6th March 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

The New ‘Levellers’

          For many years I would have described myself, if asked, as a democratic socialist.  In today’s market-based society, everything, and everybody, is deemed to have a price.  It’s a society in which it is assumed that everyone’s ambition is the acquisition of greater personal wealth; in which everyone grabs as much as he can for as little as he (or she) can get away with.

            I have learned to survive, even to prosper, in this society.  I didn’t and don’t like it.  I hoped that democratic socialism could develop, if not into an earthly paradise, at least into a fairer and happier society than the one in which we live today.   However reading of the researches of two Quakers, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in their book ‘The Spirit Level’ published in 2009, convinced me that, although public ownership could be one way of producing a fairer society, there are other ways – the co-operative movement could be one, as could employer/employee partnerships like the John Lewis business group.

            Richard and Kate discovered and demonstrated that our society’s greatest evil was the ever-widening gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest members of our society.  Furthermore they discovered that levelling off incomes didn’t just benefit the poor (though they are the immediate and obvious beneficiaries) but the whole of society – rich, poor, and the great majority of us who are neither the one nor the other.   More equal societies, Denmark, Sweden and Norway for instance, are happier, less crime-ridden, have fewer teenage pregnancies, and are more peaceful and healthier societies.

            The United Kingdom has the most unequal society in Europe and one of the most unequal in the whole of the developed world.  The gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest in the United Kingdom steadily gets wider.  The Labour Party was created to provide a political voice for working people and the poor.   It is to the party’s shame that during ten years of New Labour government, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest widened!

            In 2009, in the wake of the publication of The Spirit Level the Equality Trust was formed to draw attention to our unequal society; to promote policies that work towards greater equality and oppose those that widen the gap.  All over the country there are groups working towards those ends.  A newsletter is sent regularly to supporters and below is an extract from the latest newsletter:

February has been a successful if troubling month for exposing some of the forces behind our extreme inequality. Revelations on HSBC’s role in tax avoidance saw the media focus on the incredible schemes used by the very rich to shield their wealth. With impeccable timing it was also revealed than banks themselves have done pretty well over the last few years. The Robin Hood Tax campaign found bonuses paid out by banks and insurers since the start of the financial crisis are set to top £100bn this year.

It didn’t end there either, as a sting operation led to claims that MPs Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind were involved in a ‘cash for access’ scandal.  We calculated that Rifkind and Straw command rates of around £2,290 and £500 per hour for some of their consulting work. That’s 197 and 43 times the average wage rate respectively. Once again the question is asked as to how, and how much, our politicians are paid.

If you’d like to know more about the Equality Trust and its work, the address is 18 Victoria Park Square, London, E2 9PF.   Its email address is info@equalitytrust.org.uk and its web site is www.equalitytrust.org.uk

The major parties are setting out their policies in attempts to persuade us to vote for their candidate in the General Election which is now only weeks away.  It seems to me that the only Party attempting anything more than a slight nudging in one direction or the other of the present grossly unfair economic and political system is the Green Party. I was surprised and heartened to learn that the Greens now have more members that the much more publicised Ukippers. Green policies are not all that different from those of the Party for which I voted and which won the election in 1945 at the end of World War II.  They do promise the hope of a fairer, more equal society.  The Green Party candidate will get my vote.

That General Election in 1945, held just after I had returned to England at the end of World War II in Europe, was the first opportunity I had ever had to vote. I voted I thought, for a fairer Britain and a more peaceful world. The vote that I hope to cast in May this year will almost certainly be my last opportunity to vote in a general election. I shall cast it with exactly the same hope of a fairer Britain and a more peaceful world, not for myself this time (I certainly won’t see any sign of it in my lifetime!) but for my grandchildren.

There’s no place like home……..

……….and no vote-winner like ‘homes for all’ or, as far as the Tories are concerned ‘Home ownership for all’.  At least that’s what all the Party leaders think, because they’re competing with each other to promise 100,000 200,000 (why stop there – the sky’s the limit as far as promises are concerned) new homes if only they’re elected in May.   To hear them talk you’d think they were going to don the overalls and hard hats they wear for ‘photo opportunities at the workplace’ and go out and build those houses themselves.  A blog reader and regular correspondent, who has expert knowledge and experience in the field of housing explains the rationale of David Cameron’s promise of 200,000 cut-price homes.

He is promising to build 200,000 new homes and sell them at a discount to first time buyers under 40 (a high age limit, but that’s how long it takes to save a deposit these days!)  He claims this “scheme” will cost nothing to the public purse. Developers are apparently very enthusiastic.

The London Evening Standard explains, as no other news medium  is doing, that these homes are to be built on “brown field” and ex-commercial sites, not normally available for housing.  When Local Authorities allow these sites to be built on for a major development (as Croydon Council is  doing right now), they normally get money from the developers for building infrastructure, of £45,000 per home. They also have a requirement that 20% will be “affordable homes” and are sold to a Housing Association. Both of these rules are being scrapped for this scheme, thus “allowing developers” to sell the homes at a 20% reduced price. Presumably, for the concession, they are forced to sell at this reduced price (but in a market economy this doesn’t make much sense). If the buyers sell within 5 years they have to return the subsidy (I don’t understand that, because it isn’t really a subsidy, just a concession, which cannot be reversed). I don’t know who they would return it to? The homeless families who are being short changed by this scheme?  It sounds like a good 5 year savings plan to me, to buy a 250K flat and get a 50K discount, wait 5 years while you live in it, then sell and get the 50K back, plus the value of house price inflation which probably means it would be worth 100K.

The reality is, that this is another calculated move to help core Tory voters – middle aged, middle class people aspiring to buy their first home – while robbing would-be Labour-Voting Social Housing Tenants of potential housing.  In the end, this isn’t reducing the cost of housing, but rather it is increasing it, by increasing the supply of inflated owner-occupied housing at the direct cost of the supply of the shrinking supply affordable rented housing.  However, it makes a good headline before an election; about as meaningless as many of the other promises being made right now.

It is worth remembering that much, if not all, of our country’s current housing problems date from the Thatcher years when ‘right to buy’ legislation compelled local authorities (but not private landlords) to sell, at bargain basement prices, houses and flats that had been provided by their predecessors to eliminate homelessness and overcrowding from their districts; ‘buying votes with other people’s money!’  Prior to the ‘avaricious eighties’ local authorities had a right and a duty to provide homes in their districts for letting and to allocate them to those with greatest need.

‘The Government giveth – and the Government taketh away!’

