministers or High Court Judges while those who don’t meet the basic requirements for public contact work find themselves beaten to a job in a coffee shop by almost any Polish migrant!

            I think that both  those Cambridge alumni exaggerate a little.  I’m pretty certain for instance that my correspondent (who as it happens, is a managing director) does not consider himself to be a ‘brilliant geek’.  Nor, though I left a state school at the age of 16, do I believe that, even then, I was a total barbarian. Thanks to an inspiring English teacher I did leave school with an appreciation of English Language and Literature and, through wide reading, a considerable store of general knowledge. I knew very little about either either art or music though and  I was agonisingly shy and certainly lacking in self-confidence, eloquence and social skills.  Nor did seven years in the army (in the barrack room, not in the officers’ or even the sergeants’ mess!) do anything to remedy those deficiencies, though I hope that over the years I have managed to counter some of them.

            I am not at all sure that they are qualities that can be instilled in state day schools to pupils with non-privileged backgrounds, though I would very much like to think they can be.  Pupils at posh boarding schools are exposed to the school’s ethos for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week during term time – and probably spend their holidays in an atmosphere of culture and privilege. State day-school pupils are exposed to their school’s ethos for only about six hours a day for five days a week. For some unfortunate kids the rest of the time may well be spent in an atmosphere that accords with the late Air-Marshal Hermann Goering’s remark ‘When I hear the word Culture, I reach for my revolver’.  It is hardly surprising that, in some fields, they are virtually unemployable.

Olympics Fever!

           Among my possessions is a certificate to the effect that Hall E, of the 5^th Form of the Northgate Secondary School for Boys, Ipswich swam a distance of one mile on a date in July 1936.  I also possess the Bronze Lifesaving Medallion of the Royal Life Saving Society, presented to me during that same year.  They comprise the record of the sole athletic and physical achievements of my school-days. I have always been uniformly useless at gymnastics, athletics, rugby, hockey, cricket and tennis. 

            I had therefore imagined myself to be totally immune to the epidemic of Olympics Fever  (Pyrexia Olympica to the scholarly) currently sweeping the country.    Certainly I showed no signs of the early symptoms exhibited by tens of thousands of others when ‘The Olympic flame’ made its leisurely progress through the country on its way to the Olympic Stadium in London. ‘What possible connection’, I asked myself rhetorically. ‘can that gas flame within an aluminium holder being paraded round Britain, have with the flame that had been ignited by the rays of the sun, hundreds of miles away in Olympus a week or so earlier?

            I was amazed when thousands of apparently rational people turned out in wind and rain to watch and cheer its passing, and when locally, Tendring District Council and the local press were so upset when they learned  that the towns of the Tendring Peninsula – Clacton, Frinton, Walton, Harwich and Brightlingsea – were to see nothing of its progress.  I was quite pleased that local residents were to be spared the resultant traffic congestion and expense.  I pride myself on keeping a finger on the local pulse.  On this occasion it clearly wasn’t!

             The Olympics Opening Ceremony, which I thoroughly enjoyed and said so in this blog, did nothing to arouse my fears of contracting Olympics Fever.  Britain had produced Shakespeare and Milton, Isaac Walton, Isambard Brunel, Florence Nightingale and the NHS.  It was only fair to leave gymnastic and athletic prowess to other nations.

            The first symptoms appeared within a couple of days of the Games beginning.  The fact that Great Britain (I hadn’t yet quite reached the stage of saying ‘we’!) had not yet been awarded a gold medal, began to arouse a certain disquiet. Surely we (it was just beginning to creep into my vocabulary!) would get one soon.  Over the weekend (3^rd to 5^th August) I realized that I was severely infected.  I found myself glued to the telly, willing our girl, or our fellow, to win.  I was delighted when they did, dismayed when they didn’t, and found myself wondering why we were only in third place on the league table.  What’s so special about those Chinese and those Yanks that we can’t beat them?  Perhaps in Rio?

            Oh dear; obviously a severe case of Olympics Fever, an affliction for which there's no known cure!   However I am assured that the more distressing symptoms are likely to disappear within the next few days and that I should be back to normal by the end of the month.   What a relief!    

  

           

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Week 51.2011 29.12.2011

Tendring Topics........on Line

Paying for ‘Sid’s Free Lunch’

            British children of the 1920s and ‘30s learned at an early age that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  We were all familiar with the politically incorrect nursery rhyme about Simon, a young man with learning difficulties, who encountered a seller of pies on his way to a fair.

