Week 19 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

The Global Market

 I am mildly claustrophobic. I am never very happy in an enclosed space and the thought of being buried alive in the ruins of a collapsed building is the stuff of my very worst nightmares!  That’s just one of the reasons why news of the collapse of an eight storey building in Bangladesh in which some two thousand people, mostly women, were employed in the manufacture of cheap clothing for the European and American Markets, filled me with horror.  More than 600 of those employed in the building have died, many after having been trapped for several days.  Over 1,000 have been injured, some seriously.  All are human sacrifices to Mammon – the god of greed and selfishness or, if you prefer, of the entrepreneur and the ‘free market’.

            It seems that the building should have been limited to five storeys and that three were added illegally (no doubt to ‘maximise profits’).   Furthermore when warning cracks appeared in the walls of the building the workers were told to ignore them and carry on with their work, instead of being urged to get out while there was time to do so.

          The manufacture of cheap ready-made garments for export is a principal industry of Bangladesh, employing some 3 million people on an average monthly salary of £40. (Try living on that for a day or two!)  Industrial accidents are a frequent and regular occurrence and not a single manufacturer has been prosecuted in connection with them. Similar incidents would occur in this country had it not been for the activities of the Trade Unions and the Parliamentary Reformers of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries whose Public Health Acts and Factories Acts (fiercely contested by the political friends of the Factory Owners) created the relatively tolerable and safe working environments that most of us enjoy in this country today*. We joke about ‘health and safety’ but the Bangladeshi experience could be repeated here if there were no health and safety regulations and no ‘snooping bureaucrats’ enforcing them.

            But, of course, the safe environment and tolerable working conditions that are enjoyed in the UK and in most of Europe render us ‘uncompetitive in the Global Market’ that politicians of all parties seem to find so attractive. So retailers get the supplies of the cheap clothing that their customers demand from such places as Bangladesh where few safety regulations exist. Those that do are ignored by officials so poorly paid that they are easy targets for those who wish to corrupt them. I suspect that at least some of the powers that our Prime Minister and UKIP are  determined to ‘repatriate’ from ‘Brussels’ are the regulations that protect the health, safety and well-being of workers throughout Europe.

            We can only become truly competitive in a market that includes countries like Bangladesh by replicating their slums, their public services, their working conditions, their health services, their education, their low wages.  Is that really what we want? A much better alternative would be for the people of Bangladesh to raise the level of their environment and public services to that of Europe. While I am sure we should help and support them in such efforts it is something that we can’t do for them.  

*The Song of a Shirt

An example of the way in which workers in clothing manufacture in the UK did suffer working conditions comparable with those in Bangladesh today is found in Thomas Hood’s poem, The Song of the Shirt’ published in 1843. Below is the first verse and one of the subsequent verses:

WITH fingers weary and worn,

With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,

Plying her needle and thread--

Stitch! stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

She sang the "Song of the Shirt”

Work—work—work!

My labour never flags:

And what are its wages? A bed of straw,

A crust of bread--and rags.

That shatter'd roof--and this naked floor--

A table--a broken chair--

And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank

For sometimes falling there

 Its origins, according to Wikipedia, are as below:

'It was written in honour of a Mrs. Biddell, a Lambeth widow and seamstress living in wretched conditions. In what was, at that time, common practice, Mrs. Biddell sewed trousers and shirts in her home using materials given to her by her employer for which she was forced to give a £2 deposit. In a desperate attempt to feed her starving infants, Mrs. Biddell pawned the clothing she had made, thus accruing a debt she could not pay. Mrs. Biddell, whose first name has not been recorded, was sent to a workhouse, and her ultimate fate is unknown; however, her story became a catalyst for those who actively opposed the wretched conditions of England’s working poor, who often spent seven days a week labouring under inhuman conditions, barely managing to survive and with no prospect for relief.

The poem was published anonymously in the Christmas edition of Punch in 1843 and quickly became a phenomenon, centering people’s attention not only on Mrs. Biddell's case, but on the conditions of workers in general. Though Hood was not politically radical, his work, like that of Charles Dickens, contributed to the general awareness of the condition of the working class which fed the popularity of trade unionism and the push for stricter labour laws'.