I recently commented in this blog on the Government’s proposal to hand over all health and welfare services in the Manchester area to the local authority for that area. That’s quite a responsibility!

Today I have just heard on ‘BBC Breakfast’ that, in connection with another public service,  the Government is interfering in the very minutia of local government administration.  Motorists nationwide parking their cars in municipal car-parks are to be allowed an extra ten minutes before any action is taken about their over-running the time for which they have paid.  Furthermore local authorities mustn’t use illegal parking fines as a source of revenue.

Goodness – local government can be trusted to run the health and welfare services of a large conurbation but  can’t be trusted to administer its own car-parks!   It couldn’t, I suppose, be anything to do with the fact that a great many supporters of the present Government are owner-drivers of cars – and that a general election is only a few weeks away?

  

                       

                

             

            

20th February 2015

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘Immoral Earnings’

          Tax evasion (strictly illegal) and tax avoidance (legal but often distinctly dodgy) have been a recurring theme in this blog. I regard income tax as our annual subscription for the privilege of British citizenship. We should be proud to pay it, not reluctant. There is nowadays a thriving business in advising already-wealthy clients how to avoid paying anything like their fair share of income tax – in some instances how to avoid paying any income tax whatsoever.  This new ‘profession’ is surely parasitic and ’living on immoral earnings’, much the same as brothel keepers and the like; and deserving the same punishments as them if or when they are brought to justice.

             I was astonished when I learned that BBC investigative journalists had discovered that Britain’s largest Bank HSBC, was among  the foremost of these ‘financial pimps’ – and that one of their multi-millionaire clients had lived in luxury for years without ever paying a penny in income tax.  HMRC – the government department charged with the collection of taxes and customs duties believed that this particular client was living somewhere in Spain, but – surprise, surprise! – had been unable to contact him.

            There seems to have been a remarkably cosy relationship between HSBC, the HMRC and the government that employs the latter to collect money owed to them (our money in fact).   A former Chief Executive, later chairman of HSBC, on leaving the bank was ennobled (just like our own Lord Hanningfield!) and given a job in the government.  Nothing wrong with that perhaps – I have always thought that the Kray brothers would have made excellent Police and Crime Commissioners!    Rather more worrying is the fact that, on retirement, a former senior official of HMCR was given a senior position with HSBC.  Poacher becoming a Gamekeeper is one thing – but Gamekeeper becoming Poacher is something quite different.

           

            I wouldn’t pretend to understand exactly how multi-millionaires were advised on avoiding the taxation that the rest of us have to pay.  It seems though that at the centre of this operation was a Swiss ancillary of HSBC. We are told that that ancillary has now been thoroughly reorganised.  ‘Lessons have been learned’ from the mistakes.  They were made a few years ago and we must now draw a line under the past and move forward into the future.

            I bet that those ‘celebrity paedophiles’ who are serving prison snentences for incidents that occurred forty or fifty years ago, are wishing that they could have said the same thing – and got away with it!

The Prime Minister’s response

          David Cameron’s response to the revelations about HSBC and HMCR was as we have come to expect.  No government, he claimed, has done more than his has to stem aggressive tax avoidance and tax evasion.  That says no more than that no government has ever done very much in that field.   Understandable enough – start taking money from the super-rich and they’ll be less inclined to offer financial support to the party that they had relied upon to look after their interests.

            Probably though Mr Cameron, like me, doesn’t really understand how tax avoidance works, and how it can be prevented.   He swiftly moved on to a field in which he and his chancellor have become experts; penalising the poor and vulnerable to avoid inconveniencing the really wealthy.  They hadn’t previously noticed that some of those who receive benefit do so because they are suffering from obesity or alcohol or other addiction.  These are curable conditions.  Cut their benefit unless they are positively seeking a cure and you’ll not only improve their medical condition but you’ll encourage them to seek work and save a few quid to reduce that deficit.

            I’m reminded of a somewhat cynical story that was circulating in Germany in the early post-war years when every firm and every organisation was struggling to rid itself of the taint of Nazism.    One keen German gardener meets another:   ‘What have you been doing today Fritz?’ ‘I’ve been denazifying my carrot patch’. ‘Denazifying?’   ‘Yes, denazifying – you know; pulling out the little ones so that the big ones will thrive and get bigger’. 

Ukraine

           Three times I have started to put on paper my thoughts about the situation in Ukraine and three times I have failed.  The situation changes day by day, almost hour by hour.  Hope of a peaceful settlement almost dies – and then flickers into life again. One thing that is certain is that the outlook on both sides has hardened as a result of the conflict. Before the killing started I am quite sure that the rebels would have been satisfied with a limited autonomy within a loose Ukrainian Federation.  Now, I think, they’ll be striving for full independence.   Similarly, many on the government side would, I think, have been willing to grant that limited autonomy.  Now hard-liners will be satisfied with nothing less than the ethnic cleansing from Ukraine of all Russophiles (hundreds have already been killed and thousands driven into exile) and the obliteration of the Russian language and of Russian culture from the country.

In this conflict it is the rebels (always referred to in BBC news bulletins as  ‘Russian-backed rebels!) who are the victims.  They feared that the Kiev Government intended to destroy their language and culture.   At first they tried to prevent them by peaceful means – do you remember the tv pictures of unarmed civilians, men, women and little children trying to stop the progress into their country of Kiev government tanks and armoured cars?  Since the fighting started it is the rebels’ homes that have been flattened by shellfire.   The million people driven from their homes and seeking refuge in Russia are all from rebel held towns and villages.  I have little doubt that they comprise most of the 5,500 dead.

Angela Merkel and the French President are at least trying to keep the flame of peace alight.  Our government?   Well, we’ve supplied the Kiev Government with sixty second-hand armoured cars.  They’re unarmed at the moment but the Kiev government can soon mount some machine guns onto them and send them into the conflict.    Oh yes – and our Defence Secretary has announced that any armed Russian incursion into the Baltic States will be resisted by NATO.  Over a quarter of the population of two of those three Baltic states are ethnic Russians. The Defence Secretary (who clearly isn’t old enough to remember the true horror of a European War) would be better occupied urging the governments of those Baltic States not to treat the ethnic Russians as second-class citizens, and to give the Russian language the same status as the local tongue.  Switzerland, Belgium and Wales all have more than one ‘official language’.   So could Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.   

If the Baltic ethnic Russians have no grievances they’ll have no inclination to revolt and seek Russian help.

Some later thoughts

This morning (Friday 20^th February) I have just heard that an influential committee of the House of Lords has declared that, due to inept policies pursued by inexperienced foreign office officials, we have ‘sleep walked’ into the situation in Ukraine.  My own fear is that we may be sleep-walking into World War III.

