Week 10 11 8th March 2011

Tendring Topics……on line



The Big Society is us!



It seems that as far as David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ is concerned, our own Tendring District is at the very centre of things. Harwich and North Essex MP Bernard Jenkins is chairing a House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee which wants to separate the government’s programme of cuts in public services, from the idea of The Big Society. Perhaps I have misread the Clacton Gazette’s report but it seems that Mr Jenkins and the Committee he is chairing are not too sure themselves what The Big Society is all about. And it is to us – well to Mr Neil Stock, leader of our district council – that they are turning for enlightenment.

The Gazette reports that Mr Stock, ‘has responded to a call from MP Bernard Jenkins for an inquiry into what the concept (of the Big Society) means’. Mr Stock was, of course, pleased to oblige. He says modestly that, ‘While we don’t claim to have all the answers, I do believe that ‘we get it’ and I would welcome the opportunity to talk to the Select Committee. We in Tendring are well ahead of the game in respect of understanding the potential of how ‘Big Society – Small Government’ can improve the quality of life of our residents. It could well help the committee with its inquiry and I look forward to speaking with them’.

Mr Jenkin announced the setting up of the inquiry during Prime Minister’s Questions where it was welcomed by David Cameron (the Big Society was David Cameron’s idea. Surely he knows what it is all about!) Mr Jenkins clearly doesn’t. He told the House of Commons that, ‘It would be helpful for us to discuss the issue with a Council which has already stepped forward to embrace the Big Society in such a positive way.

One of Mr Neil Stock’s close colleagues on Tendring Council, Councillor Peter Halliday, seems to have no doubt of the Big Society’s purpose; it is to get free of charge services to the public that the Council has previously had to pay for, eventually (though I doubt if he thinks that far ahead) making the Council itself redundant.

A picture in the Clacton Gazette shows Mr Halliday congratulating public spirited Mrs Margaret Henderson of William Drive, Clacton on collecting litter from the Martello Beach three times a week, a task that she has been carrying out since her retirement three years ago. She sorts out what she collects and disposes it in the recycling bins by the Hastings Avenue Lifeboat Station.

Mrs Henderson, who is in her early seventies, is beginning to find bending over to pick up litter a bit too much for her. Veolia, the council’s cleansing contractors, have already given her a pair of protective gloves and the council have now given her a ‘litter picker’, one of those gadgets (I’ve got one myself) that can be used to pick up objects without bending right over. It is very good of them both, though it is of course, their job to keep the beach clean, not just to help someone who is doing their job for them.

I think that Mrs Henderson deserves everybody’s thanks. If more people behaved as she has, the world would be a happier – and much cleaner! – place. Sadly most people either can’t or won’t. That is why we elect district councils and pay our taxes for them to do these jobs for us. They should keep our beaches clean and prosecute those who litter them, not appeal for volunteers to do the work for them for nothing.

Councillor Halliday was also recently reported in the Clacton Gazette as urging stores and pubs to open their loos to the public – thereby reducing, and perhaps ultimately eliminating, the need for the Council to provide and maintain public conveniences. I have a great deal of sympathy with Ms. Eileen Murphy of Jaywick Lane who has written to the Gazette urging Mr Halliday to ‘stop and think for a change. Publicans and restaurant owners have these facilities for their patrons only. They pay staff to keep them clean and up-to-date. Is the council going to pay towards this facility, or do they expect the service for free? She adds, ‘a woman on her own would not go into a pub toilet. How awful that would that feel!’

I think that Ms. Murphy has made a couple of very valid points. Someone has to pay for the provision and maintenance of those pub and restaurant toilets. If the council wants them to be available to the public then the council should contribute. I quite agree too that no woman, unaccompanied, would want to enter a strange pub, ask for directions to the ladies’ toilet and then make her way there, possibly through a crowd of drinkers!

When my wife and I were on camping holidays we would occasionally use pub toilet facilities. Always though, we went in together. And we would never dream of using those facilities without my ordering at least a fruit juice for my wife (a life-long teetotaller) and half a pint of something a little stronger for myself.

I reckon that if and when Councillor Neil Stock faces Mr Jenkin’s Westminster Committee, he won’t be far wrong if he says that, in Tendring at least, the Big Society is an attempt to get services for free that they have previously always had to pay for. Perhaps they’ll succeed – and will demonstrate that such pieces of folk wisdom as, 'there is no such a thing as a free lunch' or, as they say in Suffolk, ‘Yew doant git nawth’n f’r nawth’n – and not-a-lot f’r a tanner*’ simply aren’t true!

