Week 50 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

‘In the bleak midwinter……….’

          So begins a well-loved Christmas carol, describing weather rather more Dickensian than Palestinian!  Will Christina Rosetti’s words written in 1872 describe our winter of 2012/’13 with its, ‘Frosty wind made moan.  Earth was hard as iron, Water like a stone. Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow – in that bleak midwinter, long ago’?

            It was still dark when I published my weekly blog on the internet at about 7.00 am last Wednesday, 4^th December.  In it I expressed a fear that, after a summer and autumn of heavy rain and floods, winter would bring freezing weather, icy roads and footpaths, and heavy snow.  I pulled aside the curtains from my window and looked outside – my garden was covered with a thin layer of snow and snow was falling from the heavens!   The snowstorm didn’t last long but, as I write these words three hours later, the snow is still lying and it is bitterly cold outside.  I fear it is a presage of things to come!

            The previous evening I had watched a BBC tv news bulletin including the concern of Shelter, the charity serving the homeless, that the number of people sleeping rough on the streets of our big cities (in particular London and Glasgow), after having fallen at the beginning of the new century, was now steadily rising and expected to rise still further as a result of government policies and proposed policies

It is very difficult to get an accurate estimate of the number of ‘rough sleepers’ as they tend to seek out remote alleyways, passages and derelict buildings to get what shelter they can from the elements.  Estimates are likely to be lower than actuality.  However it is reckoned that during the winter of 2011/2012 there were no less than 5,678 rough sleepers in London – an increase of 43 percent on the previous year’s total of 3,975.  In the future the total is likely to be higher still, particularly if the government goes ahead with its cap on Housing Benefit, its exclusion of single under-25s from Housing Benefit, and its ‘bedroom tax’ on Council house tenants and those in receipt of Housing Benefit.

Every night I sleep warmly and comfortably under my duvet.  At 4.30 am my gas central heating and water heating come on for two hours, ensuring that when I rise just before 6.00 am (yes, I am an early riser) my bungalow is comfortably warm and there is plenty of hot water for my morning wash, shave and shower.  I prepare and eat my ample breakfast at my leisure in a warm kitchen.  During the two hours the boiler was in action it will have produced sufficient hot water for twenty-four hours.  After I have dressed and breakfasted I decide whether or not I need to switch it back on for space heating only.

  How very different every night is the plight of thousands of my fellow men and women!   In London alone at the most conservative estimate, at least 5,000 of them try to find some protection from wind and rain in shop doorways or alleyways and settle down on cold, hard paving stones to snatch a few hours’ sleep, threatened not only by the vagaries of the weather but the criminal violence of fellow humans in an even more desperate plight than themselves.   They wake shivering and with aching limbs, cold, hungry and miserable, to face another day of seeking shelter and begging or stealing to stay alive.   Why don’t they seek work?  For those who have a fixed address it's difficult enough to find a job.. For those who haven’t, it’s impossible. There’s a more-than-usually vicious circle.  Lose your job and you’re likely to be made homeless.  Once you’re homeless and have ‘no fixed abode’ you can never hope to find employment!  

Clacton’s Wellesley Road on New Year’s Day 1979.  Tough luck for ‘rough sleepers’!

Yes, some of them are alcoholics or drug abusers.  Give them the few coins for which they beg and they’ll go straight and spend them on something guaranteed to make their situation even more hopeless. They may be well aware of that – but they also know that the substance that will ultimately destroy them will give them, if only briefly, a release from misery and despair. ‘Judge not, that thou be not judged!’ According to Dante there is a notice at the entrance to Hell; ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here’.  No wonder rough sleepers are 35 times more likely to take their own lives than the rest of us. 

I have endured hunger, cold and privation as a common soldier and as a prisoner of war during World War II, but have never experienced squalid discomfort, cold and hunger comparable with that of these ‘free’ fellow-countrymen and women of mine who have the misfortune to be penniless and homeless. Nor, unlike them, was I ever entirely without hope of a better future.

We Christians should remember that every time we say ‘Our Father’ we are acknowledging that the homeless and the destitute, the undeserving as well as the deserving, are our brothers and sisters, our fellow humans.  I am glad that Christian Churches are well to the fore in seeking to alleviate the plight of the rough sleepers and trying to lift them out of the abyss of hopelessness, loneliness and despair in which they find themselves.

 But charities, however committed and hard-working, can never hope to do more than ease the problem.  It is up to the politicians to reduce and ultimately solve it.  I have almost given up hope of them ever doing that – but surely they could try to refrain from making a bad situation even worse!

 Correcting Karl Marx!

            There has been a great deal of outrage in the news media in recent weeks  about the overseas corporations that trade very successfully in this country but, usually by having their HQ or financial base in a country with a lower corporation tax than the UK, succeed in paying little or no taxation here.  Three highly successful international corporations have been ‘named and shamed’ – Starbucks, Amazon and Google.

            This negative publicity seems to have had a salutary effect on Starbucks who, no doubt because their customers were deserting them and patronising other coffee-house chains, have announced that they will be changing their financial arrangements so that our Inland Revenue receive some benefit from their highly profitable activities.  That is very nice of them – but it really shouldn’t be the prerogative of a commercial enterprise to decide whether or not to pay its proper dues.  Operating a business in this country is a privilege and, in market-driven Britain today privileges, like everything else, have their price.

