Week 43 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

Congratulations!

It really is an unusual pleasure to be able to offer unqualified congratulations to a senior member of the Government but I have no hesitation in doing so to Home Secretary Theresa May for her refusal to extradite computer whizz-kid Gary McKinnon to the USA.  Whether or not he was suicidal is surely beside the point.  I don’t think that it needed an expert in international espionage or a leading psychiatrist, to realize that this young (by my standards!) sufferer from Asperges Syndrome had no evil intent whatsoever when he hacked his way into some of the USA’s most secret electronic files.

If the USA feels that someone should be prosecuted for this affair, the individual or company who sold them a system that could be hacked into by a lone 42 year old in a distant land, might be a more appropriate object for their urge for justice (or could it be an urge for vengeance after they had been made to look ridiculous?) than this hapless British citizen.

If Gary McKinnon managed to hack into the USA’s most closely guarded secrets it cannot be impossible for someone else, deliberately and with much less innocent intent, to do so.  President Barak Obama might find it worth his while to despatch one or two of his own computer experts to England to have a polite and friendly chat with Mr McKinnon.  If asked courteously he might be prepared to tell them just how he did it and even, for an appropriate fee, help them to devise a system that is not just American-expert-proof but McKinnon-proof!

Footnote:   Where, I wonder, was the voice of UKIP in the McKinnon controversy?  Usually their strident voice is in the forefront when British sovereignty is being defended.  Their silence over this matter reinforces my conviction that they are motivated less by love of the United Kingdom than by dislike and suspicion of our fellow Europeans..

Growing old on the ‘Costa Geriatrica’

          That’s how I have heard our Essex Holiday Coast disparagingly described.  It is true that we have a higher proportion of elderly residents than most other areas in the United Kingdom.  Holland-on-Sea in particular is said to have the highest concentration of pensioners in Europe!  For that, I have no doubt, there are two reasons.  Ours is a very healthy area so we natives tend to live longer than those elsewhere.  It is also a very pleasant area in which to live, with low rainfall, lots of sunshine and safe sandy beaches, so those who live in less fortunate regions often move here when they retire and are able to do so.  Surely those are features about which we should be proud, not apologetic.

            Old age does bring problems – not least, as I can confirm from personal experience, to those who achieve it.  When I was in my forties I remember thinking how silly seventy and eighty year olds were to cling so frantically to their independence.  Couldn’t they see how much better off they would be in a residential or care home – no more worries about preparing meals and washing up, about the laundry or the neglected garden, about fuel bills or house maintenance?   There would be no more loneliness, with plenty of contemporaries available to chat and share memories, and there would be medical and nursing care available at any hour of the day or night.   

            It sounded idyllic to my then middle-aged mind but now I am over 90, and clinging to independence myself, I well understand the fears of those old people half a century ago.  I find that shopping, preparing meals, doing the washing (with a reliable washing machine!), dealing with my email correspondence and preparing this blog every week, keep me fully occupied, avoid my vegetating in an armchair while watching daytime television, and prevent my thoughts dwelling too much on happier days in the past.   I am lonely only for the wife who shared my life for 60 years. I appreciate the occasional company of my contemporaries but I also enjoy a chat (I can only hope that I don’t bore them out of their minds) with younger people – the ladies at the supermarket check-out, the younger folk (that’s actually everybody!) at the Quaker Meeting and at the two Clacton churches I visit with a friend each week.  Then there’s the lady who spends an hour or so with me every Friday, preventing the interior of my bungalow from becoming a tip, and the gardener who slows down my neglected garden’s evolution into a wild-life sanctuary!  Nor must I forget the value of my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) that gives me the independence I need to do my shopping, visit local friends and get to those church services and Quaker Meetings.

And, although it may sound fanciful in this secular and materialistic age, I don’t feel that I have entirely lost contact with my late wife while I remain in the bungalow in which we spent half a century together.  Often I feel her, always benign and loving, presence.  Somehow I don’t think that that presence would follow me into a care home.

My wife Heather – as I remember her towards the end of her life.

Towards the end of her life I went with her when she visited friends who were spending their declining years in residential care homes in Clacton (she was the visitor – I was just the chauffeur!) and I learned from my own observation that while some such homes were very good indeed, others were awful – with noisy, un-cooperative and antisocial residents and inexperienced, harassed and uncaring staff.

