Week 49 2013

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘The signal fires of warning, they blaze, but none regard, And    so, through night to morning, the earth runs ruin-ward!’

          These lines, in a poem by A.E.Housman (1856 – 1936) seem strangely prophetic today. In recent months we have seen bush fires burning beyond control in an even-hotter-than-usual Australian summer; unseasonal snow storms in South Dakota burying, and killing, thousands of cattle in deep drifts; hurricanes devastating huge swathes of America’s mid-west in a month usually reckoned to be hurricane-free, and the most powerful cyclone ever recorded killing tens of thousands of men, women and children and rendering hundreds of thousands homeless in the Philippines. Even in the equable British Isles, normally free of the extreme weather conditions experienced in other less favoured parts of the world, we have had hurricane strength winds uprooting trees, damaging buildings and causing loss of life.

            These weather conditions came hot on the heels of the most serious and urgent warning yet from the world’s leading scientists that planet Earth is facing catastrophic climate change largely as a result of humankind’s own selfish activities.  There is urgent need to reduce and ultimately end the production of energy by the use of fossil fuels.  Their burning is one of principal sources of the greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere that are producing these disastrous weather phenomena.

            It wouldn’t be true to say that ‘none regard’ the warning signs of the ruin that the world is facing.  Some people take it very seriously indeed and even top politicians like to go through the motions of taking it seriously when they think there may be a few votes in it.   Remember David Cameron’s slogan at the time of the last General Election – ‘If you want green then vote blue!’ or words to that effect.  The government even took some steps in the right direction – encouraging the development of wind farms, subsidising the insulation of homes and the installation of new energy-saving boilers.  I took advantage of the scheme to have my roof space thoroughly insulated – and have felt the benefit of it.  To finance these schemes they took a relatively small portion of the profits of the energy companies.

            But, of course, energy companies – like all private firms – do not exist for the benefit of their customers but for that of their shareholders. They mustn’t be allowed to suffer.  ‘Healthy competition’ is supposed to be one of the great benefits of the free market economy.  It keeps prices down – so they say.  Strangely enough, despite free competition and the Prime Minister’s urging that we should all ‘shop around for the best tariff’ all the energy suppliers raise them by about the same amount within a period of months.  Now they are claiming that the high prices are largely the result of those ‘green taxes’ and the Prime Minister is talking about ‘rolling them back’, abandoning the grants and limiting the development of wind-farms and other sources of green energy.

            Blog readers are, I am sure, in no doubt about where I stand on this issue.  I believe very strongly that catastrophic climatic change is taking place, and that its progress is accelerating largely as a consequence of human activity.  A first responsibility of every government in the world should be to attempt to slow down and reverse that process.  You don’t have to believe me.  I am a very old man with – some may think – failing faculties and too vivid an imagination!   Below is an extract from an email received from a regular correspondent, a successful business man, who is even angrier than I am.  So he should be.  He is over thirty years younger than me.   Thanks to my age I am unlikely to experience the worst results of the folly and short-sightedness of the governments of the world (politicians rarely manage to see beyond the next election!) but he may  have to endure years of it!

This government just continues to get worse and worse. They are now considering dropping their Green commitment in order to reduce energy bills. I see Australia has voted in a right wing government and already announced plans to do just that. Every time I hear of an environmental disaster in the USA or Australia - and there have been plenty - I feel it serves them right and that actually many more are needed for them to wake up and respond accordingly.  But despite the hardships to some, as long as the good times roll on for the many, they just don't care.   That actually is the problem with democracy, decisions reflect the selfishness of the majority.

The arrogant dismissal of scientific evidence by Ministers who know very little about anything is breathtaking. You will see on the BBC News web site that less than a quarter of the marine conservation areas proposed by the Government's own scientists have been agreed by ministers who said that the "scientific evidence just doesn't stack up" - presumably words fed to them by the fishing lobby. They have the same attitude with recommendations to tax fizzy drinks and use the money to subsidise school meals, to introduce a minimum price for alcohol and removing cigarette displays in shops. In each case the scientific advice given to the Government has been cautious and considered, and made by experts who have no financial investment in their recommendations, but the Government prefers to believe "industry representatives" who are following in the path of the smoking lobby, and have a massive financial investment in stopping any change.

A Nation in Debt!