*a tanner – slang expression for sixpence (old coinage). In today’s terms 2.5p.

Unanswered questions

There are aspects of the current financial crisis that puzzle me: The Government insists, and it is obvious from readers’ letters in the popular press that many people accept it as self-evident, that the current economic situation can be blamed on the profligacy and incompetence of Mr Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister. How then is it that the Irish Republic, the USA and a number of mainland European countries are in much the same, or an even worse, situation? Surely, it isn’t suggested that Mr Brown was the leader of an international conspiracy to undermine the world’s monetary system?

When the Governor of the Bank of England, who might have been thought to be the man in England most familiar with the situation, addressed the Trades Union Conference a few months ago, he didn’t blame Mr Brown. He put the blame fairly and squarely on ‘the bankers’, people like himself. He made the point again, even more strongly, just a few days ago. But, of course, ‘the bankers’ are among the largest contributors to the funds of the major partner in the coalition government. It might be wiser not to make too much fuss about their role in the creaton of the current situation!

Come to think of it, the profligacy of Mr Brown’s government can hardly have even approached that of the wartime government between 1939 and 1945. That was a time of desperate emergency when every pound that we possessed, or could borrow, was spent on guns, tanks, ammunition, aircraft, warships and on the pay and equipment of servicemen and women. No one grudged a penny of it. That was expenditure to which we owe our national survival – but it was also negative expenditure on a previously unheard of scale. Compared with that, the prodigality of the New-Labour Government must surely have been just ‘petty cash’.

The immediate post-war years were a time of austerity (I lived through them which is more than many – if any – members of the House of Commons can claim!) There was still wartime rationing and there were still shortages of consumer goods. Thousands had been bombed out of homes, which could only then, with the war over, begin to be replaced.

Those years were also though, as I well remember, a time of hope for the future, a time of rebuilding, reconstruction and regeneration. Many of Britain’s major cities, flattened by air raids, were rebuilt as were ruined infrastructures. Factories that had been devoted to the manufacture of weapons of war, were converted back to peacetime use. Jobs, in the construction industries and in the run-down public services, were found for the thousands of returning servicemen and women. Homes, temporary (remember the prefabs, people were glad enough to have them at the time!) and permanent, were found for the tens of thousands of the homeless and badly housed. By 1951, with much remaining to be done, we felt sufficiently confident to celebrate our achievements in The Festival of Britain!

Autumn, 1945. Heather and I, planning our wedding, are caught on camera strolling along Charing Cross Road.

I don’t remember those years as being a time of increasing austerity and cuts in public services, blamed by the politicians of that time on the previous coalition government. Nowadays the Spirit of the Blitz is regularly invoked (though rarely by people who actually remember the Blitz!) as an example that we should try to emulate. I’d rather we recovered something of the Spirit of post-war Britain, when many of us (Heather and I among them) really believed that we were on our way to building in Britain, and as an example to the world, a true commonwealth (common wealth!) of liberty, fraternity and equality – the new ‘Jerusalem’ of William Blake’s poem, (now the anthem of the Women’s Institute).

Bring me my bow of burning gold.
Bring me my arrows of desire.
Bring me my sword, O clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I shall not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till I have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

Over sixty years later, we’re further away from that goal than we have ever been!

Prudent Tendring Council could save a half-million pounds!

Perhaps! The thought was evoked by a report in the Clacton Gazette about the hesitation of a local charity to apply for help from the Council’s much-vaunted £500,000 Big Society fund. Andrew Mowle, Chairman of the Green Team (a very small local charity that looks after Jaywick’s community gardens and organises an annual ‘front gardens’ competition there) says: ‘We would have to make a case that we are saving the council money by doing what we do. But they don’t spend any money on the gardens so how can we make a case? I don’t think David Cameron had this in mind’.

Who knows what David Cameron had in mind? It is very clear to me though that this criterion would render almost every local charity ineligible for a grant. How much money, for example, does the Council currently spend on practical help for the elderly and disabled, as do Family Support Groups throughout the district, or on providing respite-care for carers as does Cross Roads based in Thorpe-le-Soken, or on taking vulnerable people out weekly for a meal as does St. Osyth’s Dumont Lunch Club, or providing a little extra care and comfort to the sick and dying as do Hospital and Hospice local support groups?