 Nations, as well as individuals, should make a real effort to see the world through the eyes of their opponents.  Russia sees itself surrounded by a hostile NATO alliance extending from the Baltic, round the frontier of the Russian Federation to the Black Sea.

We may well think of that NATO alliance as being purely defensive – but how would we feel if the Irish Republic, the Netherlands, Belgium and France were to become part of a potentially hostile alliance?   How would the USA feel if Mexico and Canada did the same?

In the case of the USA we know what would happen.  In the 1962 the Soviet Union attempted to supply its ally Cuba with missiles to defend itself from the very real threat of invasion from the USA. President Kennedy – by no means the most bellicose of American presidents – was prepared to bring the world to nuclear war to prevent it.   Fortunately Nikita Khruschev, then President of the USSR, had more sense.  He withdrew the missiles – but there was no further attempt to invade Cuba from the USA.

Week 26 2013

Tendring Topics………on line

What's really wrong with the economy? - an expert speaks.

          A recurring theme in Tendring Topics…..on Line has been my conviction that the current financial crisis is not the result of the previous government’s over-spending on benefits to the poor and disabled, but of the greed and selfishness of the wealthy.  I believe that the way to get rid of that deficit about which we are always hearing is not to cut expenditure but to make sure that everyone in the land bears a proportionate burden of taxation.  I am appalled when I hear the leader of the Labour Party, the only possible alternative government, proclaim that his party in power would pursue a very similar policy to that of the present government – but would do so more effectively and, if market forces permitted, a shade more humanely; hardly the kind of policy that inspired the pioneers of the Labour Movement to brave dungeon dark and gallows grim, and whose lifeblood dyed blood-red ‘every fold of the peoples’ flag’!   No wonder neo-fascist movements like Ukip, BNP, and English Defence League are gaining popular support.

            I am not an economist and am unable to substantiate my conviction.  I was delighted therefore to read an article by Dr Alan Storkey, economist and sociologist, in the Church Times (not generally thought of as 'loony lefty'!) of 14^th June declaring that ‘It is the rich, not the poor, who are the problem’  and backing that claim with hard facts and figures.

            Dr Storkey writes that Public Sector net debt was 36 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in April 2008, and then doubled after the banking and other crises.  It is still climbing. The banks were and are a big part of the problem, and the Conservatives pushed for deregulated banking. The Government claims to have had a greater impact on debt than is the case.  It still climbs by about £100 billion a year.

            Yet, Labour would have cut back nearly as much as the Conservatives, and could not have kept the economy from what the Archbishop of Canterbury has rightly called a depression.

            The budget deficit requires the Chancellor, George Osborne, to save perhaps £80 billion a year.  Supposedly, it is the poor on benefits who are the problem.  But the underlying issue is that, over several decades, the rich have been milking the state of hundreds of billions of pounds.

            While the cost of benefits to the poor is less than is generally believed, the rich have received big handouts.  The first is tax, where, as the Office of National Statistics has declared, the poor are subsidising the rich.  The bottom 20 percent of the population pay proportionately 5.8 percent more tax than the top 20 percent (38.2 percent rather than 33.6).   If the rich paid the same proportion of their income in tax as the poor, it would bring in another £100 billion a year.

            That is not all.  Higher income groups have benefited from public-sector contracts, high public-sector incomes and bonuses.  For example GPs (family doctors) received a new contract in 2004, giving them an increase in pay from less than £80,000 to more than £100,000 a year for doing less work.  This cost the NHS more than £2 billion annually.

There has been no revaluation of house prices for council tax since 1993.  Over the past two decades house-price increases have mushroomed, but they are not reflected in council tax, which gives another bonus of tens of billions to the wealthy.

The big corporations avoid much VAT, evading tax to the tune of tens of billions.  The personal income of some of the top ten percent exceeds that of the whole of the bottom 50 percent, but some of this moves to tax havens, removing more billions from revenue.  Tax avoidance and evasion is estimated by the Tax Justice Network to amount overall at £70 billion a year.

In addition the banks have received profits through seigniorage, the windfall that comes through creating electronic money, amounting to between £20 and £30 billion a year, beside receiving government support while they run tax havens and give dud payment-protection insurance.

These losses of revenue are an overwhelming explanation of the Chancellor’s woes, and their solution.  Moreover, the way these funds are hoarded, moved and have created debt, explains why the economy is depressed, and will remain so.

Dr Storkey’s article in the Church Times concludes with the hope that, since the wealthy and the political establishment will not debate these issues, it is time that the Christian Church did so.       Why not?   Our God is one who ‘puts down the mighty from their seat and exalts the humble and meek………scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts ………fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich empty away’ -  and the Anglican tradition of Christ’s Universal Church now has a leader who probably has as wide a knowledge and experience of the realms of high finance and low dealing, as anyone either in our Government of millionaires or its supine and spiritless opposition.

The wrong sort of publicity! 

           I have never gone along with the idea that all publicity is good publicity.  There is a difference between ‘fame’ and ‘notoriety’ and it is the latter that has been showered onto Clacton and the Tendring District during the past year or so.

            Quite beyond the control of either the county or district council has been the amount of violent crime – including murder and attempted murder – in and around Clacton during the past year or two, one such incident less than a couple of hundred yards from my front door!  We’re hardly comparable with the Midsomer of Inspector Barnaby or the Oxford of Inspectors Morse and Lewis, but it’s quite disturbing enough in an area that we had thought of as being quiet and peaceful. 

Then there has been the revelation that the Brooklands Estate in Jaywick is Britain’s most deprived area, and that Clacton’s Pier Ward  is a ‘benefits ghetto’. In Pier Ward, the very centre of our holiday town, the UK’s fifth largest number of people on state benefit survive in former boarding houses converted into buildings with multiple ‘bed-sits’.  More recently we have learned that schools in rural areas and seaside towns (that means every one of Tendring’s schools) have an appreciably poorer academic record than those in large inland towns.

            There’s not much that we do about local violent crime. Perhaps the Commissioner we elected a few months ago will make a difference, though I’m not holding my breath!  Michael Gove, the government’s Education Secretary, really tries very hard, reaching back into the past even as far as my school-days, to find a model to solve education’s ills.  Perhaps he’ll succeed one day.

            The government is determined to ‘cut the red tape of planning legislation’ to free developers to ‘create wealth’ and help pull Britain out of recession.  In the ‘80s Mrs Thatcher’s government did much the same thing to free the bankers, wealth creators and financial risk-takers. Nobody at the time thought to mention that the risks were taken with our money!  We have to live with the result today.