            Nor does remaining in one’s own home with the support of social services necessarily provide a happy solution.  Once again a government report (that the government chooses to ignore!) highlights the danger of contracting these services out to ‘the private sector’.  Investigation revealed that some private agencies were found to be using totally untrained staff, and even staff with criminal records, for personal and social care of elderly and disabled people in their own homes.  I remember seeing, in a tv documentary last year, a secretly taken video of a ‘professional carer’ giving an old gentleman a blanket bath, with a sponge in one hand while the other clutched a mobile phone pressed to her ear with which she was having a chat with a friend!

            Last week’s Clacton Gazette carried the shock/horror headline SHOCKING ABUSE OF OUR ELDERLY.  This did not relate either to care agencies or social services authorities, but to abuse of some old people in their own homes by their own relatives.  Age UK Essex Advisory Service (based in Thorpe-le-Soken) has found that some local families, impoverished by unemployment and rising prices, are bullying elderly relatives into handing over some of their money to them or, in some cases, stealing from their bank accounts by fraud

                                                                                                                  

Mrs Belinda Griffith, the service’s co-ordinator, said that there had been a surge of people taking advantage of elderly relatives since the economic crisis started to bite four years ago.  They had for instance not understood why one old lady’s finances were in a muddle until they discovered that her grandson was turning up on pension day and demanding money from her.  In another instance an unemployed woman had taken her elderly mother’s cashpoint card and was helping herself to money from her mother’s bank account.  The victim was reluctant to report what was happening, ‘because she loved her daughter and didn’t want to get her into trouble’.

Oh dear – how very, very fortunate I am to have reached the age of 91 and – so far – to have lived independently in my own home, without help from Social Services, with an adequate income and with a loving (and certainly never exploitative!) family and good and steadfast friends.  I only hope that, like my wife, I end my days here.

The Global Market – a blog reader’s view

My last week’s blog about the global market certainly struck a chord with a regular blog reader with a strongly developed social conscience, who is the founder and managing director of a small but successful private consultancy. It evoked from him an immediate and forcibly worded response.  Here – almost unedited – it is.

The story in your blog about your Royal Mail Envelope (made in China) was a small example of the absurdity of globalisation. Did you know, for instance, that almost all the souvenirs for London 2012, selling Britain to the world, were made in China?

If globalisation is taken to its logical extreme – and there is no sign that it will not be – then wages and taxes, working conditions and the welfare state are all pitched into global competition. How can an unskilled worker in the UK compete with a billion workers in India?  He is funding a National Health Service and an Education Service which his counterpart in India is not, and he has expectations of Employment Rights which the average Indian cannot even dream of.

 The mechanism by which this deterioration in the UK workers’ standard of living will occur is also clear and is happening already.  His UK employer will go bust, or go global and move his job abroad*. The worker’s  own desperate need to live more cheaply will ensure that he accelerates the process himself, by shopping around for the cheapest goods - made in the Far East. This of course creates a situation where the demands on the welfare state are growing and its cost is falling on a reducing number of better off workers, who themselves are being squeezed by foreign competition.  In the end they will want to cut all this welfare expenditure and be rid of the burden of funding the poor and disabled.  I can see that happening both in the UK and USA.

            I think the Tory party conference gave us a breath--taking glimpse of the future; endless multi-billion pound cuts to welfare (this got the loudest cheer!) progressively opting out of Europe; workers bribed and, in the end, forced to sell or forgo their rights to almost everything in exchange for a job. I realized with some amazement how far the Conservatives have come since the days of Ted Heath and John Major!

I cannot imagine how Cameron has been said to have “detoxified” the Tory brand or how he managed to keep the lid on this groundswell of extreme right wing opinion so that at the last General Election many voters felt that there really wasn’t much difference between the parties.

That email  reminded me of a verse from a rarely-quoted poem by A.E.Housman:

The signal fires of warning

Burn on, but none regard,

And so, through night to morning

The earth spins ruin-ward!

Not the whole earth perhaps, but certainly our small corner of it.


*Only yesterday (23rd Oct.) I learned that Birmingham Corporation (Britain's largest local authority) was out-sourcing its IT services to India and making members of its own staff redundant!

