24th November 2014

Tendring Topics…..on Line

Bankers Bonuses

          The previous Governor of the Bank of England said publicly on several occasions that the financial crisis in the UK and world-wide was not due, as Messrs. Osborne and Cameron would have us believe, to the policies of the previous government, over-generous welfare benefits, nor even the activities of immigrants and the machinations of ‘Brussels’.  Fairly and squarely to blame were the activities and incompetence of ‘the Bankers’, obviously not the management and staff of your local Barclays, Lloyds or what-have-you (they’re as much victims as we are), but the ‘super-brains’ at the top – and the Governor of the Bank of England really should know.

   Mind you, I think that a considerable measure of blame does lie with the previous New Labour government – not because they were too eager to spend money on social services, but because, blinded by billionaires, they were just as keen to seek the favour of the bankers, the money lenders and the financial fiddlers as the present lot at Westminster.   They should have spotted what was happening and curbed it.  I don’t recall that the present Bank of England Governor has ever publicly blamed the banking fraternity as had his predecessor – but then he has never suggested that his predecessor was wrong.

            What is particularly infuriating to the ordinary British citizen – the ordinary voter – is that throughout the period of recession top bankers have shed a few hundred junior staff; carried out mergers; effectively reduced the value of savings (including mine!) by paying savers an interest rate below the rate of inflation - and have continued to draw eye-wateringly high salaries for just turning up at their offices.   For actually doing their best at the job for which they are paid those enormous salaries, they expect to receive even more gargantuan bonuses!

            Quite apart from causing the world-wide financial crisis there have more recently been the muck-ups and illegal fiddles in which some of them have been involved.  Millions of pounds had to be repaid to bank customers who had wrongly been sold insurance.  For weeks I had regular phone calls from ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers assuring me that they’d get my money back for me despite my assurances that, as far as I knew, none of my money had been involved!   Then there was the fiddle with interest rates that led to huge fines – all passed on to customers I have little doubt.  Yesterday we learned that one of the biggest banking groups had been heavily fined for having a faulty IT system that resulted in customers being unable to access their own money for several days.    Rents, mortgage repayments and direct debit payments were not paid!  No doubt this was the fault of someone well down the line in the banking hierarchy – but the top people claim the credit for success, so they should also be prepared to accept the blame for disaster.

            Something should really be done to cut those huge salaries and abolish those enormous bonuses  but, so we are assured, market forces demand that we offer those rewards if we want the ‘best’ brains.  If we don’t they’ll just go elsewhere.  Well, we’ve seen the disasters that ‘the best brains’ can cause.  Who knows?  The ‘second best’ might be less successful – or they might just be less disastrous!

            One way that ‘the best brains’ could be discouraged from migrating in pursuit of a few extra millions would be to limit or reduce the number of places to which they could migrate.   The European Union probably had this in mind when they decided to put a legal limit on Bankers Bonuses.  Throughout the EU, they suggested, no banker should receive a bonus in excess of his or her annual salary.  They then added a rider to the effect that the bonus could be up to double the recipient’s annual salary if the Bank’s shareholders agreed.

            It doesn’t take a financial genius to see how utterly feeble that is.  It means that a banker with an annual salary of £500,000 (common enough among top bankers though at least ten times more than a salary that most of us would consider very high) he would be able to receive another £500,000 as a bonus.  He’d be receiving a million pounds for his year’s work!   But that’s not all.   If he could persuade a majority of the bank’s shareholders to agree, that bonus of £500,000 could be doubled, making his total pay for the year  £1.5 million. That’s nearly £29,000 a week!  You could hire quite a few doctors and nurses for that.

            Would you believe it? – pathetic as the EU’s decision is, Cameron and Osborne were determined to  oppose any limit to bankers’ bonuses on the grounds that it would only lead to their being offered even higher salaries!   I understand that they have now withdrawn their opposition, having been told they haven’t a leg to stand on.

            No wonder the UK electorate is sick of all the existing political parties!

UKIP triumphant?

          I concluded my comments about Bankers’ bonuses by saying that the UK electorate is sick of all existing political parties.  Their members in Kent demonstrated that distrust last week when they followed the ‘Clacton example’ and, in a by-election in Rochester, returned another defecting former Conservative  to the House of Commons as a Ukipper.

         Once again I see parallels between the situation in the UK today and that in Germany in the late 1920s, early 1930s.  In Germany too a dynamic and charismatic leader, first thought of as ‘a bit of a joke’, transformed a struggling political party into a dynamic, powerful and all-conquering force that struggled into shared power and then became a ‘cuckoo in the nest’, turning out members of all other parties and establishing the Nazi one-party state. ‘One People, One United Kingdom, one Leader!’  I can just imagine Nigel Farage acknowledging that Nazi acclamation when he and his party finally acquire the power they covet!

