Week 9 2014

Tendring Topics......on Line

Spring is on the way!

            Yes, it really is.  Last Sunday (15^th February) here in ‘sunny Clacton’ we had sunshine from dawn till sunset.  It was a weak sun with barely enough heat in it to temper the chilly breeze.  Nevertheless, shining all day on the solar panel on the roof of my bungalow, it managed to raise the temperature of the water in my storage cylinder to sixty degrees Celcius, quite high enough to provide all my hot water needs for the next twenty-four hours!*  And it was only half-way through February and officially still ‘winter’.  Mind you, I still needed to have the boiler going for space heating from mid-afternoon!

`In Southern East Anglia at least, this chilly (but not really cold), very wet and very windy winter really does seem to be coming to an end.   I have daffodils naturalised under the long grass surrounding the eating-apple tree in my back garden.  They have been evident as green shoots for some weeks but yesterday some of them were in full bloom – and here they are.  Known in some parts of the country as ‘Easter lilies’, they are true harbingers of spring.

    

        Nor is it only in the garden that new life has been burgeoning.   On 1^st February I became a great-great uncle when my great-niece Catherine gave birth to a baby boy, Jay Luke Beard.  Here he is with his great-great uncle. Between us Jay and I span four generations and almost a century.  I was born in 1921, within the first quarter of the twentieth century, and Jay first saw the light of day in the first quarter of the twenty-first century – the second decade of the new millennium!

            Jay's life will undoubtedly be very different from mine, but whether better or worse - only time will tell!

*It did the same thing on Saturday 22nd February - we really do  get
more than the average amount of sunshine in Clacton-on-Sea!

           

 

 ‘A Plague on both your Houses’

          Three paragraphs in the latest issue of Private Eye explain why I have no confidence whatsoever in either of the political parties likely to form a government after the next General Election:

            No matter how loudly Ed Miliband proclaims that “those with the broadest backs should bear the greatest burden” the party has no plans for some of those with the deepest pockets to do their bit.

            These are the non-domiciled elite who claim allegiance to somewhere abroad while remaining resident in the UK (often, as in the case of Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere*, for their whole life) and pay the not exactly burden-sharing rate of, er, 0 percent of offshore earnings if they can find an easy way of getting them back into the UK (which they easily do).

            At this stage before the 1997 election, even in the midst of a City charm offensive, New Labour promised to end the non-dom tax break.   That was before, in office, the Party back-tracked as non-doms such as Lakshmi Mittal and private equity broncho Sir Ronald Cohen bankrolled it through subsequent elections with seven-figure donations.  Such plutocrats can look forward to tax haven Britain not loading much on their shoulders, whoever wins in 2015. 

            I really don’t want the United Kingdom to have the very best government that money can buy!

           I am disillusioned with both the Conservative and the Labour Parties and I am sure that I am one of thousands who feel the same.  Nor am I alone in feeling betrayed by Nick Clegg after having voted Lib-Dem. in the last General Election.  The danger is that some – perhaps many – voters, disillusioned with the traditional parties, will vote for UKIP.   Nigel Farage, the Party Leader, wants to sweep away party politics and put Britain first – and what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that thousands of Germans thought in much the same way about Hitler in the 1930s.  The fact that, unlike  Adolf Hitler, Nigel Farage is a socially likeable chap who enjoys a drink and a smoke  possibly makes him all the more dangerous.

               Me? I shall definitely vote Green in the European Parliamentary Elections later this year.   That election is being held by proportional representation and every vote really will count.  If I’m still around for the General Election I’d like to vote Green again, but under our first-past-the-post electoral system a Green vote is likely to be a wasted vote.  Our present Conservative MP’s views are virtually indistinguishable from those of UKIP so I shall probably vote for whoever is most likely to defeat him unless, of course, his most dangerous rival is the UKIP candidate! I think it likely though that the local Ukippers will consider Mr Carswell to be ‘one of us’ and won’t oppose him.

* I had always thought (when I gave any thought at all to the matter) that Lord Rothermere was as British as the Union Jack. Intrigued by the comment in parenthesis in the second paragraph of the Private Eye article, I consulted Google and found that that his father had lived in France and had taken up French nationality. The present Lord Rothermere has inherited the nationality as well as his title and the Daily Mail.

The Expert

‘The bloated and bureaucratic’ Common Agricultural Policy, that hands out over a billion pounds every year to Europe’s farmers and land owners, is a favourite target of such Europhobic dailies as the Sun, Express and Mail. Who am I, knowing virtually nothing about farming and rural estate management to say whether or not these payments are justified?  I was though interested to learn from Private Eye that an increasingly large share of that billion-plus subsidy is paid not for agricultural production but to land-owners who improve the environment or diversify the local economy by providing and overseeing rural activities.

