Tendring Topics.......on Line

Welcome Northumberlandia!

          Where seams of coal – or other valuable natural material – are close to the earth’s surface, opencast mining provides an inexpensive and relatively safe way of extracting it.  It does leave a ruined landscape though – an enormous hole in the ground and tons and tons of rock, clay and soil ‘spoil’.   There are various ways of dealing with this problem.   Who, for instance, would guess that the delightful lake, venue of every kind of water sport that, on a recent visit, I could see from my bedroom window in the Haus am See Hotel in Olbersdorf in eastern Germany, was once an opencast lignite (‘brown coal’) mine?

            Rather nearer home American landscape architect Charles Jencks has found an even more imaginative way of dealing with the aftermath of opencast mining in Northumberland.  From 1.5 million tons of rock and clay spoil from a local mine he has created the enormous reclining figure of a woman (Northumberlandia!) as the centrepiece of an attractive country park.   The figure is 1,300 ft. long and 112 ft. high at its highest point. The recumbent figure is encircled by carefully planned and sited footpaths. 

She is naked but not, I think, in a way that will cause offence.  She is surely much more attractive than the male figures cut into the chalk hills of the southern shires. Northumberlandia  certainly complements that other iconic local figure, the well-loved Angel of the North.  I am not at all sure, mind you, that this newly arrived curvaceous and very earthy lady is an appropriate companion for an angel.  Perhaps it is just as well that they are a few miles apart and strictly immobile!     Last week, she was officially declared ‘open to the public' by the Princess Royal.  I hope that she, and the country park of which she is the central feature, will attract many visitors.

            My only criticism is of her name.  Northumberlandia surely is a bit of a mouthful for northerners and southerners alike.  I have no doubt that local people will soon think of an appropriate and less long-winded title.  My own suggestion would be Geordina, as a tribute to the nickname by which her fellow northern English are happy to be known?

Some Modern Myths

          A disillusioned blog reader has written to me expressing his disgust at the fact that the then Housing and Local Government Minister Grant Shapps had said in the course of a newspaper interview that Social Housing should be renamed Tax Funded Housing.   He hoped presumably to arouse the resentment of other tax payers. My correspondent points out that Mr Shapps is himself a Tax Funded Minister and that he and all his parliamentary colleagues are tax funded MPs!   Perhaps we should be grateful that the former Minister for Housing and Local Government has been ‘promoted’ (is his new job really more important?) to that of joint Chairman of the Conservative Party.

            The idea that folk in social housing are uniquely supported out of taxation is just one of the modern myths that divide our society.  There is, for instance, a general belief that those in Social Housing are work-shy drop-outs living off the State.  I know from my own experience (and am assured that the situation hasn’t changed materially in that respect) that most tenants either do have a job that pays only the minimum wage or little more, or are pensioners with no capital and no occupational pension.

            There is a similar myth that housing benefit, helping tenants in the private sector, is just for the unemployed.   In fact, a great many claimants are hard working people whose salary is just too low to pay an exorbitant rent, or folk who have retired after having been a shop assistant or something similar all their lives, and who are now surviving on a state pension.

            Finally there is the particularly noxious belief encouraged by the government that all public service workers (including doctors, nurses and ancillary health workers and therapists, fire fighters, teachers, the police and so on) are ‘a drain on the economy, funded by the‘productive’ part of society the ‘private` sector. This, of course includes moneylenders, those involved with the betting ‘industry’, proprietors and employees of escort agencies and massage parlours, beauty and make-up artists.

            My correspondent speculates on how different the world would look if we were all rewarded in accordance with the contribution that we make to society.  Heading the list would be those who produce the food that we eat, the buildings that we live and work in and the clothes that we wear - agricultural workers, builders and factory workers making items that everybody needs. Somewhere in the middle would be those who provide the services that those essential workers and all the rest of us need (most of today’s public services).  Right at the very end would come the makers and vendors of luxury goods, of  designer clothing and of junk food and drinks, together with money lenders, gamblers and those who currently make a fortune by moving money from one account to another - just about a total reversal of the present position in fact!

             That certainly would be the day - and I had thought that some of my ideas were pretty utopian!

This year?..........next year?........sometime?.............    

            When the Tendring District Council introduced its controversial refuse collection/recycling scheme earlier this year there was a storm of angry protest from local householders.   One of the more justified complaints was that in at least one respect, less material was being recycled under the new scheme than had been under the old one.