             A month or two ago, during the run-up to the Scottish referendum, I wrote in this blog that the worst-case possibility in the event of there being a majority YES vote, could be the creation of a Conservative/UKIP coalition government after the May 2015 general election; a coalition that the more ruthless and determined Ukippers would quickly dominate.   Well, there was a NO vote majority and the United Kingdom remains united.

            I now think though that, despite that NO vote, Ukips’s continuing success means that a very dangerous Conservative/UKIP coalition could emerge from the general election (I can’t tell you how fervently I hope that I am wrong!) and that Ukip members, with their vigour and ruthlessness  could dominate the coalition, so that the situation could end with Nigel Farage as a 21^st century Oliver Cromwell.  Conservatives proclaim that a vote for any party other than the Conservatives makes it possible that Ed Miliband will be the next Prime Minister.  I very much fear that a vote either for the Conservatives or Ukip will make it possible that, sooner or later, our government will be headed by Nigel Farage.

            However, another – to me more cheering – future seems possible.  An  unexpected result of the Scottish NO vote has been the increasing popularity of the Scottish National Party that has, since the referendum, more than doubled its membership.  Alex Salmond, a dynamic and charismatic leader  has retired and has been followed by a forthright and politically experienced still-young woman who promises to be a worthy successor. She has taken his place both as Party Leader and as Scotland’s First Minister.

            Conservatives and Lib Dems. have been all but eliminated from the Scottish scene.   Ukip has never gained a foothold there – and the machinations of New Labour have little appeal.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Scotland, still part of the UK thanks to that No vote, returns a solid block of Scottish National Party MPs in the new Westminster Parliament.   It is possible that they might make common cause with MPs from Wales and Northern Ireland and join with Labour to create a formidable coalition that could well outnumber the combined Conservative and Ukip forces.  Who knows – the fervour of the Scots might inspire Ed Miliband at least to attempt to narrow that yawning gap (no, not the deficit) between the wealthy and the poor and induce the wealthy to carry their fair share of the burden of taxation.

            There's another quite different matter about the Rochester and Clacton by-elections that’s worth bearing in mind. In both by-elections (and in the earlier European Parliament elections) the Green Party Candidates received more votes than the Lib-Dems.   Nick Clegg in his urge to become Deputy Prime Minister has effectively finished off his once-great Liberal Party.  Gladstone and Lloyd-George must be turning in their graves.  Yet the BBC and other  tv channels are still inviting Nick Clegg, and not the leader of the Green Party, to take part in televised debates before the General Election.  The only conclusion that I can come to is that the BBC and whoever funds the independent tv channels doesn’t want Green Party policies to be considered by the public because the Greens are the only party working towards real change.  He who pays the piper calls the tune.

             

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 41.10 12th October 2010

Tendring Topics……..on Line

‘How will the Chancellor’s child benefit move hit you?’

This was the question posed by the daily Coastal Gazette to its readers on Tuesday 5th October, the day that Chancellor George Osborne broke it to the Conservative Party Conference that from 2013 higher rate taxpayers would not be eligible for Child Benefit. Predictably the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph saw it as yet another assault on ‘Middle England’. Local readers of the Coastal Gazette however seem to have taken the news much more philosophically.

The higher rate of income tax comes into force on incomes of about £44,000 a year. I reckon that a substantial number of Gazette readers think in terms of a weekly wage rather than an annual salary. For them £44,000 a year is roughly £850 a week, not the sort of sum that many of them find in their wage packets on payday. Unsurprisingly they see the Chancellor’s decision as a sound one. Nina Hamilton, who lives not far from me in Old Road, is reported as saying, ‘People who are bringing in about a grand a week don’t really need the help in my opinion. Child allowance makes a big difference to people on lower incomes’. Amanda Snelling, a mother of one, from Great Clacton, made a similar point: ‘I’m all for these cuts for people earning upwards of £40K a year. If they’re on that money then what does a £20 a week benefit really mean to them anyway? It’s good news for the working classes who rely on that money’

Those who definitely will see the Chancellor’s proposals as unfair will be ‘Middle England’ mums whose husband’s income only just comes into that upper tax band and who feel that being at home for their growing children is more important than, for instance, owning a second car, living in a rather posher home or taking regular holidays in the Caribbean. Next door to them, in the leafy suburb in which they both live, may be a family with a total income of £60,000 a year – but it comes from a man and wife both working and earning £30,000 a year each. They will still get their child allowance because no one in the household is on the higher tax band! ‘Fair’, did I hear David Cameron say?