National economic recovery is on the way. Politicians are cautiously optimistic.  Unemployment has dropped to 7.6 percent and the Governor of the Bank of England has said that he will consider raising interest rates if and when this figure falls to 7 percent.   This, I heard a financial expert declare on tv, would be bad news for ‘home owners’.

I am a home owner and I can assert unequivocally that that is nonsense.  My mortgage was long ago paid off and the deeds of my bungalow are in the strong room of my solicitor, not in that of the Building Society that long ago had lent my wife and I the money to buy our home.  I now have money invested in that building society.  Year by year, as inflation has increased and interest rates remained frozen, that money has steadily lost its value.  I and other ‘savers’ have been helping to fund the loans of the home buyers encouraged by the government to ‘get their feet on the property ladder’  If interest rates go up there is a chance that those savings will hold their value – perhaps even increase it.  For debt-free home owners and savers like me an increased interest rate would be very good  news indeed.

For home buyers (I think it is a cruel deception, encouraging a false sense of security, to refer to them as ‘home owners’) the situation is very different.   Interest repayment rates are at an all-time low but, to discourage irresponsible debts, banks and building societies have been insisting on deposits of as much as 25 percent of the purchase price before making a mortgage loan.  The government is giving would-be home buyers a further loan (of our money!) to bring that deposit down to as little as five percent.

The result is that working couples are buying houses with borrowed money that needs the combined wages of both partners to service the repayments.  The loss or reduction of income of either partner, or an increase in the interest rates resulting in higher repayments, could spell disaster.  David Cameron has painted a glowing picture of the pride and satisfaction of the house-buyer holding, for the first time, the key of his own home!   He omitted to mention that it wouldn’t actually be ‘his own’ until he has made that final mortgage payment.  Nor did he dwell on the shame, disappointment and despair that house-buyer will feel if, due to circumstances beyond his control, he is unable to keep up his mortgage payments and is made homeless.

You think it couldn’t happen?   That same ‘expert’ who said that an increase in interest rates would be bad news for home owners, went on to say that an increase of just one percent in the interest rate would result in 30,000 families, who had imagined they owned their homes, becoming homeless.  A report of the Centre for Social Justice says that nearly four million British families do not have enough savings to cover their rent or mortgage for more than a month, and that 26,000 UK households have been rendered homeless in the past five years as a result of rent or mortgage arrears, more than 5,000 of them during the past twelve months.

Mortgage debt is by no means the only debt burden that many of we Brits are bearing.   The Centre for Social Justice says that ‘average household debt, now stands at £54,000’, nearly twice the level of that same average just ten years ago.  That £54,000 is ‘the average debt’.   Since there must be quite a few who like me have no debts whatsoever there must be a very great number of households who owe considerable more than that!   The Centre’s report says that poor people are bearing the brunt of a ‘perfect storm’ of rising living costs, falling real wages, low savings and expensive credit. Households with total incomes in the lowest ten percent of the population have average debts greater than four times their annual income, with average debt repayments amounting to nearly half their gross monthly income. I think it likely that this Christmas – thanks to credit cards, store cards and payday loans – that burden of individual debt, already at an all-time high, will increase dramatically!

 The UK’s economic recovery is surely an empty triumph if it results in our country becoming a land of debtors.  Wasn’t it the late Lady Thatcher who famously claimed that there was ‘no such thing as society’ and declared that it was individuals and families who really matter?  How strange that Lady Thatcher’s political heirs should have managed, so it seems, to set the country (Society?) on the path to economic recovery - but at the cost of getting millions of individuals and families into unmanageable debt!

 

  

Week 50 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

‘In the bleak midwinter……….’

          So begins a well-loved Christmas carol, describing weather rather more Dickensian than Palestinian!  Will Christina Rosetti’s words written in 1872 describe our winter of 2012/’13 with its, ‘Frosty wind made moan.  Earth was hard as iron, Water like a stone. Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow – in that bleak midwinter, long ago’?

            It was still dark when I published my weekly blog on the internet at about 7.00 am last Wednesday, 4^th December.  In it I expressed a fear that, after a summer and autumn of heavy rain and floods, winter would bring freezing weather, icy roads and footpaths, and heavy snow.  I pulled aside the curtains from my window and looked outside – my garden was covered with a thin layer of snow and snow was falling from the heavens!   The snowstorm didn’t last long but, as I write these words three hours later, the snow is still lying and it is bitterly cold outside.  I fear it is a presage of things to come!