Those of us who had co-operated with the council’s recycling efforts (there has always been a substantial minority who didn’t!) had put out our green boxes every week with paper and cardboard waste, metal cans of all descriptions and most plastics – including, for instance, plastic bags, yoghurt and margarine containers and other plastic food containers, as well as plastic milk bottles and other plastic bottles used for cleaning fluids and so on, together with our black plastic bag filed with unrecyclable refuse for landfil..   

With the new system was introduced we were all issued with a red box into which we put our waste paper and cardboard to be collected on alternate weeks.  The existing green box was to be used for plastic milk bottles and other plastic bottles only, and was to be put out for collection on the other alternate weeks.  The weekly collection of our non-recyclable rubbish continued under the new system, but we were asked also to put out every week a new locked-lid container with waste food.   Plastic bags and plastic containers other than bottles, which had previously been collected for recycling, now had to go into the black plastic bags for landfill.   These plastic items comprised a considerable proportion of many householders’ refuse.  Failure to collect them for recycling seemed to nullify the whole purpose of the new scheme.

Enquirers at the Council’s offices were told that the Council was aware of this problem and intended to solve it.  In the future there would be a comprehensive collection of plastics.  No date was ever given or suggested but enquirers undoubtedly hoped that this would take place within months, rather than years.

We now know that it won’t!   Tendring Council’s hopes of expanding the present system rest on a new recycling sorting centre to be opened in Basildon.   It will, says the Clacton Gazette recover recyclable materials such as metal, plastic and glass. Work on the new sorting centre hasn’t yet started, but the County Council hopes that it will start sometime in 2013 and will be completed by 2015, still three years away!   It isn’t even quite certain yet that the centre will be started or that, if it is ever in action, it will take plastics not covered by the present scheme.  Tendring’s ‘Cabinet Member for the Environment’, Councillor Nick Turner, is reported as saying, ‘We don’t know the fine details yet, but as far as we are led to believe, we will be able to collect more plastics’.  Oh yes, and the final paragraph of the Gazette’s report tells us that the sorting centre site 'is currently waiting for planning permission!’  This year?...........next year?.........sometime?........never?

‘Lies, damned lies – and statistics!’

In tv interviews I have heard economics expert after economic expert express surprise at the fact that although Britain’s economy is undoubtedly in a double dip recession with no signs of an early recovery, unemployment figures haven’t been rising as one would have expected.  They have either remained static or have fallen slightly.

A study by Sheffield Hallam University led by Professor Steve Fothergill and welcomed by Tendring Council leader Neil Stock suggests that the reason could be that the state of our economy is established by an independent body and is beyond dispute, while the unemployment statistics are based on data selected by the government.   The study finds that unemployment in seaside towns in the south of England is much worse than official figures suggest.  In our own Tendring District of north-east Essex, for example, the government figure for unemployment is 4.2 percent.  The study suggests that the true figure is 9.6 percent, more than twice as high as the official figure, with almost one in ten people out of work.

One explanation of the discrepancy is that since the 1980s successive governments have hidden the real unemployment figures by moving unemployed people onto sickness and incapacity benefit. Now this process is being reversed but there is still a long way to go.  Another factor is the number of unemployed people disqualified from claiming Job Seekers Allowance because they have savings or because they have a partner who is working.

I certainly remember in the 1980s a friend of mine, in his early sixties, who was told that he could draw his retirement pension early if he undertook not to look for work.  Sixty-five year old Peter Bloomfield of Enfield, interviewed by a Gazette reporter, confirmed that this practice of the Thatcher years continued into the Blair governments of the 1990s.  ‘When I was unemployed in the 1990s, they put me onto incapacity benefit, even though I was only unemployed.  I was told that because of my age I wouldn’t find work’.

In conclusion Professor Fothergill makes a point that I have made over and over again in this blog.  ‘Our figures cast serious doubt on the likely impact of  government initiatives such as the Work Programme and Universal Credit, which are founded on the assumption that unemployment can be brought down simply by encouraging the unemployed to look for work.  There has to be jobs for people to go to.

           

           

            

Week 38 2011 27.9,2011

Tendring Topics……on line


Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate – a Retirement Village?


I learned with distinctly mixed feelings the suggestion that Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate could be transformed into a retirement village. I have a double interest in the idea. It is an area with which, as a Public Health Inspector, I first became acquainted in the late 1950s. It was then still trying to recover from the disastrous floods of 1953 that had taken many Jaywick lives. Its facilities were even more basic then than they are today.