In my younger days, certainly in families from ‘Middle England’ and in many working class ones too, the wife made and maintained the home and looked after the children. The husband was, and was expected to be, the ‘breadwinner’. My mother never had a job other than home making once she was married. Neither did my wife. What a medieval idea that seems today! There was much less juvenile delinquency though in those days, many fewer schoolgirl pregnancies and many fewer teenage sufferers from alcoholism or sexually transmitted diseases.

One thing that has been made plain by those who protested indignantly at the Chancellor’s proposals, and those who thought that they were a good idea, was that everyone welcomes cuts in services and benefits – provided that they always affect other people. And that this is true of wealthy and poor alike! This will no doubt be confirmed when more details of ‘the cutbacks’ are known on 20th of this month. I really don’t envy the Chancellor in his task! He can’t possibly please everybody and he can’t possibly be fair unless he pleases nobody!

Some Cheerful News – for now!

There isn’t much good news about these days but it was nice to spot a small news item on an inside page of the Clacton Gazette announcing that the village of St Osyth has been listed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the best endowed by nature as a place to live. It has, says the report, low levels of air pollution and offers its residents ‘exhilarating sea walks’.

Its outstanding positive feature though is its low rainfall, at 20in or 513mm, the very lowest in Britain and (as I used proudly to claim when I was Tendring Council's Public Relations Officer) was comparable with that of the fringes of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert! If you prefer a nearer comparison, Britain’s wettest spot, Crib Goch in Snowdonia (an area where thousands go on holiday each year) has almost 90 times as much annual rainfall at 177in or 4500mm.

It isn’t quite so good of course for keen gardeners. I remember, in the distant days when I was one of their number, surveying my parched lawn and wilting runner beans after weeks of drought, and reflecting that there were snags about cultivating a garden just three miles from the centre of Britain’s driest location!

It won’t, of course, affect the weather but I reckon that if the present owner of St. Osyth Manor gets his way and doubles the total number of homes in the village, St Osyth will become a lot less desirable place in which to live. Perhaps though, as Britain’s population grows, expansion on those lines is inevitable. I won’t be around to see it, but I think it possible that before the end of this century the village community will have been swallowed up in Clacton and will have become one of the town’s more attractive suburbs. 'Oh brave new world!'

Chip off the old block?

It can be disconcerting to find traits in your offspring that are replicas of your own. It can, of course, also be extremely satisfying. I have been more than pleased that my two sons have both chosen socially useful careers motivated by job satisfaction rather than by financial gain, and that my three grandchildren have followed in their parents’ footsteps. I am pleased too that, although no longer ‘go-to-meeting’ Quakers, my sons pursue what I consider to be the Quaker values of honesty, plain speaking and concern for others. In that respect I fear that it was their mother rather than I who set the example.

A little while ago I confessed in this column that I was an opinionated old man and one who was not content to keep his opinions to himself. Pete, my elder son, is beginning to display similar symptoms. I tend to spread my opinions via this blog and in the correspondence columns of the press. He – more usefully perhaps – shares his with his member of parliament. I should perhaps mention that in many respects, the present Prime Minister would consider Pete to be an ideal role model. Made redundant from a very senior post in local government housing administration, he launched his own IT consultancy, gathering round himself a team of IT experts experienced in public administration, to solve the problems of local, police and other public authorities. HUB Solutions Ltd ( www.HUBSolutions.co.uk ) now has satisfied clients throughout England and Scotland and an office in Glasgow as well as in London. This doesn’t mean that, any more than I do, he supports all – or even many - of the policies of David Cameron and the coalition that he heads. Very shortly after the General Election he wrote to his local MP, Lib.Dem. Lynne Featherstone about the coalition’s axing of the school building and renovation programme and received a very rapid and positive reply. Now he has written again in the wake of policies announced at the Conservative Party Conference. Below, slightly abbreviated, is his letter.

Dear Lynne,

I wrote to you shortly after the General Election, in which I voted for you, concerned at the decision your Government has made to cut the entire School Building Programme. I appreciated your prompt reply. However, I feel that policy pronouncements of the last week require me to tell you that the latest decisions of your partners in the Coalition seem to me to move so far in the wrong direction, that it is difficult for me to understand how you can remain a party to such a regime.

I am sure that I am not alone in noticing, that while the Prime Minister says that the burden of cuts must be shared by all, in fact a particular sector of the community – those with children in their care – has been relentlessly singled out for sacrifice. This anti-child policy started with the immediate and apparently careless decision to cut the school building programme. Since it became apparent that this could not even be accurately listed, it could hardly have been carefully assessed.