Said Simple Simon to the pieman, ‘May I taste your ware?

Said the pieman to Simple Simon, ‘Show me first your penny’.

Said Simple Simon to the pieman, ‘Indeed I haven’t any’.

            And poor Simon went hungry.

            It was a message that in the ‘80s the then Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, would have whole-heartedly endorsed.  If I close my eyes I can almost hear her well-bred but somewhat strident voice:  ‘Wealth is a product of hard work and enterprise.  There is no such thing as a free lunch’.

            How strange therefore that it should have been during her period of office (in fact as a result of her initiative) that thousands of Britons came to the conclusion that there was such a thing as a free lunch after all.  I was reminded of this a week or so ago when a radio programme announced that the year nearing its end had seen the twenty-fifth anniversary of the then government’s privatisation of British Gas, the first of a series of similar privatisations of state enterprises.

            Towards the end of 1986 there was a brilliant sales campaign (do you remember it?) in which we were all asked to ‘Tell Sid’ about the forthcoming sale of British Gas shares.  Well, thousands did, and resold their shares later at a very comfortable profit.  This was repeated with other privatisations though resale didn’t always realize enormous profits.  

            It struck me as very odd at the time.  I remember writing in Tendring Topics (in print) in the Coastal Express that I had been quite persuaded that wealth was the product of hard work and enterprise and that there was no such thing as a free lunch.  Whose hard work and enterprise was it then, I asked, that had produced the profits realized by those who had been astute enough to buy – and then resell – those privatisation shares?

            The fact is, of course, that no extra wealth had been created.  Not a cubic inch of extra gas had been produced.  It had all been simply a paper transaction. I believe though that it was those and similar paper transactions (the deregulation of financial services, the transformation of Building Societies into banks and so on), over which Mrs Thatcher presided in the avaricious ‘80s, that are at the root of our current financial problems. You can ‘tell Sid’, if you encounter him, that the poor, the old, the disabled and the unemployed are today having to pay for all those ‘free lunches’ of a quarter of a century ago!

 Is ‘our Dave’ the only one in step?

          Many years ago there was a magazine cartoon showing a mum and her daughter watching a platoon of soldiers marching past.  The daughter was proudly pointing to one of the soldiers.  ‘Eh Mum, look at our Jim.  He’s the only one in step!’

         I remembered that cartoon (I think it must have been in an old copy of Punch) when I read the press headlines about our Prime Minister being alone in declining to sign up to a new treaty of the willing to sacrifice a small part of our national sovereignty to ensure a united economic Europe in the face of the economic blizzard that we are all facing.  He had already threatened to veto any amendment to the European Treaty to achieve the same end.

               Mr Cameron had been urged by his Europhobic Conservative colleagues to ‘stand up for Britain’ and ‘show the bulldog spirit’.  They had clearly forgotten (or perhaps were not old enough to remember) that Winston Churchill, the very epitome of British independence and the bulldog spirit’, had been a supporter of the idea of a United States of Europe in which Britain would play a leading role.  He had wanted to inspire and lead our fellow Europeans – not turn tail and run away from them!

            Whether we like it or not, Britain is part of Europe – geographically, historically and culturally.  Our ultimate destiny, I have little doubt, is for us to fulfil Churchill’s dream and to become not the leader but a leader of a Europe politically and economically united. As it is the 26 participating European states form a powerful political and economic unit.  It would have been that much more powerful had it included the United Kingdom as the 27^th. Before signing the American Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin is said to have declared, ‘If we do not now hang together then we shall assuredly hang separately’.  It could be that the same is true of Europe today.

            I hope, by the way, that the Parliamentary Europhobes do not imagine that that the ‘special relationship’ will ensure that the USA stands by us in our self-imposed isolation.  The USA acts always in its own interests (why on earth should it do otherwise?)   During the Cold War period Britain was the USA’s unsinkable aircraft carrier.  More recently we have provided the USA with a foothold into Europe.  I fear that, as far as the USA is concerned, Mr Cameron may well have made the United Kingdom redundant.