Universal Benefits

            It seems that the government’s Work and Pensions Secretary Mr Ian Duncan-Smith has noticed that there is something a little incongruous about elderly millionaires being able to take advantage of the concessions intended to make the lives of us less affluent oldies a little more comfortable.  It is surely surprising that a septuagenarian with an ocean-going yacht, a second home in the Caribbean, and a chauffeur-driven Rolls, can claim the winter fuel allowance, free tv licence, free NHS prescriptions and free bus pass, just like you (if you’re a pensioner)  and me.

            Mr Duncan-Smith appeared to suggest that it might be a good idea if such people handed benefits that they didn’t need back to the government, but he now stresses that he didn’t mean that at all.   Like all members of this government of the wealthy for the wealthy he seems desperately eager not to cause the very least offence to anyone even richer than himself, and he has made it clear that millionaires are at liberty to keep their benefit, hand it back, or give it to charity, just as they please.   He would express no preference on the matter at all.

            I am a long, long way from being a millionaire but, unlike many pensioners, I am not entirely dependent upon the state pension and any benefits that I can squeeze out of the government.  I have a modest public service pension for which I paid six percent of my salary throughout the many years that I was working.

            I cannot take advantage of a bus pass or concessions on rail travel, because physically I am no longer able to walk to the railway station or even to the nearest bus stop.   The winter fuel allowance though has meant that I had no qualms about keeping my central heating on continuously during the icy weather of February and March this year! I am glad too that my NHS prescriptions are free as it seems to take an increasing amount of medication to keep me going. 

I also very much appreciate my free tv licence, and the lower rate of ‘Attendance Allowance’ that I receive because of my steadily diminishing mobility. This frees me from being housebound and has made it possible for me to buy and maintain the electric mobility scooter that I use to go to Church and the Quaker Meeting, as well as for shopping and visiting friends.  The blue disabled parking badge that I use when, very occasionally, I am driven in a friend or relative’s car has been free too. It is due for renewal in a month or two and I understand that it will now cost me £10.   As far as I am concerned that won’t break the bank.  For some disabled people though it could prove to be the final straw that breaks the camel's back..

            I am certainly not proposing to give any of my benefits back to the government – they’d probably fritter them away on nuclear deterrents that don't deter anybody, expensive funerals for former politicians, or arming ‘freedom fighters opposed to tyranny’ who, before you can say jihad, are liable to become ‘dastardly terrorists trying to murder us!’

           
           Nor would I welcome the idea of any of those benefits being means-tested. It would be expensive and time-wasting to administer.  Many needy but proud pensioners would feel that submitting details of their income and expenditure to a faceless official was intrusive, demeaning, and a form of ‘begging’ in which they were not prepared to engage.  Others would seek means of ‘fiddling the system!'

           

There is just one way, that would I believe be acceptable to most pensioners, in which the government could make the ‘old age benefit system' fairer than it is at present  That is, to make all those currently tax-free benefits subject to income tax. All old people would continue to get their age-related benefits in full as at present.  Pensioners who have no source of income other than the state pension would be completely unaffected by the change. Those, like me, who have another modest source of income and are currently paying income tax would have the appropriate proportion added to their income tax demand, and really wealthy pensioners, with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year, would have an increase in their income tax equivalent to 45 percent of the value of the benefits to which they were entitled.  It would, of course, have been 50 percent had it not been for the Chancellor’s recent generous hand-out to the very wealthy!

            This system would work very well so far as winter fuel allowance, free tv licence and attendance allowance are concerned but would present difficulties with bus passes and prescriptions as the financial benefit from these varies from person to person and from time to time.   It should though be possible to work out an average benefit, a notional sum that could be added to the taxable income of every income-tax paying pensioner.  Thus, I would be helping to pay for bus passes that I can’t use but others can, while those who don’t need as much medication as I do, would be helping to pay for mine.