The Chancellor, in his first speech to the House, announced a cap on Housing Benefit, knowing that it would mainly impact upon families with several children living in central London properties, who would, as a result, be forced to move out – possibly away from extended family and schools, which are so important to children. I am sure that you are aware that it is practically impossible for a Benefit claimant to start a private tenancy on a high rent, as very few landlords would allow that. Therefore, the arbitrary cap would mainly affect those who were working and suffered misfortune such as illness, separation or redundancy.

The Chancellor this week announced two further policies that deliberately and quite carelessly extend this strategy, placing an arbitrary cap on Benefits receivable, and removing entitlement of Child Benefit from households in which any member is paying the higher rate of tax.
I have yet to see any attempt to share the “national sacrifice” with single young people and childless couples, who often have a high disposable income much of which is spent on entirely unnecessary luxuries. Just as relevant, if we are genuinely concerned about people who should be more motivated to get a job, I haven’t seen anything to encourage single young people, neither in work nor in full time education, who are potentially highly mobile and who have very little justification for claiming benefits, to seek employment.

I believe that decisions such as these which focus on the most vulnerable in our society are not just a matter of political judgement – or misjudgement – but are quite immoral in their motivation, carelessly indifferent to the impact of their application, and nothing whatever to do with the financial crisis.

I admire the loyalty that Liberal Democrats have shown to the concept of a coalition in the national interest, but morality demands that loyalty must have its limits. It doesn’t look as if the Liberal Democrats were even consulted on any of the policy pronouncements I have listed and I would urge you to consider the threshold at which, from a Liberal Democrat point of view, the Coalition is no longer serving the National interest. I believe that you can compromise on judgement, but not on the issues of fundamental morality to which I have referred..

Yours sincerely

Peter Hall

It is all stuff that I would have been happy to have written myself, except that I hadn’t realized the effect that capping housing benefit would have on poorer households in central London. But there, I haven’t had experience of housing administration in central London. Pete has. I am glad too that he has drawn attention to the fact that well-off ‘singletons’ and the DINKY (Double Income, No Kids Yet) Brigade seem so far to be escaping the cuts that are threatening those with families.

Looking at the bigger picture, it leaves me wondering whether financial measures affecting the great majority of us who are neither the seriously wealthy nor even residents in the very comfortable ‘Middle England’ of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, should be under the control of a Chancellor from a privileged background who has never experienced poverty or been in a situation where every penny (or even every fiver!) counts.

A Bungled ‘Rescue’

I can’t stop thinking about that Aid Worker, full of compassion for the Afghan people; kidnapped by those she was trying to help and then killed by our NATO allies in a bungled rescue attempt. The final indignity was surely the ever more detailed lies that were told about the manner of her death. (‘The embrace of death’, ‘Clutched to the bosom of a suicide bomber in the hour of rescue’) until, so it appears, photographic evidence suggested that she was killed by a fragmentation grenade hurled by one of her rescuers into the room in which she was held captive. Resolutely casting aside such thoughts as ‘trigger-happy Yanks’, there are two or three questions to which I would dearly like to know the answers.

The need for her rescue was said to have been urgent because she had been about to be transferred across the frontier into Pakistan. Isn’t the Pakistan government supposed to be our loyal ally who has recently fought a vastly expensive (both in resources and in human life) campaign clearing their border area of Taliban terrorists?

Why on earth were fragmentation grenades carried by troops engaged in a rescue mission? Stun grenades and stun guns, certainly – automatic rifles and hand guns, probably – the rescuers wouldn’t have known what armed resistance they might have encountered immediately before or after the rescue attempt. Tear gas or similar grenades, possibly. Surely not fragmentation grenades, deadly weapons used at relatively close range and guaranteed to kill or maim anyone, friend of foe, in their immediate vicinity!

Had it not been for that photographic evidence, we would still believe those lies about that aid worker’s death at the hands of her dastardly captors as the heroic rescuers drew near. How many other lies have we been told, I wonder, about this unwinnable war that is looking more like ‘Vietnam’ (except that then there were no British troops involved) as every day passes?

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 10.09

Tendring Topics………….on Line

The Financial Crisis

Being a prophet of doom, as I have tended to be throughout the past year is a pretty thankless role. Either you’re discredited because your warnings of disaster have proved to be false alarms, or your prophecies have turned out to be all too true and you yourself may well be caught up in the disasters that you have foreseen.

As I had suggested was likely, 40,000 families, who had imagined that they were ‘home owners’,were dispossessed last year, and the number of unemployed is about 2 million and rising. This time too, the unemployed seem to include many people at lower and middle management level, much where I had been during my years of local government service, rather than largely unskilled manual workers. I haven’t yet been seriously affected but I take no pleasure in other people’s misfortunes. I can imagine all too well how awful it must be to be without a job. To lose a home as well, on which all your future hopes had been pinned and on which you had already spent every bit as much as (perhaps rather more than!) you could afford, must surely be the final straw!