            It occurs to me that the planning laws may need to be strengthened rather than weakened. Stronger and more firmly enforced planning legislation could have prevented Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate being transformed from a holiday township with basic facilities suitable only for short-term occupation during the holiday season, to an urban slum with cheap sub-standard homes occupied all the year round.  Is it not possible too that similar laws might have prevented the boarding houses of Clacton’s Pier Ward, being converted into cheap single-room bedsits in a Benefits Ghetto?

            Don’t be in too much of a hurry to cut all that red tape.  It may be all that is holding our fractured society together!

Another ‘bottom of the class!’

          It must have come as something of a shock to Tendring Councillors to know that after over twelve months operation of their reconstructed recyclable and unrecyclable refuse collection service, Tendring Council’s collection of recyclables was the lowest of any local authority within the county of Essex!

            Prior to April 2012 every household in the district had been issued with a green plastic box with lid and a supply of black plastic bags.  The black bags were for non-recyclable rubbish and the green boxes were for paper, cardboard and plastics of all kinds for recycling.  Householders who had more recyclables than would go into the green box could put them in an any-colour-but-black plastic bag or sack and put it on top of the green box.  Filled green boxes and filled black plastic sacks were put on the boundary of the property to be removed on the day of collection.   It worked pretty well though there was a minority of householders who ignored the green box and just put all their refuse in a black sack or sacks as they had done in the past.  Most of us, I think, co-operated.

            That all changed in April 2012.  All 60,000 households were issued with a red plastic box and two smaller green plastic boxes with lockable lids.  Our old green boxes were now to be used only for plastic milk bottles and plastic bottles that had held domestic cleaning fluids.  Other plastics – yoghurt cartons, food containers, plastic bags and so on – were henceforth to be put with the non-recyclable refuse, in the black plastic bag for landfill.

            The two plastic boxes with lockable lids were for food waste.  The smaller (‘the caddy’) was to be kept in the kitchen for the immediate receipt of food waste.  The larger was to be kept outside for reception of the food waste  when the caddy was filled.  The black plastic bag and filled container of food waste were to be put on the boundary of the property every week, the green box with some plastics and the red one with paper and cardboard were to be put out on alternate weeks for fortnightly collection.

              The situation was made worse by the fact that, presumably to save a few pounds, the red boxes for paper and card had no lids!  This inevitably meant extra litter blowing about the streets.  It also meant that when it rained between the box being put out and the arrival of the collectors, the saved paper and card became a soggy mess.  After receiving scores of angry letters, the Council bought 12,000 lids for those red boxes and left them to be picked up by householders at several centres throughout the Tendring District.

            The new recycling collection scheme was described by Tendring Councillor Nick Turner as ‘a Rolls Royce’ service but opposition Councillor Gary Scott wrote in the local daily Gazette ‘It is more like a Robin Reliant Service!’  For householders the system is complicated and, particularly for the old, time and energy consuming.  A kind neighbour carries my filled black sack and two filled plastic boxes (waste food and either the red or the green box) from my back door to my front boundary every week.  I find filling the sack and two plastic boxes every week and putting them by my back door completely exhausting.   Yes, I know that I am very old and am consequently feeble and lacking in energy – but then so are a great many other Tendring householders.  Don’t forget us. We pay our Council tax and we vote!

            Complicated, exhausting and incomplete (tons of salvageable plastics go into landfill) the system is much more ‘Robin Reliant’ than ‘Rolls Royce’.   A stroll down any residential road on ‘collection day’ for that area will reveal that a great many, possibly a majority, of householders simply ignore it and put out two three or four black plastic sacks filled with refuse of all kinds for landfill disposal.   I’m not at all surprised that Tendring District Council is ‘bottom of the class’ where collection of recyclables is concerned.

It is only fair to mention that the Essex County Council has done its bit to discourage recycling by closing Martin’s Farm Disposal and Recycling Centre in St Osyth, and reducing the hours of opening of their other centres.  No wonder there’s an increase in fly-tipping and that there are always queues of motorists at Clacton’s Rush Green Road Disposal and Recycling Centre.

            I expect that both county and district councillors are expecting a pat on the back for having ‘kept the Council Tax down to a minimum’.  I reckon that many voters will feel as I do that we would get better value for our money if the Council spent a little more and provided us with a better service. 

   

S more than £2 billion annually.

Week 31 2012

Tendring Topics.....on Line

The Mote in your neighbour’s eye…….

 A month or so ago, when the back-boiler in my kitchen that serves my hot water supply and central heating systems had its annual service, I had quite a shock.  I was told by the heating engineer that it had sprung a leak and needed to be replaced urgently.  My dismay was compounded by the fact that its manufacturer no longer makes back-boilers.   I would need to have a new modern boiler installed in quite a different position!

This, I thought, is going to be an expensive job – and so it proved to be.  It took two heating engineers two full days to remove the old boiler and complete the installation of the new one (and they really did give me two days service – taking only half an hour or so for lunch, and drinking while working the mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee that I made them)  In addition, another operative was called in to arrange the new boiler’s ventilation by means of a pipe and fitting taken through the roof, and there were several hours work by an electrician who provided and tested the boiler’s electronic controls.  Then of course there was the cost of the boiler itself!

Yes, it was expensive.  Fortunately though I have an emergency fund saved for just such a crisis (though I wouldn’t want too many of them!) and I wrote out my cheque in payment without resentment at the cost of the work.  I had no doubt that I had received value for money.  Furthermore, the efficiency of the new boiler would complement my solar water heating system to reduce my energy bills still further.

What I did resent though was the £500 VAT charge that the Heating Engineering firm had to add to my bill and hand over to the government.   I never complain about my regular income tax payments because I appreciate the public services (depleted though they are nowadays!) that I receive for them, and because I realize that I am fortunate in having an income large enough to be liable for income tax.  I do object though to having to pay a considerable sum to the government for the privilege of carrying out the essential maintenance of my own home!    

I remember Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher explaining unctuously that the great thing about VAT (unlike income tax!) was that you could choose not to pay it.  That may well be the case for those considering the purchase of diamond ear-rings or designer ball-gowns, or having a new garage built to accommodate the second car.  There’s precious little choice though about mending a leaky roof, keeping a car that you need for work, on the road or – in my case – replacing a leaking boiler!