            Many of us would pay rather more income tax than we do at the moment but we would all receive our full benefits and, unlike any other kind of taxation, it is the nature of income tax that no-one is ever asked for more than they can afford to pay. The system would, of course, be much simpler and fairer if the whole income tax system were to be overhauled and restructured so that all adults paid an equal proportion of their gross income as their annual ‘membership fee’ for British citizenship.  The annual income tax assessment would then be a ‘means test’ to which everyone would have to submit – but it would be the only means test ever needed.

             But there – regular readers of this blog will know that that is a hobby horse of mine.

I told you so……..

          …….but very much wish I had been wrong.   Below is an extract from a blog that I published in March, forecasting UKIP’s likely performance in last week’s county council elections.

 Nigel Farage seems also to have acquired the knack of attracting the serial non-voter, the kind of man or woman who dislikes politics and will never trust politicians.  He gives the impression that he feels just the same as they do; that he is an anti-politics politician. Such people comprise a considerable slice of the electorate.   If he can persuade them to vote, his Party will do very well in the forthcoming County Council elections and, even more importantly, in the European Parliament Elections next year.

  My forecast proved all too accurate.  Although UKIP does not have any county councils under its control it has massively increased its representation on these councils throughout the country – mainly at the expense of the Conservatives but both Labour and the Liberals have also suffered.   In my own North Clacton electoral division Conservative Andy Wood was elected with a total vote of 929 thanks to our ‘first past the post’ method of election. He was the choice of less than one third of those who voted.  Second came Samatha Atkinson, the Labour candidate, for whom I voted, with 790 votes, followed by UKIP Anne Poonian with just one vote less. Mark Stephenson of ‘Tendring First’ had 396 votes, Lib Dem. Harry Shearing 191 and James Horsler Green Party 75.  Anne Poonian's relative success is all the more remarkable in that she doesn't live in Clacton and that she was the only candidate from whom I - and presumably others - received no election literature.

            I view the future with foreboding – not least because Nigel Farage’s Party’s success will mean a swerve to the political right in Conservative policies in an attempt, that will probably prove to be fruitless,  to avoid being outflanked  by the UKIP.

Week 12 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

Lies, Damned Lies…….and Statistics!

          I don’t think that I have been alone in finding some of the regularly appearing national statistics very puzzling.   The United Kingdom’s economic situation clearly isn’t improving.   It seems likely that instead of climbing out of the ‘double-dip’ recession into which we fell a few months ago, we are heading for an unprecedented ‘triple-dip’.  The value of the pound sterling is falling against that of the American dollar and the once-derided euro, but this doesn’t so far appear to have helped our exporters.

Yet, at the same time we learn that the number of people in work is rising and the number of unemployed steadily falling.  It is true that the unemployment figure for our own Tendring District continues to rise but perhaps there are local reasons that account for this.  Nationally the employment situation has unquestionably been improving.

A partial explanation is to be found in figures recently released by Manpower UK Ltd a commercial employment agency with offices nation-wide.  As a result of the incompetent (or could it be plain dishonest?) activities of the Banks that the government is so eager not to offend, a large number of short-term temporary jobs have recently become available in the ‘financial sector’.

Remember the banks wrongful selling of ‘protection insurance’ to tens of thousands of their customers who neither needed nor wanted it?   That little mishap cost the banks £10 billion in compensation and they have had to take on 20,000 temporary staff to cope with the claims.  Then there was the Libor (fiddling the bank rate) scandal.  That cost Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland £300 million and also gave rise to temporary job vacancies on a scale sufficient to skew the statistics.  It appears that a substantial part of the fall in unemployment isn’t the result of a thrusting and entrepreneurial financial sector finding ‘fresh worlds to conquer’, but of its creating mammoth messes that required temporary extra staff to clear up.  

            Manpower UK Ltd also revealed that many public authorities had been over-enthusiastic in discarding staff to meet central government’s demands for ever-greater austerity cuts.  These authorities (local government, the NHS and so on) have statutory duties to perform which they cannot do without sufficient trained and experienced staff.  They are now having to find and recruit fresh staff to carry out those essential duties.