I feel particularly sorry for some folk who hadn’t attempted to get on the home ownership ladder but had been content to rent their homes and had paid their rent regularly when it became due. To their dismay they find themselves having to get out because their landlords were not actually owners but tenants or investment-home-buyers themselves who had failed to keep up their payments! I hadn’t even thought of that happening.

Way back in 1956 Heather and I did manage to take our first step towards home ownership. With a guarantee from Clacton Urban District Council we succeeded in getting a ninety-five percent mortgage to buy our bungalow in Dudley Road. One hundred percent mortgages were unheard of in those days and raising that last five percent (plus the inevitable expenses of moving into a new unfurnished home!) was a real struggle. We had been married for ten years and, although we had no debts, neither had we any worthwhile savings. In the end we sold Heather’s engagement ring to make up the sum. It was a single diamond in a square setting that I had bought with a substantial chunk of my saved-up army pay when I returned from German captivity in 1945.

I find it less than inspiring when I hear spokesmen for the New Labour Government and for the Conservative Opposition being wise after the event and urging ‘responsible’ lending on the banks and the end of mortgages of one hundred percent or more. They were the very people who vied with each other to remove restrictions on borrowing and free capitalist entrepreneurs for the ‘courageous risk taking’ that would make themselves and the nation wealthy. Nobody mentioned that it was with our money, not their own, that they were taking those risks!

How can the crisis be ended?

Your answer to this question is probably as good as mine, and mine is almost certainly as good as that of the financial experts who are responsible for the present situation. I wasn’t particularly surprised to find that one of the Prime Minister’s Chief Advisers on dealing with the financial crisis had been among the top executives of HBOS. They, of course, have been revealed as among the most irresponsible of a group of financial institutions remarkable for their irresponsibility!

Measures taken by the government don’t seem to have had a great deal of effect so far. We are told that it may be months, or even a year or so, before they take effect. That long-term view is of little interest to those who lost their jobs last week and who, with their families, are facing eviction next week from what they had fondly imagined was their home.

Can the wheels of industry and commerce really be made to turn again only by lubricating them with public money…our money? If so, how should this lubricant be applied? Not, I think, by pouring it into the bottomless pit of the banks; nor is it by handing vast sums to the motor manufacturers to enable them to continue producing even more cars that no one wants to buy.

In the 1930s President Roosevelt began to pull the USA out of its slump with his ‘New Deal’; spending vast sums of money on badly needed public works. President Obama now seems to be following a very similar course. That may well be our way forward too. Here in Britain there is an obvious need for lots of affordable housing. Let’s build those houses and the infrastructure that is need for their support, not in the vain pursuit of the chimera of home ownership for all, but for letting at affordable rents by Local Authorities and Housing Associations.

Then again, we should direct large sums towards the production of clean and renewable energy, and research into new and improved ways of exploiting wind, wave, tidal and solar power. Bring the insulation and draught proofing of our homes up to the best North European standards. Improve our woeful public transport systems. All these measures would provide employment both directly and in ancillary industries and services.

Finally, the government must find some way of reducing the enormous gap in wealth that that exists between Britain’s poor and our super-rich. It is difficult to believe that the plight of the unemployed and the homeless is being taken seriously in a society in which professional footballers are bought and sold (don’t they find that a demeaning process?) for millions of pounds; where the head of a bank whose spectacular failure makes other banks’ losses look like mislaid petty cash, has retired at fifty on an annual pension of nearly three quarters of a million pounds* (his victims, of course, struggle along on job seekers’ allowance!); and where leading members both of the government and of the opposition are prepared to be guests on the luxury yacht of a multi-billionaire. What actually happened while they were on that yacht is less important than the fact that they had accepted its owner’s lavish hospitality. Those who sup with the Devil (or with Mammon) need a very long spoon indeed. There is, as we are frequently being told, ‘no such thing as a free lunch’.

The suggested measures might not only bring the present economic depression to an end but could also lay the foundations of a truly ‘great’ Britain that could proudly lead a politically and economically united Europe along the road to prosperity. Yes, it would result in a national debt that future generations would have to pay….but it should at least ensure that they have a future in which to pay it!

*The government, realizing the extent of public anger at this particular incident is currently making desperate efforts to persuade the gentleman in question to forgo at least part of his enormous pension. They haven’t, so far, succeeded!

A welcome break!

Everyone needs an occasional break from the daily routine…. and I had a wonderful one last weekend, from 26th February to 1st March. My elder grandson Chris, living and working in Taiwan, had decided to spend a week with his younger brother Nick, living and working in Brussels!