My resentment at VAT payments was reignited last week when Treasury Minister David Gauke complained about the way in which, so he claimed, tax liability was being regularly avoided by the payment  of small bills in cash. He claimed that jobbing builders, gardeners, domestic cleaners, window cleaners and the like would offer substantial discounts for cash in hand to avoid paying tax.  The resulting loss to the Treasury was comparable with the loss resulting from the tax avoidance by the wealthy that had recently been publicised.

Much of the news media seems to have assumed that David Gauke was referring to avoidance of VAT.  I find that difficult to believe.  Surely he must be aware that only quite large firms are required to be registered for VAT (the proprietor of the garage where I used to have my car serviced took some pride in the fact that he managed to keep his turnover below the level of liability) and I can’t believe that many, if any, jobbing gardeners, odd-job-men, window clearers and general cleaners need to be VAT registered.

What probably does happen is that these small self-employed entrepreneurs pocket unrecorded the fruits of their labours and neglect to declare them to the Inland Revenue. Probably quite a few of them would remain below the level of liability for income tax anyway! I’d be very surprised if many formally offer a discount for cash.  They simply agree to do a job at a lower rate than they would were they expecting part of their earnings to be skimmed off by the government.  They work on the principle that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and some of them may not even have a bank account. 

It isn’t all that long ago that all transactions of ‘working class’ people were carried out in cash or with postal orders.  As a lower ranking local government officer I was paid in cash (and paid all my bills in cash) until I came to Clacton in 1956 and opened an account with the Co-op Bank. 

It is probable that the government does lose a small amount of revenue through the unrecorded cash receipts of some of these self-employed workers.    I am quite sure though that it bears no comparison whatsoever with the tax avoidance of the super-wealthy and of Britain’s and the world’s giant corporations, though Mr Gauke and his well-heeled friends and colleagues may prefer to think otherwise.

I suggest that they take the advice in Chapter 7 of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which can be loosely paraphrased as,  ‘Don’t worry too much about the speck of dust in your neighbour’s eye until you have got rid of that enormous log obscuring your own vision!’

A Prophetic Email

The news that Britain had slipped even further into recession than had been forecast  (due, according to our Chancellor, to the weather, and to our all having taken our eyes off the ball, our shoulders away from the wheel and our noses from the grindstone for a whole working day to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee!), and David Cameron’s subsequent public affirmation that the government would not change its economic policy, reminded me of a prophetic email that I had received from a regular blog reader a month or so earlier.

I really feel that George Osborne’s and David Cameron’s financial strategy is now in ribbons, don’t you? The country’s debt burden is growing as tax receipts go down and benefit payments rise.  The Governor of the Bank of England seems to be convinced that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, so that’s it – the economy just carries on shrinking.  The really pathetic thing is that these two failed leaders have only one response to everything, which is to do more of the same; carry on with policies that have been shown to be counter productive.

The Bank of England is considering cutting interest rates further (to zero?)  This is like driving a car with one’s foot flat on the accelerator, and trying to push it through the floor to get some more power!  As for George Osborne; he’ll need to make more cuts to benefits and public services to pay for the cost of the cuts that he has already made!  Meanwhile David Cameron, the front man, will run a diversionary campaign, whipping up suspicion and hatred against groups of claimants, the old, the disabled, the unemployed, against public sector workers (despite the fact that they have cleared up the muddle in which the private sector had left security at the Olympics) and against our European neighbours and partners.

Cameron was right in one respect – about the problem of a ‘benefit culture’. .It takes some of the sting out of poverty and unemployment.  If the victims of the government’s policies were actually starving and their families were actually out on the streets, I have little doubt that we would see demos and riots that would make those in Egypt and Greece seem like Sunday-school picnics!  As it is I suspect that most of those affected didn’t even bother to vote in the last election, and probably won’t bother to vote in the next one either!

‘Which came first - The chicken or the egg?’

This ancient conundrum comes to my mind when I think of the government’s ineffectual efforts to solve our national economic problems.  To deal with youth unemployment they make every effort to make unemployed young people employable by learning new skills; and to find employment by learning how best to apply for a job and to behave at a job interview.  These skills are not much use while there is little demand for either new or old skills, and a score of applicants for every job that is available.

One reason for the shortage of jobs is that the banks, despite all the financial support they have been given are reluctant to lend money to entrepreneurs who would like to set up a new business or expand an existing one. The banks’ reluctance to lend is because they are by no means certain that the new or expanded businesses would attract enough customers to service and ultimately repay the loans.

The remedy is to make sure that the potential customers, the general public, have enough money for them to buy the services or manufactured products that those new or expanded enterprises would offer.  But the government’s austerity programme, coupled with a taxation system (VAT and customs duty increases and reduction of the highest rate of income tax) that penalises ‘ordinary’ people at the expense of the super-wealthy, has precisely the opposite effect.

Another blog reader (I really do read and appreciate readers' comments!) reminds me of my pie-in-the-sky dream of a UK government funded largely by a compulsory annual ‘citizenship membership subscription’ consisting of 20 percent of the gross annual income of every adult citizen from the very poorest to the most wealthy.  This could, at a stroke, be a means of redistributing our national income without impoverishing anybody, and would put money into the pockets of those who would spend it to revive our moribund economy.

One day that pie-in-the-sky may be seen as the only diet capable of restoring our nation to health.  The chances of my seeing that day dawn are pretty slim - but there's no harm in hoping!

Lord of the ‘Olympic’ Rings!

That, I think, certainly describes Danny Boyle, creator and director of the wonderful Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.  It was watched and appreciated world-wide.  Here is an email that I received early on the morning of Saturday 28^th July from a friend in Zittau, in what is to us the most remote part of Germany.

Dear Ernest,

Did you watch TV yesterday evening? Julia and I watched the opening performance of the Olympic Games in London. It was marvellous - congratulation!

Yours Volker and Julia

            My friend is a Cultural Senator of the Federal State of Saxony and is a Ph.D. whose specialism is European history.   His praise for what was a graphic portrayal of the transformation of the verdant England of tiny villages, green fields and rural pursuits of the 17^th and 18^th centuries to the chaotic and ugly (but productive) ‘dark satanic mills’ of the industrial revolution of the 19^th and 20^th  therefore carries some weight!  I thought that the idea of the symbolic forging of the Olympic rings as one of the positive results of that revolution was especially brilliant.  

So too, was the idea of visiting Buckingham Palace and involving the Queen (and her corgis!) at the very beginning of the celebration.  James Bond was, I suppose, an appropriate escort though he isn’t one of my favourite fictional characters. I’d have preferred Brother Cadfael or the first Chief Inspector Barnaby, and think that the Queen would have found either of them a more congenial temporary companion. The helicopter ride and parachute drop would surely have tested Brother Cadfael’s faith to the utmost, though to Inspector Barnaby it would no doubt have been just another of those last-minute calls of duty that constantly prevent him from spending a quiet evening at home with his family.