            By ‘opting out’ David Cameron has certainly earned a place in history.  Will it be as Britain’s liberator, who cast off the shackles of Brussels, secured the UK’s independence and led us on to financial security and prosperity?   Or will it be as the bungler who drove the final nail into the coffins of both the European Union and the UK; the politician who sacrificed British industry for the sake of the very financial institutions that had led us to financial ruin, and sacrificed his country for the sake of the unity of his political party? 

            I am not at all sure that I want to live long enough to find out!

  A Look Back at 2011

          For Great Britain, Europe and the World, 2011 has been a pretty disastrous year.  There have been earthquakes and tsunamis, devastating monsoon floods and, elsewhere, disastrous droughts.  There have been nuclear contamination fears.   The great depression, out of which we seemed to be slowly emerging before the last General Election, has again deepened.   So far our government’s attempts to lower the financial deficit have only made things worse. Several Governments within the Eurozone are threatened with bankruptcy. Efforts to remedy the situation, plus the incurable Europhobia from which a great many of our MPs suffer, have resulted in a two-tier European Union, with the UK alone and isolated on the lower tier. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs, thousands have been rendered homeless.  Meanwhile Climatic Change (progressing virtually unimpeded due to international failure to agree effective counter action) threatens to make our self-made financial crises look like Sunday-school picnics!

            For me though, on a personal level, 2011 has been quite different.   It has been the year in which I have celebrated my 90^th birthday and in which family events have made it a year to remember. It has been a year on which I can look back with quiet satisfaction.

            First, on 23^rd April was the same-sex wedding of my beautiful granddaughter Jo to her partner Siobhan.  It was an event to which I had looked forward with some trepidation – not least because I anticipated that I would be the oldest (probably by as much as 25 years!) of the hundred-or so guests and I had promised to say a few words during the course of the partnership ceremony.

            It turned out to be a loving and dignified occasion of which I have warm memories.  I shared with the other guests Shakespeare’s sonnet beginning, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment……’ and a piece of wisdom that I had acquired from a German daily tear-off calendar while I had been a POW.  ‘Lieben und geliebt zu werden, ist das höchste Glück auf Erden’  (To love and to be loved in return is the greatest good fortune that there is on earth).

            A month later was my 90^th birthday and I celebrated it with my two sons and daughters in law, two of my grandchildren (Chris – the third – lives and works in Taiwan) and my younger son’s girlfriend Romy; eight of us in all, together with my German friends in Zittau, the small town in Germany where I was  POW from 1943 – ’45.

Highlights of the occasion were our champagne reception by the Mayor of Zittau in the Town Hall, my being presented with a splendid certificate confirming my honorary membership of the Fellowship of the Zittau Lenten Veils, and the celebratory dinner that I hosted at our hotel for my family, my German friends, the Mayor of Zittau (Herr Arndt Voight) and his wife and other local VIPs.

Accordion Orchestra.. In the background is the great Lenten Veil. 

 I remember equally warmly though, the spontaneity of the welcome I received from a local twenty-strong piano-accordion orchestra in the museum/church of the Holy Cross where the Lenten Veil, in whose history I played a tiny role, is on permanent display.  They entered playing When the saints come marching in, and gave us a concert of eight or ten folk or light classical items beginning with the European Anthem, Schiller’s Ode to Joy, ­and ending with Happy Birthday To You played with real gusto!

I also remember with great  pleasure a final celebratory family meal that we had together on the last evening of our visit to Zittau.  It was in Zum Alten Sack, a character-filled hostelry in the centre of the town just a few yards from the site of the building (now demolished) where we had the temporary ‘POW Barracks’ in which I lived from October 1943 till May 1945.  Younger son Andy is missing from the picture as he was holding the camera.

         
                Towards the end of the year we also learned that my younger grandson Nick (almost excluded from the photo above!) had been appointed Acting Executive Director of the European Travel Commission, a non-profit making organisation that has the purpose of attracting tourists from the rest of the world to Europe.  He is only ‘Acting’ Director.  Whether he will apply for and be offered the permanent post, remains to be seen.  In the meantime he is, while still only 28, gaining valuable experience at the top-most level of public administration.

            For my family and I 2011 certainly had some memorable moments!  What, I wonder, will 2012 bring?

           

Week 40 2011 18.10.2011

Tendring Topics……on line


The European Travel Commission’s new Acting Director!