Their Dad my son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene, invited me to accompany them on a weekend visit to Brussels so that, for a couple of days, we could all be together. Needless to say I was delighted to accept their invitation.

We took Zoe (their elderly boxer dog who now has her own ‘pet passport’) with us and crossed the Channel via the Tunnel’s shuttle service. This was another new experience for me. Cars are driven, nose to tail, onto the shuttle that consists of a series of open-ended freight wagons linked closely together to produce, in effect, a very long mobile garage. Drivers and passengers stay with their vehicles throughout the journey, which in our case was totally uneventful and lasted just half an hour. It is certainly the quickest and simplest way of taking a car to the Continent but, of course, there are no sea views or refreshing breezes. Nor, of course, is there any risk of being sea-sick.

Chris and Zoe the dog renew their friendship in Nick's Brussels' apartment

We spent the afternoon companionably in Nick’s Brussels apartment catching up with family news, and went out to a restaurant for an evening meal.

Dining out in Brussels. Clockwise, grandsons Nick and Chris,myself, Arlene and Pete

Brussels is a city with a multitude of restaurants and they seem always to be well filled. Eating out is taken very seriously indeed and is a leisurely activity about as far removed as you can get from sandwiches in front of the telly, or a ‘burger and fries’ at a MacDonalds! Me? I prefer something somewhere between the two extremes.

Here I am relaxing in my apartment in the Raddison Hotel

Pete, Arlene and I spent two nights at Brussels’ Raddison Hotel where I really discovered how the other half live! My luxurious suite (with comprehensively appointed en suite bathroom) had, among other amenities, a huge ‘built in’ tv set, the screen of which carried a message of personal welcome to me as I entered!

On the Saturday we drove into the Ardennes mountains, the starting point for the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ at the end of 1944 when the German army made its last desperate counter-offensive against the allies. We lunched in a picturesque village high in the mountains and then went on into Luxembourg. In the Grand Duchy’s capital we met and dined with a former colleague and business associate of Nick, and her boy-friend. Once again I was very favourably impressed with the absence of frontiers in today’s mainland Europe. We had no idea when we were in Belgium and when in Luxembourg though, in past times, the defence of those frontiers had cost untold numbers of young lives.

We were reminded of this on the following day when we visited the battlefield of Waterloo, just a few miles outside Brussels. This was an excursion that should be on the programme of everyone visiting Belgium’s capital. It can be enjoyed as much by those with a serious interest in history as by those who have been enthralled by the exploits of Richard (Rifleman to Colonel!) Sharpe on tv, or who have enjoyed Bernard Cornwell’s novels of the fictional hero on which the tv dramas were based!

A unique feature of this battlefield is that it has been strictly conserved by the Belgian government’s veto on any new development within the area. This means that visitors, travelling round the field of battle in a tourist bus are able to see it much as it was on that fateful day in late June 1815; the points from which Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington endeavoured to direct the course of the battle; the area where defensive ‘British squares’ withstood attack after attack of French cavalry, the 'sunken roads' in which the infantry awaited the order to attack, and the woods from which the Prussian army under Marshal Blucher advanced to engage the French flank late in the day. A commentary in English and French is accompanied by the realistic ‘noises off’ of bugle calls, the roar of artillery fire, the thunder of horses hooves and the shouts of their riders and – of course, the screams and moans of the wounded and dying.

Dozens of visitors of all nationalities throng the tourist centre. There were British, French, German and, of course, Belgians. There were film shows and presentations and dozens of books and souvenirs, all relating to the Battle of Waterloo. I bought a facsimile of the edition of ‘The Times’ newspaper which carried a report of ‘Our Glorious Victory over the tyrant Bonaparte!’

I found myself wondering what on earth was the purpose of all the carnage. Was Napoleon really such a cruel tyrant compared with some we have seen more recently? In any case, were the regimes of the nations allied against Napoleon any better? Russia in particular was a cruel autocracy of which a considerable proportion of the population were serfs (in effect slaves, bound to the estate on which they were born). In Britain, offenders, including young children, could be hanged for crimes that today would be considered trivial, and it was to be decades before there was even the pretence of democratic rule. Austria and Prussia were certainly no better. I was reminded of some lines from G.K.Chesterton’s poem The Rolling English Road:

I knew no harm of Bonaparte (and plenty of the Squire!)
And for to kill the Frenchmen I did not much aspire,
But I did bash their bayonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the rolling road an English drunkard made!

The visit reinforced my conviction that warfare, in the early nineteenth century as in the twentieth and the twenty-first, produced no winners.…….only some who lose more than others.