Other highlights of the evening for me were the splendid celebration of the NHS, one of the achievements of the immediate post-war years that hasn’t – yet – been totally destroyed by the forces of Mammon, and that wonderful soprano solo voice singing Blake’s Jerusalem.  At first I feared that we were to hear only the first verse of that magnificent poem but later – at an appropriate moment – we had the other verse:

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.

It is a wake-up call that the disheartened, disillusioned and dispirited Britain of today badly needs.

  

  

Week 26 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

Quite Legal……but Immoral!

          That, you may have thought, was an accusation that might be made about some of the activities of money-lenders, bookmakers, escort agencies, massage parlours and similar dubious individuals or institutions.  They though are all just small fry compared with the big operators who (obviously for a reasonable fee) can make sure that the rich and famous, the great and the good, get away with paying only a fraction of the income tax of us lesser mortals.

            I have been protesting about the iniquity of legal tax avoidance for years. A particularly flagrant case has at last caught the attention of David Cameron our Prime Minister. His shock/horror at finding that a well-known comedian’s financial arrangements had the perfectly legal effect of reducing the percentage of his income-tax payments  to lower than that of the council employee who empties his dustbins, spurred him into making his judgemental statement about the morality of income tax avoidance.

            I’m not going to pretend that I understand the details of the tax avoidance scheme with which this individual was involved but I understand that his income was first paid into an off-shore account from which he received no income but ‘borrowed’ all the money that he needed.  He, of course, was just the one tax avoider who was singled out and pilloried (and has, as a result, withdrawn from the scheme), but there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of others involved in the same or other similar schemes.  I suspect that if all the tax avoidance loopholes were closed, we would be well on our way to solving the deficit problem that is responsible for so much of the austerity that the government has imposed upon us during the past two years.

            My own solution to the problem would be to tackle it from its source.  I would make the principal source of the national revenue a ‘citizenship tax’, a percentage of the gross income of every single one of us without exception or exemption, as our payment for the very considerable privilege of being a citizen of the United Kingdom. Evading, by any means at all, that basic ‘membership fee’ would be considered to be as irresponsible and antisocial as drink-driving is today! I think it likely that fifteen or twenty percent of income overall would be more than adequate.  This percentage would amount to a very small sum from the very poor (just as percentage increases to their income are very small) but a very large sum from the seriously wealthy.   Once that citizenship tax had been paid, what happened to the remainder of the taxpayer’s income (which, for the seriously wealthy would still be a very large sum) would be no concern of the state.  It could be paid into an off-shore account, donated to charity, used to buy a football team, a yacht, or a home on the shores of the Mediterranean, frittered away on extravagant living – or saved for ‘a rainy day’.

 No - it isn’t going to happen – not this year, not in this decade, probably not in this century.

In the meantime I hope that our Prime Minister and government will cease wringing their hands at the immorality of tax avoidance and close the legal loopholes that make this avoidance possible.  If they can’t do it then it is time they were replaced by a government that can – and will!

A Forgotten Anniversary

            I am often awake at about 5.00 am.  I usually listen to the 5.30 am news headlines, weather forecast and Prayer for the Day on Radio 4, before getting up at 5.45 am with the arrival of Farming Today.  Just before Prayer for the Day listeners are reminded of news items that made the headlines on that day in bygone years.  Last Thursday  (21^st June) for instance, we were told that Prince William had been born on 21^st June in 1982 and that it was therefore his thirtieth birthday, and that on that date in 1945 American forces had finally succeeded in taking the Pacific Island of Okinawa from the Japanese.  There were one or two other anniversaries that I have forgotten but there was one, certainly front page news at the time, which was conspicuously ignored.

            It was the capture of Tobruk by General Rommel’s German Afrikakorps in 1942; not quite as disastrous as the fall of Singapore to the Japanese earlier in that same year, but certainly the nadir of British fortunes in North Africa – a situation that was to be dramatically reversed a few months later with the Battle of El Alamein.

            The fall of Tobruk was seventy years – a lifetime – ago, but it is not an anniversary that I shall ever forget. I was one of the 30,000 British and allied troops taken prisoner on that day and destined to spend the remainder of World War II as a PoW.

            The eight-gun Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a lowly member had been in almost continuous action from the day in late May (a few days after my 21^st birthday) when Rommel had launched his offensive in the neighbourhood of Gazala, some forty miles west of Tobruk.  Continuously on the move, we had in mid-June become part of the Tobruk garrison, defending the perimeter in a position to the south-east of the town and port.

            On 19^th June we learned that we were cut off from the main British forces but were assured by ‘Military Intelligence’ (we used to say cynically that, in descending order, there were three kinds of intelligence – human, animal, and military!) that the main German forces were by-passing Tobruk and moving eastward towards Cairo and the Nile delta.  We settled down for the night expecting a long siege.

            We were woken before dawn by the thunder of artillery fire, the roar of low-flying aircraft, the rattle of machinegun fire and explosion of bombs.  The enemy attack had begun – and it was clearly concentrated on our sector of Tobruk’s perimeter!   We manned the guns and, for several hours, fired at unseen targets, our guns directed by an Observation Post Officer and Assistant in a forward position. Our 4.5mm gun/howitzers were designed and built to batter down fortifications, not to be aimed at relatively small, moving targets like armoured cars and tanks. Our guns targeted the terrain over which the enemy tanks were advancing – but if the tank commander made sure that they were well separated as they advanced he could be certain that some, probably most, would come through unscathed.

            Meanwhile Stuka bombing aircraft were flying without opposition overhead (on that fateful day we had no support either from the Royal Navy or the RAF) and enemy shells were falling all around our gun position.  ‘Airburst’ shells exploding overhead were particularly deadly.  Much of the force of those bursting on impact was absorbed by the desert sand.

            Our targets were getting closer and closer.  Before we could be over-run we were ordered to ‘limber up’ our guns and withdraw to a new position to the north-west from which we could see, in the distance, enemy tanks heading toward the town and port.  Again we opened fire, this time within sight of our targets.  The dust and smoke of battle made it impossible to see whether our shells were having any effect.

            As darkness fell, the firing on both sides subsided. The air reeked of burnt cordite and of smoke from burning vehicles.  It was painfully obvious to us that Rommel’s attack had succeeded and that the centre of Tobruk was already in enemy hands.  We laid down to sleep beside our guns on the desert sand with the prospect of death, maiming and/or captivity on the following day.  Exhausted, we all slept soundly anyway!