Private Eye records that the Langwell Estate near Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands has attracted £248,000 (nearly a quarter of a million pounds) in such subsidies.  It offers grouse shooting, deer stalking and other similar activities and rents lodges for £4,250 a week during the high season - a sum larger than the total that my family and I spent on half a dozen annual camping holidays in the Scottish Highlands, the Welsh Mountains and mainland Europe!

I was astonished to learn, again from Private Eye, that the owner of the Langwell Estate is Paul Dacre editor of the Daily Mail.  I have to concede that when leading articles in the Daily Mail rage against the huge handouts of ‘our money’ made by the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels who operate the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, the author – quite unlike me – undeniably has direct personal knowledge of his subject.

NHS National Database

          Every household in the country is supposed to have had an official leaflet delivered to them explaining that a national NHS database is being prepared, giving the medical details of each of us held on the computer files of every medical practice nationwide. It also said that we could ‘opt out’ of the scheme if we wished, and told us how to do so.  The scheme had been supposed to come into operation this April but as thousands of people claim that they have never received the leaflet and knew nothing about the database, the launch has been put back to the autumn.

            I do remember receiving the leaflet.  I glanced at it briefly and it occurred to me that there might be some people with medical conditions that they didn’t want to be made available for instance, to friends or relatives, to employers, or to an insurance company. That didn’t apply to me. At 92 no-one is going to offer me life insurance and my afflictions are boringly common – high blood pressure, osteo-arthritis, failing strength, vision and hearing, and other conditions of old age.  I really don't care who knows about them and I didn’t for one moment seriously consider ‘opting out’.

            I think it likely that a great many people who honestly don’t remember receiving the leaflet, did in fact do so, but just thought it was a piece of the junk mail that we all receive every day (special offers at local supermarkets, begging letters from worthy charities, catalogues from mail order firms and leaflets from local entrepreneurs eager to clean windows, tidy up the garden or clean out the roof gutters) I’m sure I’m not alone in consigning most of them  the recycling bin with no more than a cursory glance. It was pure chance that made me decide to read right through the NHS leaflet when it arrived.

Week 46 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

Hitting the target – but how and at what cost?

          We can read about NHS scandals in London, Liverpool or Glasgow without feeling anything more than disapproval and perhaps a little relief and satisfaction with the thought that, ‘thank goodness, that sort of thing doesn’t happen down here!’  That, of course, makes it all the worse when that sort of thing definitely does happen here and makes the headlines in the press and in the radio and tv national news bulletins.

            Colchester Hospital, our local major hospital, where most of us find ourselves at some time or another, if not as ‘in-patients’ at least seeking specialist advice or diagnosis, has featured in the national newspapers on several occasions recently.  At first it was just that an above average number of deaths had occurred there.  Not, in itself, a cause for great concern – it is the nature of an ‘average’ that there will be as many above it as below it.  Just last week though the allegations were much more serious. They were about the quality of cancer care. Members of the staff had complained that they were being pressured or bullied by ‘management’ to record false figures for the records relating to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.  The police had been informed!

            That was much more concerning.  During the past six years I had had three operations on my ears for cancer of the skin and cartilage. They were successful though I am still required to attend the hospital at six monthly intervals to make sure that my ears were still OK and that the cancer hasn’t spread to the glands of my neck. Much more serious, a very good friend of mine has had major surgery for cancer at Colchester Hospital followed by a month of out-patient radio-therapy at Colchester and Southend Hospitals, all  during the past six months,

I am not in the least worried about my own situation.  Although my ears were cancerous and I was told that the condition in one of them was ‘very aggressive’ prior to the operation, I have so far been treated as a ‘plastic surgery’ rather than a cancer patient.  At ninety-two my life is, in the nature of things, approaching its end. I think it very unlikely that the problem with my ears will get even a mention on my death certificate! The situation is very different for my friend who is many years younger than me, and for other folk who have been treated for cancer at Colchester Hospital during the past year. For all their sakes I can only hope that there will be a happy and expeditious conclusion to this present crisis and that very few, or not any, patients’ conditions have deteriorated as a result of it.

            The hospital is now ‘in special measures’, the cause of the present crisis is being investigated and steps will no doubt be taken to prevent a recurrence. My own knowledge of the situation is limited to what has been published in the local and national newspapers and announced on radio and tv.   I shall be very surprised though if at the root of the crisis has not been a determination on the part of senior members of the hospital’s professional and administrative staff to hit unrealistic ‘targets’, set at  a high level by people obsessed by statistics and quite ignorant of circumstances ‘on the front line’.

            It must surely be obvious that if an emergency department, and all hospital departments sometimes have to deal with unexpected emergencies, is staffed and equipped only to deal cost-effectively with ‘normal circumstances,’ it will not be capable of dealing with abnormal circumstances when they arise.  There must be sufficient slack to accommodate sickness, holiday absences, staff training, medical and surgical emergencies and so on.  It is ridiculous to expect a consultant to deal with a given number of patients in an hour, or a day. Nor can a midwife or obstetrics nurse deliver a given number of babies in a given time.  The minds of ‘human resources’ managers and time-and-motion experts may work like that, but nature doesn’t!