Week 49 7th Dec. 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

Prepared for the weather?

Do you remember last winter, how it went on and on? And do you remember how, directly it was over, Essex County Council, as one of England’s largest highway authorities, called a conference of all such authorities, to discuss dealing with snowed-up highways in future years. I can’t remember what the conference decided. I do remember though that Lord Hanningfield (then leader of Essex County Council) announced that it had been a great success. It was, he claimed, yet another example of Essex County Council leading the way and others following!

Well, winter has undoubtedly come onto us early this year and, before the end of November snow covered a great deal of the country. We had the usual toll of traffic accidents and of traffic halted or reduced to a crawl. Highway authorities began salting and gritting major roads in an effort to keep traffic moving. Most of them, (who knows, perhaps they had been inspired by that conference!) announced that this year they wouldn’t be caught out. They had enormous stocks of grit and salt available and had ample reserves accessible if they needed them.

I think that they may have been a little over-confident. They started using up their salt stock before the beginning of December. No-one can possibly know how long the winter will last and how many days and nights of freezing temperatures and lying snow we would have to endure before the spring. Shelley concludes his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ with the rhetorical question, ‘O Wind – if winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ The only honest answer to that is, ‘Yes, sometimes it can be!’ There are no certainties where the weather is concerned.

There were no such boasts from County Hall in Chelmsford. Unaccustomed modesty? Perhaps – but on 25th November the Coastal Gazette carried the alarming report that, ‘Essex may run out of road gritting salt if this winter becomes as bad as last year’. The report goes on to say:

‘Despite improvements to the quality of the salt and closer relationships with other authorities to improve gritting, another bad winter could make public highways dangerous for pedestrians, shoppers and drivers.

Figures in Essex County Council’s winter operational document for 2010/2011 show that Essex will have less than the minimum material recommended every week for the winter. Some depots do not have the capacity to store even the minimum.‘
‘
Norman Hume, county councillor responsible for highways and transportation agreed that the council had made provision only for a ‘normal’ winter and not for the conditions that we had experienced during the past two years. ‘We started with the salt barns full to capacity but the problem was re-supply. As a nation we can’t put resources into a policy not required except in exceptional circumstances’

I would hardly think that conditions that prevailed throughout the last two winters and look set to continue this year could be regarded as particularly exceptional!

The weather has been worse. Here is the sea frozen over near Clacton Pier in the early months of 1963. That year we had hard frosts until well into early spring

The county council does not plan to salt residential or minor roads, but will concentrate on major routes with local councils helping in town centres. Where, I wonder, will local councils find the funding to carry out this Highway Authority task?

Altogether, unless the weather gets much kinder, it is a pretty poor outlook this winter for local motorists, cyclists and pedestrians (and, of course, mobility scooterists; snowfall is the only circumstance that keeps my ‘iron horse’, confined to stable!) It’s not really what those who live in a county with a council that claims to ‘lead the rest!’ would expect.

In Vino Veritas

No, I didn’t have a classical education (I envy those who did!) but along life’s way most of us pick up a few Latin phrases and In Vino Veritas (Truth is in the wine) is one of mine. It means that alcohol loosens the tongue, frees us from our inhibitions and reveals our true nature. Thus, under the influence of a couple of drinks, a road sweeper may be revealed as a true gentleman and a Duke as something of an oaf.

The leaked (by Wikileaks) report of Prince Andrew’s indiscreet speech at a ‘brunch’ in Kyrgyzstan that he had attended as a British trade representative, suggests to me that His Royal Highness should have had a little more ‘tonic’ in his host’s pre-meal vodka-and-tonic. Surely he wouldn’t otherwise have made unflattering remarks about our American cousins with the American Ambassador present.

More serious though was his claim that it was ‘idiocy’ to investigate the allegations of bribery having taken place during the course of a major arms deal with Saudi Arabia, and to have denounced snooping Guardian journalists investigating bribery and corruption in other overseas trade deals. Perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that the American report on the incident said that the other Brits present had greeted these remarks not with disapproval but with enthusiasm.