My other interest is that today I am not just ‘elderly’ but ‘old’, and it would be people like me (though a bit younger!) who might be expected to make their homes there. Nothing less than an ambulance or I suppose, a hearse, will ever prise me away from the bungalow in Dudley Road in which I have lived for fifty-five years. Perhaps if I wanted to move home, I might be tempted by a modern bungalow within yards of Jaywick’s golden sands in a newly built ‘retirement estate’ on a redeveloped Brooklands. That though, isn’t quite what Jaywick campaigner Mick Masterton, founder member of the Friends of Brooklands, Residents Group, has in mind. He wants to retain the existing dwellings. He points out that many of those on the Brooklands estate are much too tiny for permanent family use. This is hardly surprising as, when built, they were intended only for brief holiday use in the summer months. He feels though that they would be perfect for residential use by retired couples. I wonder?

The Daily Gazette reports him as saying, ‘There’s not enough room to swing a cat in some of these properties, let alone stick a family of three in them. But they are a perfectly good size for people who have retired’ and, ‘you can’t put a mum, dad and three kids in a rabbit hutch with no room, but they are perfect for a retired couple’.

He goes on to say that, ‘If you start putting more mature people in there, it will start to become a nice place to retire and property prices might start creeping up’. He is hoping to persuade landlords and estate agents to rent these properties to the over 55s in the future. He believes that this could transform Brooklands. ‘If you live next door to old people, then you’re happy. They aren’t likely to go round smashing people’s windows. Could Mr Masterson have been misquoted? I hope so because the former public relations officer lurking within me thinks that his words are very unlikely to encourage the newly retired to seek a home in which you can’t swing a cat, or one that resembles ‘a rabbit hutch with no room’, even if it is unlikely to have its windows smashed in by its neighbours and is within a few yards of the golden tide-washed sands of Clacton-on-Sea’s sunset suburb!

Also, of course, no one puts ‘a mum, dad and three kids’ in accommodation in which they will be desperately overcrowded. They go into it because they can find nothing better. The reason for this is that Councils were compelled by the Right to buy legislation to sell off Council Houses built by their predecessors to eradicate homelessness and overcrowding, and cannot now build more homes for letting. Housing Associations and the Private Sector are quite unable to meet the demand.

Dreaming of an Empire?

Local control is what local government is all about – and it is a principle our present central government claims to support.

It is surely obvious that the smaller the local government unit the closer it will be to the people, and the more likely it will be to reflect their wishes. A few weeks ago I suggested that one way in which this objective could be furthered within Essex would be to abolish the County Council and to make the individual district and borough councils wholly responsible for all local government services within their own district. It now seems though that the very reverse is beginning to take place!

The Daily Gazette reports that Tendring Council has agreed to ‘share offices and work more closely with the Essex County Council’. This decision was made not by the full council but by its ‘Cabinet members’ and was signed by them on 6th September, not even being discussed at a subsequent meeting of the full council. Goodness – in my time such a revolutionary proposal would have been fully discussed by a multi-party council committee, reported in the local press for public discussion, and then debated at the next meeting of the whole council.

I am not surprised that Labour councillor Ivan Henderson sees this as the first step towards, ‘Essex County Council taking over control and making decisions about our local services. Decisions would be made to suit the county council and not the residents of Tendring’. Tendring Council leader Neil Stock, on the other hand, claims that this co-operation is, ‘a brilliant thing we are doing to protect, and hopefully create, jobs in the district, and improve services’.

I doubt if Mr Henderson’s forebodings will have been allayed (mine certainly haven’t been!) by the reported statement of the leader of Essex County Council that, ‘our customers want seamless and joined up delivery of services. They do not recognise the typical situation where geographical and organisational boundaries determine how services and management should be structured. By agreeing to this new joint way of working, we’re breaking down the barriers.’ This statement is made even more potentially sinister by the fact that the county council has signed similar agreements with Brentwood and Braintree councils. It is surely clear that the County Council’s ultimate aim is to establish itself as the single unitary authority in full control of all ‘local’ government services within the county.

Lord Hanningfield, the Council’s former leader, once declared (later he said ‘only jokingly’) that Essex was large enough and wealthy enough to be a sovereign independent state. He was clearly dreaming of an independent Kingdom of Essex (no need to ask whom he had in mind as king!). His successors are even more ambitious. They’re dreaming of an Essex Empire! And perhaps they’ll succeed. I learn that other County Councils have earned the praise of the government by organising similar mergers. I am sorry to say that I begin to see a future in which County Councils are the only units of what used to be called local government.



Recyclables Collection Centres

An example of the dire effects that can result from an attempt to manage Tendring District’s affairs by remote control from Chelmsford, is to be found in the readers’ letters page of last week’s (22.9.11) Clacton Gazette.