The whole purpose and reason for existence of a local charity is to provide a service to members of the public that the Council either cannot or will not provide.

If the Council adheres strictly to the criterion that charity grant seekers must prove that their activities save the council money, they stand to save their £500,000. If, of course, they do find charities that will save them money (is there perhaps a Support for Hard-up Councillors charity?) they’ll recover it! It is a ‘heads we win, tails you lose’ situation for the Council – though not, I fear, for the community they are supposed to be serving.

Week 45.09

Tendring Topics………on line

Remembrance Sunday

Next Sunday (8th November) is Remembrance Sunday. It is, I think, a commemoration that towards the end of the last century was beginning to lose significance as the World Wars and their victims began to fade from contemporary memory and to take their place in the history books.

Born as I was in 1921, I can remember during my childhood the continuing desolation of the bereaved of World War I; the grieving mothers, the young widows, the attractive girls destined to become old maids because the love of their life was buried ‘in some corner of a foreign field’. Throughout my pre-teen years there were always women, in tears, wearing their Flanders poppies on black garments at Remembrance Services on what we then called ‘Armistice Day’. At tens of thousands of such services it was affirmed that, ‘They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them’.

But those who remembered them best wished so fervently that they had had the opportunity to grow old; the opportunity to be wearied by age and to endure (and enjoy!) those inexorably passing years.

I doubt if since 1945 there has ever been a single day in which the whole world has been at peace. At least though, we in Western Europe have been at peace with each other, and, for the most part, only marginally affected by conflicts raging elsewhere in the world. The ‘Cold War’ remained mercifully cold.

Then came the Falklands War and, after a relatively short gap, the first and second Gulf Wars, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Once again we have parents, proud of their dead hero sons and bravely keeping a stiff upper lip, weeping widows and orphans, and desolated girl friends……. not, of course, anything like as many as there were in the wake of the two world wars, but their grief is every bit as painful and as profound.

It will almost certainly be in the prayerful silence of our Quaker Meeting for Worship that on Remembrance Day I shall remember my fallen comrades from World War II. In my Territorial Medium Artillery Regiment (6in howitzers for those interested in such things) we were mostly in our late teens and early twenties, young men from Ipswich and other East Suffolk towns and villages, who had volunteered for the TA at the beginning of 1939 when we had had realized that war with Nazi Germany was inevitable.

From 1939 till July 1941 we were part of Britain’s defences against invasion. In 1941 we sailed to North Africa and, during the winter of 1941/1942 we helped to secure the surrender of Bardia and Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass) from the combined German and Italian Forces. When Rommel counter-attacked in the New Year we were for several months in almost continuous action in the Gazala Line, west of Tobruk. Eventually we became part of the Tobruk Garrison and were overrun by Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21st June 1942.

There were 100 fatal casualties among the 700 or so men in my regiment.. That was a quite a heavy death-toll for a Medium Artillery regiment serving in North Africa in World War II. What I find particularly appalling is that, while there were obviously some deaths in battle, the overwhelming number occurred after Tobruk had fallen and we had been taken prisoner.

There were deaths when a diphtheria epidemic raged through the large transit POW camp in Benghazi, Libya. There were deaths in Italian prison camps from starvation-related afflictions. I watched Jock McGregor, a Scotsman and a good friend of mine, simply take to his bunk and die of hunger and cold in a camp in northern Italy. A few lost the will to live after receiving ‘Dear John’ letters telling them that their girlfriends or wives had found new ‘true loves’. ‘Who is he?’ ‘I don’t know; some smooth s….. in a reserved occupation or b……. overpaid Yank I suppose’.

In Germany there were deaths on the long trek in the icy conditions of northern Europe during the winter of 1944/1945 as POW camps in Poland and East Prussia were evacuated to avoid prisoners being liberated by the advancing Red Army. By far the greatest number of fatal casualties from my regiment were though from ‘friendly fire’. Fifty young men whom I had known personally, drowned like rats in a trap on 14th November 1942, when a British submarine torpedoed the Italian SS Scillin, the prison ship transporting them from Tripoli to Italy. The commander of the submarine had thought that he was attacking an Italian troop ship.

Myself on my return to England from captivity in Germany and below Heather Gilbert, the girl who had waited for me for four years.