            The previous evening I had watched a BBC tv news bulletin including the concern of Shelter, the charity serving the homeless, that the number of people sleeping rough on the streets of our big cities (in particular London and Glasgow), after having fallen at the beginning of the new century, was now steadily rising and expected to rise still further as a result of government policies and proposed policies

It is very difficult to get an accurate estimate of the number of ‘rough sleepers’ as they tend to seek out remote alleyways, passages and derelict buildings to get what shelter they can from the elements.  Estimates are likely to be lower than actuality.  However it is reckoned that during the winter of 2011/2012 there were no less than 5,678 rough sleepers in London – an increase of 43 percent on the previous year’s total of 3,975.  In the future the total is likely to be higher still, particularly if the government goes ahead with its cap on Housing Benefit, its exclusion of single under-25s from Housing Benefit, and its ‘bedroom tax’ on Council house tenants and those in receipt of Housing Benefit.

Every night I sleep warmly and comfortably under my duvet.  At 4.30 am my gas central heating and water heating come on for two hours, ensuring that when I rise just before 6.00 am (yes, I am an early riser) my bungalow is comfortably warm and there is plenty of hot water for my morning wash, shave and shower.  I prepare and eat my ample breakfast at my leisure in a warm kitchen.  During the two hours the boiler was in action it will have produced sufficient hot water for twenty-four hours.  After I have dressed and breakfasted I decide whether or not I need to switch it back on for space heating only.

  How very different every night is the plight of thousands of my fellow men and women!   In London alone at the most conservative estimate, at least 5,000 of them try to find some protection from wind and rain in shop doorways or alleyways and settle down on cold, hard paving stones to snatch a few hours’ sleep, threatened not only by the vagaries of the weather but the criminal violence of fellow humans in an even more desperate plight than themselves.   They wake shivering and with aching limbs, cold, hungry and miserable, to face another day of seeking shelter and begging or stealing to stay alive.   Why don’t they seek work?  For those who have a fixed address it's difficult enough to find a job.. For those who haven’t, it’s impossible. There’s a more-than-usually vicious circle.  Lose your job and you’re likely to be made homeless.  Once you’re homeless and have ‘no fixed abode’ you can never hope to find employment!  

Clacton’s Wellesley Road on New Year’s Day 1979.  Tough luck for ‘rough sleepers’!

Yes, some of them are alcoholics or drug abusers.  Give them the few coins for which they beg and they’ll go straight and spend them on something guaranteed to make their situation even more hopeless. They may be well aware of that – but they also know that the substance that will ultimately destroy them will give them, if only briefly, a release from misery and despair. ‘Judge not, that thou be not judged!’ According to Dante there is a notice at the entrance to Hell; ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here’.  No wonder rough sleepers are 35 times more likely to take their own lives than the rest of us. 

I have endured hunger, cold and privation as a common soldier and as a prisoner of war during World War II, but have never experienced squalid discomfort, cold and hunger comparable with that of these ‘free’ fellow-countrymen and women of mine who have the misfortune to be penniless and homeless. Nor, unlike them, was I ever entirely without hope of a better future.

We Christians should remember that every time we say ‘Our Father’ we are acknowledging that the homeless and the destitute, the undeserving as well as the deserving, are our brothers and sisters, our fellow humans.  I am glad that Christian Churches are well to the fore in seeking to alleviate the plight of the rough sleepers and trying to lift them out of the abyss of hopelessness, loneliness and despair in which they find themselves.

 But charities, however committed and hard-working, can never hope to do more than ease the problem.  It is up to the politicians to reduce and ultimately solve it.  I have almost given up hope of them ever doing that – but surely they could try to refrain from making a bad situation even worse!

 Correcting Karl Marx!

            There has been a great deal of outrage in the news media in recent weeks  about the overseas corporations that trade very successfully in this country but, usually by having their HQ or financial base in a country with a lower corporation tax than the UK, succeed in paying little or no taxation here.  Three highly successful international corporations have been ‘named and shamed’ – Starbucks, Amazon and Google.

            This negative publicity seems to have had a salutary effect on Starbucks who, no doubt because their customers were deserting them and patronising other coffee-house chains, have announced that they will be changing their financial arrangements so that our Inland Revenue receive some benefit from their highly profitable activities.  That is very nice of them – but it really shouldn’t be the prerogative of a commercial enterprise to decide whether or not to pay its proper dues.  Operating a business in this country is a privilege and, in market-driven Britain today privileges, like everything else, have their price.