Week 2.09

Tendring Topics….on Line

'Three score years and ten'

I find it difficult to believe that 1939, a year filled with events that will affect the lives of people world-wide for generations to come, is now seventy years - a lifetime - in the past. It was nearer in time (and I think in public attitudes) to the Victorian age of Gladstone and Disraeli, and of Britain's colonial wars, than to the present day! It was a year that dramatically changed the course of my life!

Myself, aged 17. I think though, that I look about 14! No wonder Heather and I were never conscious of the difference in our ages.

I can’t remember exactly when I volunteered to join the Territorial Army but it was certainly during the first two or three months of the year. Everything had seemed so clear-cut in those days. Fascism and Nazism were unmitigated evils and it was everybody’s responsibility to defeat them. Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, addressed a public meeting in Ipswich Public Hall. I sat near the back. He was a charismatic speaker but his words sent a chill down my spine. I remember being particularly dismayed by the fact that when he took his place on the platform, twenty or thirty black-shirted members of the audience leapt to their feet and gave the outstretched-arm Fascist salute which he, also black-shirted of course, returned.

Four of us members of the clerical staff of Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department volunteered for the Territorial Army at the same time. Still under eighteen years of age, I had to attend the recruiting office armed with my father’s written permission to enlist. We found ourselves in the 67th Medium Regiment R.A., equipped with ancient iron-tyred 6in howitzers. We were issued with our inelegant ‘battle dress’ uniforms, attended two ‘drill nights’ a week and, in August went away for a fortnight’s training at Roedean, Brighton, camping immediately in front of the famous girls’ school.

The German army invaded Poland. Barely had we returned to our desks in Ipswich’s Health department when, on 2nd September we received notice that ‘His Majesty the King had been graciously pleased to embody the Territorial Army’. We were back into uniform, this time as full-time soldiers. Two-thirds of the members of our regiment lived in Ipswich. We were billeted in our own homes, our parents receiving a welcome billeting allowance. Billets were found for the remainder whose homes were in small towns and villages in southern Suffolk. There we stayed, continuing our training, until we were moved to Gloucestershire in the following spring.

This was the so-called ‘phoney war’ period in which there was some action at sea and the RAF dropped propaganda leaflets over towns in Germany but, on land, nothing much else happened. Plenty happened to me though!

On 3rd September, the day on which Britain declared war on Germany, I met the girl whom, nearly seven years later, I was destined to marry and who was to share my life for the following sixty years.
Heather as I first knew her. I carried a copy of this photo in my pocket (and looked at it at least once every day) until, in 1943 when I was a POW in Germany, she sent me a new photo of herself aged 19. My original photo was a little dogeared by that time!

Heather Gilbert, as she then was, was not yet sixteen. Her home was in Ilford. She had been evacuated to Ipswich with the Wanstead County High School and billeted next door to a close friend of mine. We spent a companionable evening together, discovered that we had similar backgrounds, similar tastes and a similar outlook on life. She had a most engaging smile and was, I thought, very beautiful. She retained that smile and remained beautiful until the day she died. Wanstead County High School must have been evacuated to Ipswich by mistake. Within a fortnight they had been moved, first to Maldon in Essex and later to the west country.

That fortnight had however been long enough for Heather and I to form an attachment that continued, largely by correspondence, throughout the war. It culminated in our wedding on 27th April, 1946, just four days after my discharge from the Army.

The other personal event for which I remember 1939 was a sad one. My father, then aged only 57, died suddenly and unexpectedly of coronary thrombosis on 27th November, after having been treated by his doctor for several weeks for ‘acute indigestion’! I had loved, respected and admired my father and I felt his loss acutely. I deeply regret that he was never able to welcome me safely home from the war, to get to know the girl I married, and to have the joy of seeing his two grandsons, of both of whom, I am sure, he would have been immensely proud.

It is only now, that I have been a widower myself for nearly three years, that I appreciate how deeply my mother must have missed and mourned him during those long war years and after.

The Wrong Sort of Spending?

Can we spend our way out of the current financial crisis, using borrowed money to do so? It seems unlikely to me, especially in view of the fact that the present crisis was created by rash and irresponsible lending and borrowing, first in the USA and then in Britain. But then my knowledge of economics is limited to knowing how to stay out of debt myself. High finance holds mysteries that I have never attempted to penetrate.

The government and its financial experts obviously think that increased borrowing and spending is the answer. They have increased the national debt and have thus been able to reduce VAT and to juggle with income tax and the allowances for us pensioners to give us all more spending power. They are urging the banks, whose fingers were so recently badly burnt by unwise lending, to start lending money again. The purpose of all this is to encourage us to go out and spend, spend, spend until the wheels of commerce once again begin to turn.