 Jo. AKA Ms Josephine Hall M.A., B.Sc





Chris is nominated Teacher of the Year


















All three of my grandchildren are sources of great pride and satisfaction to me. There is Jo, my only granddaughter who is both an M.A. and a B.Sc. and has a socially valuable job as Social Worker with the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital   Then there is Chris, her cousin and my elder grandson. He graduated in art but has found his vocation as a teacher of English to both children and adults in Taiwan.. A couple of years ago he was nominated ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the educational enterprise that employs him.

Nick, Chris’ brother, is the youngest of my grandchildren, but by no means the least! He has always been a great traveller and many years ago won a Guardian competition with a prize of £5,000 with which to travel cheaply all over Europe, sending a weekly report on his adventures to the Guardian Travel Supplement. This inspired him, in his last year at University to retrace my travels sixty years earlier as a POW, from Tarranto in southern Italy to a POW camp in the north of the country. Thence to a working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Germany and finally, after the war ended, through Czechoslovakia to Prague. As he did so he created a video diary that helped to earn him a good honours degree in photography at Westminster University.
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Student Nick on his travels

This experience, plus an unrivalled knowledge and experience in IT (it was he who organised the blogspot and web site on which I am publishing these words!) ensured the success of his application for the post of On Line Sales Manager, with the European Travel Commission in Brussels. The ETC is a non profit-making international organisation which encourages, co-ordinates and facilitates tourist travel to Europe from the rest of the world. Its members are the national tourist offices of 33 co-operating European states, many of them members of the European Union but others (Norway, Switzerland and Serbia for instance) that are not. ETC has an elected President (currently a German lady) and an executive committee of national representatives.
The ETCs permanent staff have a headquarters in Brussels and are headed by a Director (in effect the Chief Executive and head of paid staff). Nick’s duties as On Line Sales Manager took him all over the world. He was also personally involved in the development and launch of www.visiteurope.com ETC’s own publicity web site, invaluable for all visitors to any part of Europe.

Now Nick has risen to the very top of the organisation. Last week the President and Executive Committee confirmed his appointment as Acting Director. Nick’s achievement is all the more remarkable for the fact that the United Kingdom is not one of the thirty-three members of the ETC. Among the membership you’ll find large countries like Germany, tiny ones like San Marino and Monte Negro, island states like Cyprus, Iceland and the Irish Republic – but no United Kingdom. I suppose that if there are many British ‘Tourism bosses’ of the calibre of Tendring District’s, and many MPs as stubbornly Europhobic as Clacton’s, we shouldn’t be surprised.


Nick in Zittau with myself and our friend Ingrid Zeibig.


It does demonstrate very clearly that Nick’s promotion was owed entirely to recognition of his own merit and not as a result of pressure from national representatives. There were none. It also demonstrates that European Union rules, that permit citizens of any member state to live and work anywhere within the EU, do not work only in one direction. It is possible for a Brit with determination and the necessary skills, to find and hold down a worthwhile job on the continent.

I am proud and very pleased that a grandson of mine has done so.

Late News!


Hardly had Nick been appointed to his new post before he was required to accompany ETC's President and Vice-President to a meeting of European Union Tourism Ministers in Krakow, Poland, last Thursday (6th October). He says that he was given VIP treatment, sharing a car with the Vice President and racing through the streets of Krakow with a police escort. He had, of course. helped the ETC's President to prepare for the occasion and was very pleased to hear almost universal praise and support from the EU Ministers for the work of ETC and for the www.visiteurope.com web site. He feels that he has made a good start


Buying Votes…….with other people’s money


That was how I described the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation when it was enacted during Mrs Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister. I make no apology for doing so. It might more accurately have been described as ‘Compel to sell’ legislation, as it compelled local councils (as democratically elected as our rulers in Westminster!) to sell off to sitting tenants at bargain basement prices, council houses that had been provided and paid for by earlier generations to house the homeless, alleviate overcrowding and make possible slum clearance in their areas. The same privilege was not of course, offered to tenants of privately owned homes. Their owners were, for the most part, loyal supporters of Mrs Thatcher’s political party.