            This too, may present unexpected difficulties.  In order to reduce staff levels as painlessly as possible, many authorities invited voluntary redundancies.  It was an opportunity that some senior professional officers seized with both hands.   They knew that, in the private sector, their skills and experience could command higher salaries than most public servants can ever hope to enjoy.  What’s more, private sector employment would free them from the constant jibes of an irresponsible press and ignorant politicians.  Finding suitable replacements for them is not an easy task.  In the fantasy world in which top politicians dwell, a man (or woman) may be in charge of the nation’s health one week and then, on a Prime Minister’s whim, in charge of foreign affairs or immigration control the next.  In the real world of the hospital, the town hall, the school or the police station it isn’t quite so easy to fill posts demanding professional skill and experience.

UKIP on the march?

          Could the Eastleigh bye-election mark a significant turning point in British electoral history?  The big surprise was not the fact that the Lib.Dem. candidate won despite scandal about two of its formerly leading politicians that had made the tabloid headlines during the week.   Eastleigh had, after all, been regarded until quite recently as a very safe Lib.Dem. seat.   What was surprising was that UKIP came a good second, beating the Conservative candidate (whom many had been expecting to win) into third and the Labour candidate into fourth place.

            Not long ago UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) had been regarded as a fringe Party whose membership, according to David Cameron, were mostly nutters and closet racists.  Those of us with long memories recalled that in Germany, at a time of general disillusion with mainstream politics, Adolf Hitler had transformed a similar small fringe Party into a powerful political force that, for   a blood-soaked decade and a half, threatened to engulf not only Germany but the whole of Europe.   Britain in 2013 is going through a similar period of disillusion with mainstream politics. Is it just possible that UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage, could perform a similar, though of course very British, miracle?

            Nigel Farage, aged 48 and therefore young for a professional politician, seems to be the epitome of the popular chap who enjoys a pint or two and a fag, and is the life and soul of the pub lounge on a Saturday night; the sort of bloke who has no time at all for politically correct language (and demonstrates this freely!) or for any sort of regulation that prevents chaps like him (red-blooded British and proud of it) from enjoying themselves in any way they like. Nor does he have any time for the machinations of traditional politician of any persuasion.

            But Mr Farage is a lot more than that.  The typical pub lounge hero would be a bit contemptuous of women, patronisingly regarding them as being provided for his service and entertainment.  That’s not Nigel Farage.  He doesn’t make the mistake of underestimating the role of women in politics.  His candidate for the Eastleigh bye-election was Diane James, a very impressive contestant who came a creditable second in what had been a very safe Lib.Dem. constituency.  UKIP has a number of capable women members who, I have little doubt, will play an important part in the Party’s future.

 UKIP attracts supporters from across the political spectrum but is possibly most accurately regarded an alternative Conservative Party, well ‘to the right’ of the Party led by David Cameron.   UKIP is fervently nationalist. Its members believe that severing all links with the European Union will instantly solve most of Britain’s problems.  They urge a complete halt to immigration, in the first instance for five years. In other fields they pursue the objectives of the most right-wing members of the existing Conservative Party.  They want, so they say, a government of the British, by the British and for the British!

            Nigel Farage seems also to have acquired the knack of attracting the serial non-voter, the kind of man or woman who dislikes politics and will never trust politicians.  He gives the impression that he feels just the same as they do; that he is an anti-politics politician. Such people comprise a considerable slice of the electorate.   If he can persuade them to vote, his Party will do very well in the forthcoming County Council elections and, even more importantly, the European Parliament Elections next year.

            Another straw in the wind; it is reported that Mr Farage has recently dined with Rupert Murdoch.  Mr Murdoch can hardly be described as a ‘king-maker’ but, as his favourite newspaper boasted with an ‘It was us what done it’ headline after a Thatcher electoral victory, he has certainly been a ‘Prime Minister maker’ in the past – and may be again.   David Cameron’s extraordinary determination not to give any statutory authority to future press regulation (despite his earlier promise to introduce the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry in full ‘unless they were clearly bonkers’) suggests that, even after all the revelations relating to his seedy media empire, Rupert Murdoch is not without influence.  