            With the dawn a German spotter plane flew low overhead.  We reached for the captured Italian rifles that most of us had acquired and fired an ineffective volley.  We ‘stood to’ on the guns awaiting an order to fire. We fully expected to be ordered to make a heroic ‘last stand’ and no doubt we would have done so. Fate though, decreed otherwise. A radio message from the garrison commander, a South African, General Klopper ordered us to disable our guns, set fire to our transport and await our victors’ orders.  He had surrendered the garrison to avoid further pointless bloodshed.

            Thus, I became a PoW.  I spent the next almost–three-years, first in a large PoW camp in Italy and later in a small working camp in Germany. When the Third Reich collapsed in May 1945, I liberated myself (with a great deal of help from the Soviet Army!) and made my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia ultimately to the British army – and home!

            There was an unexpected sequel to my capture at Tobruk and my subsequent life as a PoW.  Years later (it must have been in the early 1970s) my wife and I, with our two then-teenage sons were enjoying a camping holiday in Austria.  Taking a  trip to the summit of the Muttersberg near the small town of Bludenz in Vorarlberg province, we found ourselves sharing a cable car with an almost identical German family.  I commented on the father’s very good English.  ‘Yes’, he said, ‘I was a PoW in England for three years and worked on a farm there’.  Shaking hands I told him that I too had been a PoW but had spent 18 months in Italy and 18 months in Germany – that accounted for the fact that his English was much better than my German.  I then asked him – what one PoW always asks another! – ‘Where were you captured?’   He replied, ‘Tobruk’ adding, in case I had never heard of the place, ‘that’s in North Africa!’    I had been captured there on 21^st June 1942.  He had been captured a few months later, subsequent to the Battle of El Alamein!

            It’s a small world!

 A minor banking crisis!

             Nat.West, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulsterbank are banks which last week spectacularly failed to perform what most of us see as their main purpose – looking after our money, adding incoming sums to our accounts, paying our bills, and repaying, promptly and efficiently when we need it, the money we have entrusted to their care.  I wonder if those banks are managed by some of those brilliant financial supermen who need  a salary of millions of pounds a year  to persuade them to turn up at their offices, plus the promise of further five-figure bribes (or bonuses) if they’re to give us their very best?   Offer them less, so we’re told, and they’d go elsewhere.

            When my family and I first moved to Clacton in 1956 I signed on with the Co-op Bank, largely because they imposed no bank charges on those who kept their accounts in credit, and they had a branch office on the corner of Rosemary Road and the Grove, just a couple of hundred yards from the office in the Town Hall where I worked.  That was over half a century ago.  The Co-op Bank is not one of the UK’s largest and most prestigious, but it has never needed to be ‘bailed out’ by us taxpayers. It has never let me down and it has an ethical investment policy that allows me to be confident that my money, entrusted to their care, isn’t used to buy armaments, to exploit the poor, or to help prop up dodgy enterprises or autocratic regimes. The nearest branch is in Colchester but the bank is easily accessible by phone or on the internet. I can pay cheques into my current account at any post office and, again from any post office or cash machine, I can use my Co-op VISA debit card to withdraw cash from that account.  Using the internet I can instantly check the state of my current account and details of payments and withdrawals.  I have no complaints.

The Weather!

          This is a subject on which, this year, words almost fail me; a winter drought that the water companies assured us would take months of steady rain to remedy, followed by a late spring and early summer of high winds, torrential rain (some areas have had a month’s rainfall in two or three hours), floods, high winds and – just occasionally – warm sunshine!   We are just at the beginning of my ninety-second summer and I have never seen another like it! It’s true that I can’t remember much about my first two or three summers I but have been credibly informed that in the year (1921) in which I arrived, the summer was particularly warm and dry.

            Surely no-one can now deny that we are in the midst of a period of world climatic change and fewer and fewer can possibly believe, as our MP does, that human activity has no responsibility for it.  Our ancestors would have been convinced that we had incurred the anger of God (or perhaps of ‘the gods’) and so perhaps, in a sense, we have.   If not God, then certainly Nature is reacting to our selfishness, greed and our profligate use of fossil fuels.

            I am only thankful that Clacton and the Tendring District generally have, as is often the case, escaped the flooding and devastation that has occurred elsewhere - and we have had more than our fair share of the occasional warmth and sunshine!

           

           

Week 17 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Tendring District’s Recycling Scheme.

          I thought that I was being fairly critical of Tendring District’s changed recyclables collection scheme in last week’s blog.  It seemed clear to me that, had sufficient thought been given to the matter, they would surely never have provided unlidded red boxes for the reception of paper and cardboard.  I also felt that the amount of food waste from old people like me, living alone, would hardly be worth the trouble and expense of collection.

I thought that the scheme could be improved at minimal trouble and expense simply by swapping the purposes of the two collection boxes and using the green box, with lid, for paper and cardboard and the red box which has no lid, for plastic bottles and food cans of all kinds.

Compared with ‘letters to the editor’ in the current Clacton Gazette, and comments on the Gazette’s website last week, my blog amounted to virtually unstinted praise!  I hadn’t realized, for instance, that for larger families, neither the red nor the green box is sufficiently large to hold a fortnight’s recycled items.  In the past we have been able to put any excess into a white plastic bag, place it on top of the green box, and it would be taken away with the box’s contents.  That isn’t allowed under the new scheme. Anything in such a bag will simply go into landfill.

Also now going into landfill are the plastics that once were collected for recycling but are to be collected no longer for that purpose; plastic bags of all kinds, and pots used for containing yoghurt, cream and spreads, for example.

 A number of correspondents had realized, as I had, that paper left in an open red box would blow out and litter the streets.   An official Council spokesman said that to provide a lid for each red box  would have cost £1 a lid, and that householders could use the lids from the green boxes (they can’t, they don’t fit!) or place the waste food container on top of the paper and cardboard.  If waste paper does blow about the streets, ‘it will be cleaned up’.

 Among the many letters published in the Clacton Gazette is, inevitably I suppose, one from a reader who sees the malign hand of ‘Brussels’ behind the Council’s scheme.  S.H.Wells of Holland-on-Sea writes

‘I have a suspicion that Tendring Council’s revised waste collection measures have less to do with “helping the environment” than with the EU landfill tax.

After all, a major percentage of the world is covered by water and the theory that man has anything to do with the changing cycles of the climate has never been proven.

But the tax is very real.  It varies from country to country but in the UK since 2010, it has been 51 Euros per tonne – currently about £42.