Somehow though it has to be the right sort of spending. At the same time as consumers are urged to spend, public services are told that they must economise and cut back. Furthermore the government (and our MP) are still worried to death about the number of people, particularly it seems in Essex, who are drawing sickness and disability allowances. They want the sick and disabled back into work, never mind the fact that every day there are fewer jobs for them, or anyone else, to do.

Can it possibly be true that spending on improving refuse and recycling services, making our parks and gardens more attractive and at least maintaining existing standards of education and health and welfare care, is less conducive to the national good than, for instance, members of the public getting new tv sets or bigger and better cars? Do local and other public bodies, as distinct from private individuals, indulge in ‘the wrong sort of spending’?

I was delighted to note that our Prime Minister warned us in his New Year message, of the evils that can arise from reliance on ‘unbridled market forces’. It’s a point that I have tried to make over and over again in Tendring Topics ….on Line. It was something of a surprise to hear it from Mr Brown though. Wasn’t it he and his predecessor who, during their terms of office, have done much of the unbridling.

Easter is coming!

Easter Day this year falls on the twelfth of April, over three months away. When I wrote in this blog a few weeks ago that no sooner would the Santa Clauses, the tinsel and the reindeer have vanished from the supermarket scene than they would be replaced by hot cross buns, Easter eggs and fluffy chicks, I quite thought that I was being guilty of mild exaggeration.

It seems that, on the contrary, I was guilty of understatement! At Morrison’s this morning (3rd January and three days before ‘12th night’ when Christmas is officially over and the Christmas decorations come down) I found that hot-cross buns and Easter eggs are already available for sale in some of Clacton’s supermarkets!

How soon after Easter, I wonder, can we expect to see Halloween masks on display and preparations being made for Christmas 2009?

Clacton’s Future

Last summer, before the credit crunch really began to make itself felt, it seemed to me that Clacton was experiencing a rebirth. We had the new town centre, greeted with derision at first by local residents. Visitors liked it though and I think that we natives are learning to love it. New businesses were coming into the town. Shops that had been empty for years began to be occupied again. There were to be two splendid new hotels

Is that all about to change – or already changing? The design of one of those planned hotels has been modified for economic reasons. Woolworth’s, one of the largest and longest established retail outlets in our town centre, today stands empty. Is it to be the first of many similar closures?

We must all hope not. On the plus side, the fall of the value of the pound against the Euro should encourage holidaying Brits to stay in Britain – and where better than the Essex coast, with its sandy beaches and low rainfall? Perhaps it will encourage holidaying mainland Europeans to visit us. I know that my visiting friends from eastern Germany were delighted with Clacton when I introduced them to Clacton’s town centre and vast expanses of tide-washed golden sand early last summer. Fortunately it was a warm, sunny and windless Sunday morning and the tide was right out!

Will the much-maligned and accident-prone water feature in the town centre be put into operation this year. I was among those unimpressed by it, largely I suppose because it was rarely working! However in the autumn I had the opportunity of seeing a similar feature at the front of the Town Hall in Sheffield.

It was attractive and impressive. If a water feature in a northern industrial town on a chilly and overcast day in late October can look attractive, surely in warm and sunny summer weather a similar town centre feature in a reborn seaside town on the Essex Sunshine Coast should be able to manage it!

Sheffield's water feature. The Town Hall is in the background. Taken on an overcast day in late October.

It’s the ‘warm and sunny summer weather’ that is problematic; and we can’t do anything about that! Surely fate can’t be cruel enough to deny us a proper summer again this year.

My Grandchildren’s New Year

Their granddad may be a has-been (or even ‘a never-wosser!) but my grandchildren are certainly doing their bit for the Hall name as we move into the New Year. Elder grandson Chris, who has been teaching English in Taiwan for the past two years and who is now a fluent Mandarin speaker, has just been designated ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the ‘Joy’ organisation that owns and runs the school at which he teaches and number of other similar schools in Taiwan.

Before a crowded audience in Taipei, capital city of Taiwan, Chris receives his award as the Joy Organisation's 'Teacher of the Year!

Chris' cousin, my granddaughter Jo, who has been working as a Social Worker with Sheffield Corporation, has this week taken up a much-sought-after post as Social Worker to the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital. Meanwhile Chris’s brother, my younger grandson Nick, who is employed by the European Travel Commission in Brussels, returned in December from a mission in Tokio where he had been furthering the Commission’s task of encouraging and facilitating travel to Britain and mainland Europe. He will shortly be travelling to New York, and then on to Toronto, engaged in a similar task.

All three of my grandchildren are graduates and Jo is an MA as well as BSc. Can you wonder that I am proud of them?












Above - Nick on the phone in his Brussels apartment, and Jo and I during my trip to Sheffield in October 2008