            UKIP’s aim is claimed to be Independence for the UK.  It is stridently anti-European but, surprisingly perhaps, its publicity says not a word about the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA.  That unequal alliance has, with its US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, cost us billions of pounds and hundreds of British lives.  In the 1960s we had in Harold Wilson, a Prime Minister who kept us out of the United States’ Vietnam war.  There are, thank Heaven, no names of British service men or women on the war memorials to victims of that disastrous venture

            I do intend to vote in the Count Council and, if I’m still around, in the European Parliamentary elections.  I believe very strongly that the best future for the United Kingdom is as an important part of a Europe more closely united both politically and economically.  Within and as part of such a Union the UK could co-operate or, where necessary, compete on equal terms with the members of any economic or political bloc in the world.

            I won’t know for whom I shall vote until polling day is a great deal closer – but it’ll be for the candidate most likely to defeat the UKIP candidate and any other candidate who shares UKIP's views!

Three Score years and Ten – and Another Score…..or More!

          The Old Testament psalmist declared that the span of human life was seventy years; ‘three score years and ten’.  He went on to concede that some people made it to eighty (four score years) but suggested that this wasn’t really a good idea. These days though more and more of us are passing even that second milestone – and we’re creating problems for the younger generation.  We can’t work (I don’t think that writing his blog counts as work as I’m not paid for it) but we still eat and drink.  We still need warmth and shelter and some of us – because of the infirmities that come with old age – may need other, often expensive, care.

            We all get free prescriptions for those infirmities, together with free bus travel, a free tv licence and a winter fuel allowance that, for the over eighties, amounts to £300 a year.  Some of us, because of very limited mobility or some other affliction, receive an ‘Attendance Allowance’ amounting to about £40 a week.  Those who are bedridden or unable to walk at all receive a considerably larger Attendance Allowance.   These freebies, and the winter fuel allowance and attendance allowance all have to be paid for out of taxation and are available to all, the millionaire and the destitute.  Age and (for the Attendance Allowance) disability, are the only criteria.

            At 91 and with steadily decreasing mobility, I am eligible for all of those benefits except the higher rate of Attendance Allowance. I hope though that I’m not so self-centred as to be unable to see the injustice of it.  I am certainly not in the same financial need as much younger folk who are homeless, unemployed or trying to support a family in a low-paid job.   Means testing, suggested recently in the House of Lords, would be a clumsy and expensive means of solving the problem. It would also probably mean that some proud old people would rather suffer hardship than apply for what would appear to them to be ‘charity’, especially as it would mean revealing to some uncaring official the details of their finances.

            What would be reasonable and I think acceptable to most pensioners, would be to make all those benefits subject to income tax like any other income.  This would mean that really poor old people would receive the whole of their benefit while those, like myself, who are fortunate enough to be eligible for income tax, would pay back  some but not all of it.  Such a change would leave no-one hungry or homeless because the very nature of income tax is that it is levied only on those who can afford to pay it.   If, in fact, we had a properly graded income tax system the only ‘means test’ that anyone of us would ever need to face would be our income tax assessment!

         

  

                       

           

             

 

Week 3 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line


War Horse

            One of the saddest things about being very old and living alone is the loss of shared pleasures that were once enjoyed; the many tv programmes that my wife Heather and I used to watch together for instance; the performance of Nutcracker at the O2 arena that she would have so much enjoyed, and my 90^th birthday celebration in Zittau. I can hardly believe that she never met the German friends who have been so much a part of my life during the past few years.  Less often something happens that I wish my mum and dad could be with me to share.   My dad, who died in November 1939, never saw a television.  He would have loved those old Westerns that keep cropping up in daytime tv.  I realize too, how much he would have enjoyed War Horse a film that I haven’t yet seen, about a horse and a young lad in World War I.  He had been there, working with horses, throughout that war!