            The only one of those three corporations that is of regular service to me is Google – and very valuable I have found it.  Providing me and the rest of us Brits with a first-class service isn’t however the primary objective of Google.  That is maximising the profits made for its international shareholders. Paying for the privilege of trading profitably in this country is just one of the, no doubt tiresome, overheads that need to be subtracted from those profits before they are distributed.  It is up to our government to see that that this is done.

            Nor, of course, is it only foreign enterprises that seek to maximise their profits at the expense of other British taxpayers.  I pointed out a few months ago that Boots the Chemists (as British as the Union Jack!) has its HQ in a small village in Switzerland for no other purpose than to reduce its tax liability.  I don’t for one moment imagine that Boots is the only British culprit.

When Karl Marx declared that Der Arbeiter hat kein Vaterland (working people have no Fatherland) he could hardly have been more wrong.  Hundreds of thousands of European working men and women (British, German, French and Russian) demonstrated their loyalty to their fatherlands (and paid for that loyalty with their lives) in two World Wars.   It is their employers, the giant corporations whom Marx would have described as the Bourgeoisie, who place profit before both fatherland and fellow-countrymen.

'Patriotism is all very well - but Business is Business!'

 ‘All in this together?’

            Now we truly are ‘all in this together’ announced  the ecstatic front page headline of the Daily Mail the day after George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered his autumn statement last Tuesday (5^th December).   The really wealthy and those in benefit are both to be targeted by the Government.   Both ends of the social spectrum are to suffer financially. What could be fairer and more egalitarian?

            That assessment overlooks the fact that the sums to be extracted from the bank accounts of the wealthy will cause them, at the most, only minor irritation and inconvenience.   The cuts imposed on the poor will force thousands of poor families to face the question, ‘Do we eat or heat?’  Thousands will be a little closer to losing their homes.    In the Biblical parable the poor widow who handed over her last ‘mite’ to the Temple Treasury was left totally penniless. The Treasury’s wealthy contributors poured in their gold and silver coins – but those coins amounted to only a fraction of their total wealth.  ‘Which of them’. asked Jesus, ‘was the more generous giver?’            

         

            As a pensioner I am one of those who will not suffer directly from the Chancellor’s Budget proposals.  However, the postponement of a return to normality for yet another year (and who is to say there won’t be a further postponement in a year’s time?) makes it increasingly unlikely that I shall live to see an end to austerity.  I do wish that the Chancellor hadn’t had quite such a self-satisfied smile on his face as he announced the failure of his policies and his economic predictions.

           

Once again he is taking pride in having brought a large group of low earners outside the income tax system altogether and ‘freed them from the burden of income tax’.  I remain convinced that we will not have a fair taxation system until the annual first demand on every single adult resident in this country, from the very poorest to the very wealthiest, is a percentage (to be calculated every year in accordance with the nation’s needs) of his or her gross income; the annual payment for the privilege of living and working in the UK.  The percentage would be exactly the same for everyone but, of course, the actual amount demanded would vary widely according to the wealth or poverty of each individual. What each individual did with the rest of his or her income – spend it, save it, give it to charity or put it in an off-shore account - would be no concern of the state.

            We then really would be all in it together in a true ‘common-wealth’ of which we could be proud to be citizens!

Songs of Praise

          My wife and I always watched BBCtv's Songs of Praise together early on Sunday evenings and I have continued to do so since her death.  Last Sunday, the first in the Church’s season of Advent, circumstances  prevented my doing so – but I did record it and have just watched the recording.

            

         I am glad that I didn’t miss it because I felt it was one of the best ever.  It included the Military Wives' Choir giving us one of the finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she said, to patronise children by assuming that they can't learn to appreciate the magic of Shakespeare's words and to try to 'simplify' them

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’ which summarise what Christmas is really all about:

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible for me to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.

  one of the very finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter by the Military Wives’ Choir that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she claimed, to patronise children by trying to ‘simplify’ things, destroying their ‘magic’.

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.

  one of the very finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter by the Military Wives’ Choir that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she claimed, to patronise children by trying to ‘simplify’ things, destroying their ‘magic’.

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.