Perhaps they too had had a drop too much. I hope so. It would be very sad indeed if, when stone cold sober, representatives of our country believed that there was some moral difference between offering a bribe and accepting one, and that it was quite all right for Britons to bribe influential ‘foreigners’ to obtain lucrative overseas contracts for British firms.

Can they really believe that morality, like religion, is a private matter for the individual conscience ………but that business is business and obeys no rules but its own?

Healthy North-East Essex?

I have always believed that the Tendring District, and in particular its coastal area is a good and healthy place to live. Low rainfall, fresh air blowing in off the sea, and lots of sunshine, combine to account for the fact that there are a great many oldies in our district. Some, like me, have grown old here, others have chosen to come here on retirement. More of us than in most areas survive and even thrive, into our eighties.

This is just as well because a recently published NHS report makes it clear that appreciably less is spent by the NHS in north-east Essex, in the Colchester and Tendring Districts, than in other parts of our county. The North-East Essex Primary Care Trust spends up to £8,000 per 1,000 residents less on cancer treatment (cancer is a condition more likely to afflict the old than the young) than Trusts in south Essex. Our primary care trust spends between £140,00 and £170,00 on mental health while in the south-east of the county they spend between £200,000 and £240,000.

People in north Essex are less likely to receive a needed hip replacement than their counterparts in the south and patients with chronic lung disease (another affliction of the elderly) are likely to face a longer hospital stay in Colchester and Clacton than elsewhere in the county. This, says the report, ‘does them more harm than good’.

Will the government’s plan to abolish primary care trusts and put commissioning of health care in the hands of GPs help reduce these inequalities. Bernard Jenkin, North Essex and Harwich MP thinks so. He is reported as saying, ‘What the government is going to do is remove the bureaucrats from the decisions about who gets treated, and the doctors are going to be put in charge of health treatment budgets. GPs choosing what treatments are made is the best way to create greater equality.’

Perhaps – but in the same issue of the Coastal Gazette that carries the NHS report we learn that a Dr Shane Gordon is the joint chief executive of the new GP consortium that will take over health-care budgets for Colchester and Tendring by 2013. I reckon that Dr Gordon will need quite a few lay clerical and administrative staff to help him with this task. Could it be just another bureaucratic organisation in the making

A Question of Extradition

Wikileaks revelations have brought the sad case of Gary McKinnon back into the public eye. I have to confess that I had completely forgotten this young IT genius who – clearly with no evil intent – had hacked his way into the defence secrets of the USA’s Pentagon! The sensible course of action of the US government would have been to ask him how he had done it, and ask him to co-operate in helping them to design a truly hack-proof system.

But no, for this dire offence ‘that threatened US security’ the USA wanted him to be extradited, in accordance with an extradition treaty accepted by Tony Blair, and to face trial in the USA. My opinion of Gordon Brown and David Cameron went up a notch or two when I learned that they had both intervened on Gary McKinnon’s behalf – and my opinion of Hilary Clinton dropped like a stone on learning that she had rejected their pleas.

I remember all too well how American Courts repeatedly refused to extradite convicted IRA murderers to England during the still-recent ‘troubles’. I remember too how a British Government had refused to extradite to Spain, General Pinochet, who had presided over the murders of hundreds of his fellow countrymen and others, and the torture of hundreds more, including Sheila Cassidy, a British doctor*. What a British government could do for Pinochet, its successors can do for Gary McKinnon.

But then, of course, General Pinochet had been a personal friend of Mrs Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) and of Norman Lamont (now Lord Lamont) her less-than-successful Chancellor.

*See ‘Audacity to Believe’ by Sheila Cassidy, published 1977 by Collins of London, Publishers.

Not all Surprises!

I was certainly surprised by some of the revelations from Wikileaks, which – as I write – are being fed to us daily. I was, for instance, quite astonished to discover that the Governor of the Bank of England’s assessment of the qualities of our Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer was much the same as my own – though his judgement is of course, much more firmly grounded in knowledge and experience than mine is.

I was not however in the least surprised that the British and American governments were both seriously concerned about the possibility of Pakistan’s Nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of terrorists, who might use those weapons against us and/or India. In fact, I’d have been very anxious had I thought that that they were not worried about this possibility.

I reckon that the fact that Pakistan, India and Israel actually have nuclear weapons should cause us a lot more anxiety than the thought that Iran may possibly one day acquire them.