Trooper Hall F.C. aged 18  1900

            

            My dad was born in 1882 in a little Hampshire village near Highclere Castle (better known to thousands today as Downton Abbey!)   Orphaned at an early age he appeared to be destined to be a farm labourer but – he was ‘good with horses!’  He escaped the drudgery and poverty of a life on the soil in Lark Rise to Candleford  England, by enlisting at the age of 18 into the 17^th Lancers, a very fashionable cavalry regiment with the motto Death or Glory. Less than half a century earlier it had taken part in the heroic (but idiotic!) ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ at Balaclava in the Crimea.  It is only recently that I have realized why he chose that particular regiment. It had been a Lord Carnarvon of Highclere Castle who had led that famous charge! In the 17^th Lancers he served in South Africa in the aftermath of the South African War.  I have to this day picture postcards that he sent to my Mum (they were then ‘courting’) from South Africa during that time.

Regimental Sergeant-Major Hall and family 1921

Once again the fact that he was ‘good with horses’ affected his career. He was transferred to the Royal Army Veterinary Corps where he rose steadily through the ranks.   By the time World War I broke out he had become a Sergeant and was sent almost immediately with the British Expeditionary Force to France.  In 1916 he was granted leave from ‘the Front’ to marry his fiancée Emily Clark (my Mum).                                          

          

         It took the Allied High Command a year or two to realize that World War I on the Western Front, wasn’t going to be a conflict of heroic cavalry charges but of a long and bloody struggle, with foot soldiers and artillery playing the major roles. My dad was posted to Egypt, on to Palestine and finally to Salonica in northern Greece, where British troops had originally been sent in 1915 to support the Serbs. I learn from Google that there was ferocious fighting there in the final months of the war, against Austrians and Bulgarians, with carnage comparable with that on the Western Front.  Somewhere along the line he was promoted to Warrant Officer Class 1 (Regimental Sergeant Major).  That was the rank that he held when the war ended and the rank he held when I was born in May 1921.  

                                                                             1               

Staff-Sergeant Hall, Staff Instructor in the Territorial Army

Circa 1928

My dad completed his twenty-one years service and was discharged from the army shortly after my birth.  He made a brief return to military life in 1926 when he was appointed Permanent Staff Instructor to a veterinary unit of the Territorial Army in Ipswich – which was to become my ‘home town’. He was happy and fulfilled in this job and I was proud when as an eight or nine year old, playing with my mates near Ipswich’s  Broomhill Park, I would sometimes see him in uniform, on horseback and leading a group  of ‘weekend troopers’, as they exercised their horses and learned the correct, military way to ride. It didn’t last.  In 1931 the TA was downsized.  My dad lost his job.  He spent the final years of his life (he died of a heart attack in 1939 at the age of 57) as a clerk, dispenser, veterinary nurse and general dogsbody to a local vet who had been his commanding officer in the TA.  His meagre pay for this job, plus the small pension he had earned by his 21 years of army service, kept us just above the poverty line.

            He had six campaign medals and was particularly proud of two of them.  One was the ‘Mons Medal’ (on the left) that marked him as a member of the original Expeditionary Force sent to France in 1914 and derided by the Kaiser as ‘General French’s contemptible little army’ (its members made ‘The Old Contemptibles’ a title of pride!).  The other medal (on the right) of which he was proud was a French Medaille d’Honneur with crossed swords.  It had been accompanied by a certificate signed by the French President.  I was told, after my father’s death, that he had been presented with it by a French General ‘on the field of battle’.  One of my deepest regrets is that I never, while I had the chance, asked my father how he had earned this award.

I couldn’t have had a more loving and supportive dad. I was – and still am – very proud of him though my own life has followed a very different path from his.

MEANS TESTING

            How shaming that it should not be our elected representatives in the House of Commons, but members of the unelected and anachronistic House of Lords, who have delayed the passing of government legislation that would have cut the  benefits of thousands of disabled people!  Once again the government has chosen to select the poor and the vulnerable for sacrifice while leaving the conspicuously wealthy to enjoy their riches undisturbed.