Mr James Smith of Spring Road St Osyth wrote:

It is said that the refuse centre off Colchester Road St. Osyth is to be closed in October. So, I gave the Rush Green depot a go. When I got there at about 10.00 a.m. there was an enormous trail of cars waiting to go in. If this is an example of what people can expect there will be more fly-tipping and Tendring Council will be to blame. Closing any refuse site is not an economy. Our time is just as valuable as councillors. So, think again.


There’s just one thing wrong about Mr Smith’s letter. Extra fly tipping won’t be the fault of the Tendring District Council though they’ll probably have to clear up the mess and try to prosecute the fly tippers. One of the more idiotic features of 1974’s local government reorganisation was that refuse collection remained the responsibility of district councils but refuse disposal became that of County Councils. Recycling wasn’t a major concern way back in 1974 but it has become very important since.

Recycling is obviously part of the process of refuse disposal, so naturally refuse and recycling centres became the County Council’s concern. I can well imagine some chairborne strategist at County Hall carefully studying a map of north-east Essex and congratulating himself (or, of course, herself) on noticing something that had obviously been missed by ‘those ignorant peasants out in the sticks’. There were two refuse disposal and recycling centres within a short distance of each other – one in the former Clacton Urban District Council’s area and the other in the area of the former Tendring Rural District Council. Close one down and thousands of pounds would be saved. ‘That’s the way MBEs are earned – should be worth at least another salary grade at the next review’.

Officials in County Hall, Chelmsford are unlikely to know what hundreds of Clactonians could have told them, that removal and disposal of recyclable and unrecyclable waste from a private car or van take up both time and space. As a result there is often a long queue of cars stretching from the Rush Green Civic Amenity Centre right back towards Cloes Lane. In my motoring days I can recall being held up in such a queue. That must have been ten years ago, long before interest in recycling became general. For much of the time Rush Green recycling Centre is used up to and beyond its capacity. Closing the St. Osyth Centre would undoubtedly result in unacceptably lengthening queues of cars obstructing Rush Green Road and probably in the fly tipping that Mr James Smith predicts.


Twenty-first Century ‘bear baiting’?


Lord Macaulay, early 19th Century historian, poet and politician famously berated the Puritans for having opposed bear baiting, not because of the pain suffered by the bears, but because of the pleasure that it gave to spectators. George Bernard Shaw, 20th Century dramatist and controversialist said that the Puritans had been quite right to oppose bear baiting on those grounds. He pointed out that bears, whether captive or in the wild, suffer pain regularly from a number of natural causes, as indeed do humans. What was truly appalling was that humans should watch and derive pleasure from the deliberate infliction of that pain – or of pain inflicted deliberately on any living thing.

Although no pain was involved, I felt rather similarly about the recent controversy over the spectacle of eight year old boys clad only in shorts wrestling with each other within a large wire ‘cage’, watched with enjoyment by a cheering audience consisting largely (perhaps wholly) of young to middle-aged men.

I am quite prepared to believe that not one of those boys was in the least danger of being physically injured; that they were safer in fact, than they would have been had it been a rough-and-tumble with their mates in one of their own back gardens. Mind you, I did find incredible the words of the father of one of the wrestling boys who claimed that if his son had not been engaged in this juvenile ‘cage wrestling’ he’d have been out on the streets ‘causing trouble.’ At eight! It doesn’t say much for his mum and dad’s parenting skills!

I don’t think that those who know me best would be likely to describe me as being either particularly squeamish or prudish. I have to say though that I found the spectacle of those scantily clad kids, inside a cage and wrestling before an excited adult male audience in an atmosphere of booze and betting, utterly revolting.

Drawing a line….


There’s nothing that top politicians like more than ‘drawing a line’ under the mistakes of the past and concentrating on the future. Burglars, muggers and confidence men feel just the same, when they have been caught out. One scandal that obstinately refuses to have a line drawn under it is that of Rupert Murdoch’s evil empire News International. It began with a revelation about phone hacking but has now progressed far beyond that. We knew that Neil Wallis, former Deputy Editor of the News if the World had subsequently been employed as a consultant to the Metropolitan Police who paid him £24.000 for his services. We now learn that  during that time News International was also paying him over £25,000 for crime stories sold to them to which he had obviously had inside access. Meanwhile his former boss Andy Coulson is suing News International for failing to pay his legal fees for the litigation in which he is involved.

Why on earth should they? Andy Coulson hasn’t worked for News International for four years. Perhaps David Cameron – a more recent employer – will help him out.