I received no battle injuries, escaped the epidemic in Benghazi, sailed earlier and uneventfully from Libya to Italy, and survived semi-starvation in Italy. On VE Day I liberated myself from German captivity (with a great deal of help from the Soviet Red Army!) and arrived home in Ipswich, safe and sound, just ten days later on 18th May, my 24th birthday! My girlfriend Heather Gilbert was waiting for me, having successfully resisted the attractions of both our American allies and those in reserved occupations during the four years that I had been overseas.

I was, as I have so often been, extremely lucky. On Sunday I shall remember with sadness the tragically wasted lives of friends and comrades who didn’t enjoy that same good luck.

Flanders’ Poppies

This morning (26th October) I heard a ‘what the papers say’ report on the radio that a letter in the Daily Telegraph, from a Lieut. Col. (retired) complained bitterly about tv news announcers wearing their poppies prematurely. ‘Poppies’, the good Colonel insisted, ‘should be worn only after 1st November’.

Who on earth says so? That sounds to me like one of those stupid Regimental Orders that used to appear on our Battery Notice Board insisting that ‘From 0800 hrs. 1st October, great coats will be worn on parade’, never mind the fact that 1st October might well be in the middle of an Indian Summer heat wave.

With Christmas catalogues in the post before the end of August, and Easter eggs and hot cross buns on sale the minute the Christmas decorations come down, it’s sad if we can’t wear our Flanders Poppies a week or so early!

In any case tv news announcers are not alone in having never heard of (or of ignoring) this prohibition.. No politician hoping to be returned to Westminster in next year’s General Election has been seen without a poppy for almost a week. Lots of ordinary people in the street, myself among them, are wearing them too.

I think that everybody who wishes the Poppy campaign well, should be very pleased that this year the poppies were on sale in good time and that people were already wearing them well before the end of October.

Pride cometh before a fall!

So says the proverb, and mine certainly did. On Saturday 24th October, my son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn, came to Clacton to visit me. After lunch at the Bowling Green we wondered what to do next. It was a damp and miserable day. ‘Let’s try the Martello Tower at Jaywick’, I suggested, ‘often there’s an art exhibition there’.

That Saturday was ‘between Exhibitions’ but Andy and Marilyn thought they’d like to see the view from the top. They looked at me doubtfully, ‘Anywhere you two can go, I can go too’, I said with eighty-eight year old pride, ‘I can climb those two flights of stairs. No problem!’

And so I could, holding on firmly to the hand-rail and pulling myself up. Andy and Marilyn followed behind, ready to try to break my fall if I had been over-optimistic. I reached the top safely. Here there was no hand-rail. I took two steps forward, lost my balance, and fell heavily on my front. Pride had indeed come before a fall!

No, I didn’t suffer any permanent injury. I broke the frame of my glasses and scratched the left lens (over my one ‘good’ eye!). The frame dug into my face and caused cuts that, at the time, bled profusely. I think though that my glasses probably saved my eye from more serious injury. Andy and Marilyn found some tissues to staunch my bleed and Andy dialled 999 for a paramedic to check me over. I made my way slowly and carefully to the ground floor (on the way up I had quoted Sir Thomas More’s piece of black humour as he mounted the scaffold to have his head cut off: ‘Would you be kind enough to help me up please. I’ll make my own way down!)

On the ground floor there was a comfortable settee on which I sat and waited for the Paramedic. He arrived in a very few minutes, applied plaster dressings to my ‘wounds’, told me that I had a lovely black eye developing and urged me to phone my doctor if during the next 24 hours I experienced sickness, faintness, serious headaches or dizziness. I had none of those symptoms and have been left with nothing worse than a still-lingering black eye and the need (that will soon be met) for a new pair of glasses.

I’m not surprised though that ‘Pride’ is listed as one of the seven deadly sins though, in my case, I am glad to be able to say that it proved to be a good deal less than ‘deadly!’

Tony Blair for EU President ………I think not!

Speaking as a Europhile (by fairly recent convincement!) and firm believer in closer European integration, I think that Tony Blair is the very last person who should be considered for the Presidency of the European Union. For one thing he would represent a country that is only a half-hearted member.

Even if our European partners were prepared to accept a British President, Tony Blair would be among the last names that would come to my mind. I think that, with his ever-ready smile and persuasive tongue, he would probably use his presidency to try to create a New-EU on the lines of New Labour, an organisation for which I feel minimal enthusiasm..

I have little doubt that his appointment would be welcomed by the CIA and by the Far Right in the USA who, judging him by past perfomance, would see him as ‘Our man in Brussels’. I can only hope that if by some mischance Tony Blair were elected President, he would prove them to be wrong.