            Means testing individual benefits is a bureaucratic, time and money-wasting exercise.  It often means that some people who need the benefit miss it because they have failed to apply or have filled in a form wrongly. Meanwhile while those determined to cheat the system can usually find a way of doing so.  It would be far better to pay out the benefit to all those eligible for it – and then claim part of it back from those who don’t need it all, through one national ‘means test’ to which every one of us is – or should be – subjected; the Income Tax system.

            This system works quite unfairly at the present time, claiming a far larger proportion of the income of the poorly paid than of the wealthy.  In fact, the larger your income the smaller proportion you are asked to pay.  Many more tax bands are needed, going well above the present upper limit of 50 percent for the highest earners. In the immediate post-war years there was, I believe, an upper limit of 90 percent – and civilisation as we know it didn’t come to an end!  It would, of course, be essential for the government to reframe existing legislation and employ its own legal and financial experts to eliminate the tax evasion and tax avoidance that currently takes from the revenue far more than ‘benefit cheats’ could ever hope to achieve.

            Think of the advantages. Currently graduate students are saddled with overwhelming debt – ‘because of the advantage that their degree gives them in the world of business’.  Believe me, the advantage of having even a first-class honours degree in astrophysics  is as nothing compared with that of having no degree at all, but a father who is head of a major business corporation!  It may be argued that their circumstances are  quite different. The advantage that the Astrophysicist obtains comes from us - as taxpayers. That of the multi-millionaire's son doesn't.  Rubbish!  The fortunes made in the private sector come from us too - not as tax-payers but as consumers..  We add to those fortunes every time we buy a packet of washing powder, a new car, a new laptop or a new push-bike.  We add to it every time we turn on a tap, switch on the gas or electricity, or begin to pay back a loan from a bank or building society.  Private fortunes grow every time the government, in our name, buys a bombing plane, a tank or a nuclear missile – or builds a new school or hospital.  A properly graded income tax would level off every kind of unfair advantage.   It would also narrow the gap between the poorest and the wealthiest in our society

            I think we should abolish every means test, and every ‘special incentive’ to help the disadvantaged, and make sure that no-one is disadvantaged, by applying that single, simple means test of a fair Income Tax Assessment, to us all.  Then, whatever crisis might arise, we really would be ‘all in it together’.

Safety in the Bathroom!

            A fortnight ago I recounted in this blog a mishap that I had while staying in an hotel over Christmas.   I slipped and fell in the bath and had to summon help by means of the alarm system in my en suite bathroom.

            The layout and facilities in that bathroom were remarkably similar to those in my own home.   I too, have an over-bath shower operated from a hot-and-cold water mixing valve within the bath.  Slipping and falling at home could potentially be much more dangerous than in a hotel.  There could be no alarm system for me to summon help and it might be many hours, perhaps days, before anyone was aware of my plight!

            In fact, although I would claim no great credit for this, I have taken steps to make it far less likely that a similar accident will occur, and have also made it possible for me to summon help if it did.   Here is a photo of a corner of my bathroom.  A kind and very competent neighbour has made me a small portable wooden step, about 4in high, that can be pulled out and positioned immediately beside the bath as shown in the picture.  There is a vertical hand-hold on the wall immediately above the bath and another hand-hold, that I bought at Argos and fitted myself, connected to the bath rim.  I find that by standing on the wooden step and using the rim hand-hold and the vertical one in turn, I can step safely into and out of the bath.   I also have a synthetic rubber mat on the base of the bath to prevent my slipping and falling.  While under the shower I am always ready to grab that vertical hand-hold..

            Summoning help if I should collapse or fall?   If you look at the extreme left of the picture you will see part of a low shelf on which I place my Tendring Careline alarm pendant and my mobile phone while taking a shower.  Help would be unlikely to arrive as promptly as it did in that hotel – but arrive it surely would!

            No-one can foresee every possible future accident and take steps to prevent it. I think though that I have made my bathroom, potentially one of the most dangerous room in the house, as safe as is humanly possible.   If you, dear blog reader, are similarly old and frail (or you have a friend or relative who is) you may wish to do the same.