 

 If that is the idea, then a majority of Gazette readers think it is doomed to failure.  Two thirds of those polled believe that there will be more, rather than less, refuse destined for landfill as a result of the new scheme!

I am glad that I am not still Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer.  Putting a ‘positive spin’ on the current situation would be well beyond my capabilities!    I reckon too, that the members of the ruling majority group on the Council are glad that, unlike in Colchester, none of their number has to seek re-election early next month!

A spokesman for the Council says that the scheme will be kept under review and the views of residents taken into account.  I think that that means they’ll keep their heads down and hope the scheme will be working properly and to everyone’s satisfaction, by the time of the next Council election.   I wouldn’t bet on it!

Oh for the days when decisions like major changes to a recycling collection system that was at least working, would have been thoroughly debated in an appropriate committee, before being debated again by the full Council – rather than being decided by a tiny Politburo and presented to the Council as something which all members of the ruling party are expected to support!  In those days the whole plan would have been discussed in the press and by the public before a final decision was taken and a new system was imposed on the public.

‘You can’t have your cake…..and eat it!’

            This seems to be yet another piece of folk wisdom of which the Government is blissfully unaware.   They are very concerned about truancy from school.  In my childhood, certainly in the ‘aspiring working class’ circles in which I moved, truancy was a very rare phenomenon.  None of us dared to take a day off school unless we could be sure of being able to take with us the next day a note from mum or dad explaining that on the previous day we had been too ill to attend.

            If, due to mumps, chicken pox or some other childhood ailment we were absent for two days or more, the school would expect a parental letter of explanation to arrive promptly by post (very, very few of us were ‘on the phone’ in those days).  Parents and children alike dreaded a visit from ‘the School Board Man’ that would follow any unexplained absence. The fact that the actual extent of this official’s powers were unknown added to the fear of his visit, as did the fact that his visit would be noted and regarded as a mark of shame by all the neighbours.  ‘Them at no 27 – them that’s so ‘igh and mighty; I know for a fact that they ‘ad a visit from the School Board Man yest’y afternoon. What d’ya think of that?’

            Nowadays we are all aware that the Education Welfare Officer (the successor to the School Board Man) has very limited powers and that when he called he would very likely find no-one at home. What’s more no-one would care. Parents and children are no longer terrified of an official visitor – nor are nosy neighbours interested.   Truancy flourishes.

         

          Someone at Whitehall had a brilliant idea.   Stop the child allowance of persistent truants at source!   That’ll bring the parents to heel.  That’ll make those neglectful and non-caring mums and dads make sure that their kids go to school every day.

            However, the same Whitehall geniuses expect us all, singles, mums and dads and childless couples, to be in productive work. They overlook the fact that for many there is no productive, or even unproductive, work for them to do.  They also overlook the fact that where both a husband and a wife, or a single parent, are expected to be at work at 8.30 or even 9.00 it is impossible for or them to be certain that their child or children actually go to school.  They may make sure that they’re up, dressed, breakfasted and ready, but there is no way they can be sure that those children go through the school gates. 

             

            Similarly there’s no way that working parents, returning home at about 6.00 pm can control what their kids are up to between leaving school a couple of hours earlier and their arrival on the scene.  No wonder we have truancy.  No wonder we have street gangs and juvenile crime.  No wonder we have teenage pregnancies – ‘Let’s go upstairs to my bedroom.  Mum and dad won’t be home for at least another hour!’

            It seems to me that modern society has stark choices about its future direction.

Carry on in the way that has become popular since the avaricious eighties – husband and wife both hard at work (when they can get it!) to maintain mortgage payments or HP debt, children coming home from school to an empty house, growing youth crime, teenage pregnancies, juvenile drug and alcohol abuse, and a violent gang culture.    The alternative is  revert to pre-1980 (pre-Mrs Thatcher) values, recognising that growing children need a parent to be present when they set off for school and when they come home in the afternoon; and appreciating that bringing up a child or children in a  loving caring and comfortable home is a satisfying, fulfilling and socially-valuable career. Building Societies and banks should revert to the practice of relating the size of their loan to the income of just one of the couple seeking to buy a property, instead of the sum of the incomes of the both.  

            We would need to recognise that home ownership need not be everybody’s goal and that there is no shame in living in a rented home, even if it is Council or Housing Association owned.  Social housing should be for those who need it – not just for those who can’t possibly afford anything else.

            That way, I’m afraid, we would have fewer aspiring home owners and fewer thrusting young entrepreneurs. We would probably lose a few potentially brilliant female scientists, lawyers, doctors and (dare I say it?) priests – though it could be the house-husband as easily as the housewife, who elects to stay at home and bring up the children.   On the plus side we would have fewer unsustainable debts, fewer mortgage defaulters, fewer broken homes, less youth crime, fewer teenage pregnancies, less antisocial behaviour and fewer schoolboy and schoolgirl truants destined to become illiterate, innumerate and antisocial adults!

             Punishing the Charities

            The Chancellor of the Exchequer has, so he says, been shocked to discover what most of us have known or, at least suspected, for years; that many of the seriously wealthy contrive to pay less in taxation than we less affluent mortals!  Having made this ground-breaking discovery; how extraordinary that he should take measures that are more likely to impoverish a number of worthy charities than to cause serious inconvenience to the wealthy.

            It couldn’t, I suppose, be a deliberate ploy to persuade us that if we attempt to make the rich pay their fair share into the nation’s exchequer it is the poor who will suffer?

            I could see how the state would lose revenue as a result of large donations to charity but I have to confess that I couldn’t see what the generous donor would gain from his or her action – except perhaps a few ‘brownie points’ to present at the Pearly Gates when the time comes.

            Paul Vallely, writing in last week’s Church Times enlightened me.  ‘If a basic-rate taxpayer gives £1 to charity, the state gives 25p in Gift Aid to that charity. But if a higher-rate tax payer gives £1, the state gives 25p to the charity, but another 15p or 25p to the wealthy donor in extra tax relief.  So top philanthropists don’t just get a knighthood, or dinner with the Prime Minister, or an art gallery named after them. They also get money back’.  He also points out that some charities to which we taxpayers are thus compelled to give that Gift Aid are not ones that most of us would think of as being desperate for a few extra quid – Eton College for instance!

            Paul Vallely suggests that before targeting charitable giving, the Chancellor might try cracking down on some of the  other scams – off-shore accounts, turning income to capital gains, setting up companies to rent their own homes from themselves – by means of which the wealthy avoid paying tax like the rest of us!