It took a few years for the baleful effects of that legislation to take full effect. Almost immediately though the best homes in the most desirable locations were sold off. Many were sold to tenants who could ill-afford the mortgage and insurance repayments, the cost of maintenance and the separate rate bills for which they became responsible. Many grown-up children of elderly parents spotted their opportunity to cash in on already steadily rising house prices. They provided the small deposit required and in some cases even offered to pay the mortgage on their parents’ home. Naturally it was understood that they would inherit it in due course.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, while they waited to inherit and for the time to expire in which the house couldn’t be resold, house prices didn’t just rise. They rocketed. Former council houses were sold at a handsome profit. In rural areas houses that had been built to house members of village communities were snapped up as second homes or as bases from which to commute to the nearest big city. Councils were unable to build houses for affordable letting and Housing Associations were unable to satisfy the resulting need for social housing . House price inflation meant that young families, whose forebears had been part of the village community for generations, were unable to find a home. Villages ‘died’, no longer having enough daytime round-the-year residents to keep going a pub, a church, a village hall, a post office – or even a well-stocked village store.

Particularly in urban areas, council estates deprived of their former not-too-badly-off tenants, took the first step on the road towards becoming drug ridden, crime-infested slums. A further step was taken recently when the government dictated (so much for localism!) that in future, council tenancies should be short-term only. Tenants whose financial circumstances improved would be expected to buy their own homes or rent privately. I can think of no better way of ensuring that the interior of council houses are never redecorated and the gardens never cared for!

For all of the above reasons I was absolutely astonished when, in the midst of an otherwise inspiring speech at the Labour Party Conference, Ed Miliband apologised for the Labour Party’s opposition to Right to Buy, way back in the 1980s!  He should, on the contrary, have apologised for New Labour’s failure to repeal that Act and to encourage local authorities to build homes for letting in their areas, when they were in a position to. Had they done so it might have put a brake on out-of-control house price inflation and avoided today’s nation-wide housing shortage.

Now I see that David Cameron, possibly dazzled by his Party’s success in buying votes with other people’s money in the 1980s, is trying to breathe new life into Right to Buy. I think that he’ll be unsuccessful this time round. There is no longer the spiralling house price inflation that made home ownership such a profitable investment 30 years ago. The policies of his government are ensuring that the occupants of council houses are increasingly limited to the very poorest of society, those least able to aspire to ‘home ownership’. As for the equivalent of those who helped their poor old mums and dads to own their own homes in the ‘80s – with incomes failing to keep up with inflation, plus government cuts and the threat of unemployment, they are struggling to survive themselves these days. They are also well aware that eventual home ownership no longer offers the prospect of wealth-to-come that once it did.

‘Can do?’ – Yes, you can add the final straw that breaks the camel’s back

Thank goodness that the Conference season is over for another year. Most of us, I think, have really seen enough of posturing politicians!

I am not sure whether it was Ed Miliband’s apologies for New Labour policies that were right (goodness knows that there were plenty that were wrong) or David Cameron’s constant reiteration of that idiotic trans-Atlantic mantra ‘can do’, that I found the more irritating. It was because greedy, irresponsible and incompetent bankers thought that they ‘could do’ anything that they thought would make a profit, that we are in the current financial mess. They ‘did’ us! I think that our Prime Minister would do better to consider a few of the things that can’t be done either by him or any of us. It was an American President who remarked that you can fool some of the people all the time and all the people part of the time but - no matter how loudly and how often you say, ‘can do’ - you can’t fool all the people all the time.

Nor can you indefinitely assert with apparently total conviction and sincerity one thing while doing the exact opposite. In his Churchillian final speech to the Conservative conference David Cameron asserted the importance, to the individual and to the nation, of paying off debts promptly and not adding to them. Yet this is the same Prime Minister whose government is piling tens of thousands pounds worth of debt on students and saying, in mitigation, that that debt doesn’t have to be paid off for years, in fact. in many cases it may never need to be paid off. Only a few days earlier he had been encouraging council house tenants, who haven’t already done so, to incur more debt by buying their homes.

While urging that local people should make decisions about local matters Mr Cameron’s government is systematically stripping democratically elected local authorities of their powers particularly, in relation to planning matters and to the letting of their own social housing. While stripping the armed forces of both personnel and equipment and, so many believe, reducing their ability to deal with any emergency that might arise – he has declared that those enormously expensive and totally useless Trident nuclear submarines that prowl the world’s oceans are sacrosanct.

As the government continues cutting services and pursuing policies that penalise the poor, the weak and the vulnerable, while having minimal impact on the wealthy and privileged, Mr Cameron may care to reflect that among things that top politicians can do is to add the final straw that breaks the camel’s back!