            Surprisingly Iain Duncan-Smith, the Government’s Work and Pensions Minister (whose knowledge of the conditions in Colchester’s Hospital is unlikely to have been much greater than mine) is reported as having said much the same thing while visiting Colchester on a totally different matter in the height of the crisis.  He too felt that determination to reach ‘targets’ was at the root of Colchester Hospital’s troubles.  Targets, he said, are useful but we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be controlled by them.  Perhaps he was prompted by his own signal failure to hit the targets that he had set himself in carrying out his sweeping welfare and benefit changes, notably the introduction of ‘universal credit’.

            Well, Mr Iain Duncan-Smith is a senior member of a government that has sometimes seemed target obsessed.  Perhaps he’ll pass the news on to his colleagues and persuade them that patients are more important than targets and the well-being of individual men and women more important than statistics.

Clacton’s Problems ……… Contrasting Attitudes

          Clacton-on-Sea is unique in many respects, most of them positive.  We are the only seaside resort in East Anglia still holding an annual Air Show attracting thousands of visitors. We are the holiday resort with the lowest average annual rainfall in the United Kingdom.  Our miles of safe, sandy beaches, cliff-top gardens and lively pier aren’t unique but are the equal of any in England, and much better than most!  We have a lot of which to be proud  - I have lived here for 57 years, well over half my lifetime, and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world.

            There is a downside though.  While every other district in Essex has a falling crime-rate, ours is rising!   Part of the cause of that is the scarcity of jobs for young people and older alike, made worse by the fact that former prosperous hotels have, thanks to nationally changing holiday habits, been converted into cheap bed-sits. At the same time in the Brooklands area of Jaywick, flimsy properties intended only for temporary summer holiday use, have been used for all-the-year-round living accommodation.  They are cheap to buy or to rent.  Coupled with our proximity to London, these factors have attracted people unable to afford the steadily increasing cost of living in the capital, down to Clacton where they may hope to find cheap accommodation – but can’t find work.

          

           Clacton’s MP, Europhobic climate-change-denying Douglas Carswell has a totally predictable solution to the problem.  ‘We do have a specific problem in the centre of Clacton – and it needs a different style of policing.  Part of that has got to mean police do more stop and searching (but what are they supposed to be searching for?) and be more aggressive with the bedsit guys’.  A nice thought as the ‘season of good will towards all men’ approaches!  I reckon Mr Carswell would have felt really at home in medieval times when migrant ‘sturdy beggars’ were flogged and then driven out of town and told to go back  to the village or town from which they came.

          

            A quite different attitude is that of a group of  unemployed  sixteen to  twenty-five year olds  (I’ve no idea whether or not they include any ‘bedsit guys) who have been helped by the Prince’s Trust to set up an empty store in the town’s Pier Avenue to distribute warm clothing, bedding and food to people in need throughout December.

            The Clacton Gazette quotes Ryan Kavanagh, one of their members, as saying, ‘The idea is to help people less fortunate than us.  If they are struggling through the winter months they can come in and we help them as best we can.  This is especially important in Clacton, where there aren’t many places for people to go if they’re unfortunate enough to living on the streets or need help’

The new ‘Winter Warmer’ shop opens on 2^nd December and the volunteers are busily painting the shop, putting up new shelves, creating a new sign and making everything spic and span for opening day.

They would welcome donations of clothing, shoes, blankets, toys or food.  Donations should be taken to the Citizens Advice Bureau base in Carnarvon Road.  I wonder if Mr Douglas Carswell MP, will be making his way there with donations from one – or both – of his comfortable homes.

Immoral Earnings?

Two long feature articles in a recent issue of Private Eye reveal in some detail the lengths to which two extremely wealthy men, Lord Rothermere owner of the Daily Mail and  Richard Branson, head of the Virgin Empire, go to avoid paying to the UK taxes that lesser mortals (like you and I) pay without question, if without enthusiasm.

Remembering that the Daily Mail recently declared Ed Miliband’s dad, who in World War II served on a destroyer in the Royal Navy, as ‘The man who hated Britain’, Private Eye  described Lord Rothermere as ‘The man who hates (paying any tax in) Britain’.   I find it incredible that some immensely wealthy men and women (Lord Rothermere and Richard Branson are clearly not alone) do not feel it their duty and their privilege to pay a sum that they will hardly miss for the privilege of British citizenship. This has made it possible for them to amass, keep and increase their great wealth while many of their fellow countrymen, men, women and children, rely on charity to feed and clothe themselves and to keep warm in the winter.  

It seems almost equally incredible that there is a small army of solicitors and accountants who derive their own inflated incomes from devising schemes to avoid the even wealthier having to hand over any of their wealth to the government!  It’s all above board and perfectly legal but it is surely ‘living on immoral earnings’.

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