            The only one of those three corporations that is of regular service to me is Google – and very valuable I have found it.  Providing me and the rest of us Brits with a first-class service isn’t however the primary objective of Google.  That is maximising the profits made for its international shareholders. Paying for the privilege of trading profitably in this country is just one of the, no doubt tiresome, overheads that need to be subtracted from those profits before they are distributed.  It is up to our government to see that that this is done.

            Nor, of course, is it only foreign enterprises that seek to maximise their profits at the expense of other British taxpayers.  I pointed out a few months ago that Boots the Chemists (as British as the Union Jack!) has its HQ in a small village in Switzerland for no other purpose than to reduce its tax liability.  I don’t for one moment imagine that Boots is the only British culprit.

When Karl Marx declared that Der Arbeiter hat kein Vaterland (working people have no Fatherland) he could hardly have been more wrong.  Hundreds of thousands of European working men and women (British, German, French and Russian) demonstrated their loyalty to their fatherlands (and paid for that loyalty with their lives) in two World Wars.   It is their employers, the giant corporations whom Marx would have described as the Bourgeoisie, who place profit before both fatherland and fellow-countrymen.

'Patriotism is all very well - but Business is Business!'

 ‘All in this together?’

            Now we truly are ‘all in this together’ announced  the ecstatic front page headline of the Daily Mail the day after George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered his autumn statement last Tuesday (5^th December).   The really wealthy and those in benefit are both to be targeted by the Government.   Both ends of the social spectrum are to suffer financially. What could be fairer and more egalitarian?

            That assessment overlooks the fact that the sums to be extracted from the bank accounts of the wealthy will cause them, at the most, only minor irritation and inconvenience.   The cuts imposed on the poor will force thousands of poor families to face the question, ‘Do we eat or heat?’  Thousands will be a little closer to losing their homes.    In the Biblical parable the poor widow who handed over her last ‘mite’ to the Temple Treasury was left totally penniless. The Treasury’s wealthy contributors poured in their gold and silver coins – but those coins amounted to only a fraction of their total wealth.  ‘Which of them’. asked Jesus, ‘was the more generous giver?’            

         

            As a pensioner I am one of those who will not suffer directly from the Chancellor’s Budget proposals.  However, the postponement of a return to normality for yet another year (and who is to say there won’t be a further postponement in a year’s time?) makes it increasingly unlikely that I shall live to see an end to austerity.  I do wish that the Chancellor hadn’t had quite such a self-satisfied smile on his face as he announced the failure of his policies and his economic predictions.

           

Once again he is taking pride in having brought a large group of low earners outside the income tax system altogether and ‘freed them from the burden of income tax’.  I remain convinced that we will not have a fair taxation system until the annual first demand on every single adult resident in this country, from the very poorest to the very wealthiest, is a percentage (to be calculated every year in accordance with the nation’s needs) of his or her gross income; the annual payment for the privilege of living and working in the UK.  The percentage would be exactly the same for everyone but, of course, the actual amount demanded would vary widely according to the wealth or poverty of each individual. What each individual did with the rest of his or her income – spend it, save it, give it to charity or put it in an off-shore account - would be no concern of the state.

            We then really would be all in it together in a true ‘common-wealth’ of which we could be proud to be citizens!

Songs of Praise

          My wife and I always watched BBCtv's Songs of Praise together early on Sunday evenings and I have continued to do so since her death.  Last Sunday, the first in the Church’s season of Advent, circumstances  prevented my doing so – but I did record it and have just watched the recording.

            

         I am glad that I didn’t miss it because I felt it was one of the best ever.  It included the Military Wives' Choir giving us one of the finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she said, to patronise children by assuming that they can't learn to appreciate the magic of Shakespeare's words and to try to 'simplify' them

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’ which summarise what Christmas is really all about:

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible for me to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.

  one of the very finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter by the Military Wives’ Choir that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she claimed, to patronise children by trying to ‘simplify’ things, destroying their ‘magic’.

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.

  one of the very finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter by the Military Wives’ Choir that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she claimed, to patronise children by trying to ‘simplify’ things, destroying their ‘magic’.

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.

Week 14.10

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou?’ (John 20.15)

Easter was a very special occasion this year as, unusually, the Easter of the Eastern Orthodox Churches coincided with that of the Catholic and Reformed Churches of the West. Thus every Christian Church in the world remembered the cruel death of Jesus Christ – and celebrated his glorious rising from the dead, on the same weekend.

The picture, taken in St. James’ Church Clacton on Easter morning, depicts the empty tomb and the weeping Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Christ. It is decorated with Easter flowers and flanked by two votive candles

The turning world meant that throughout Easter there was never a moment when, in churches, chapels and cathedrals, somewhere or other in the world, Christ’s resurrection and its promise of eternal life were not being remembered and celebrated. ‘The voice of prayer is never silent, nor dies the song of praise away’.

Making a (small) profit from one’s convictions!

Did you realize that on 6th April (probably the day on which I shall post this blog) postal charges will be increased? There never seems to be much publicity of these regular upward changes and it is very easy to be caught out. The price of sending a ‘normal size’ letter under 100g by first-class post goes up from 39 to 41p and by second-class post from 30 to 32p. Large letters (that includes some large greetings cards) go up from 61p to 66p first-class and from 47 to 51p second-class.

The cost of mail sent abroad goes up correspondingly. Airmail letters under 10g to anywhere in Europe rise from 56p to 60p and to the rest of the world from 62p to 67p. Full details are set out clearly in a leaflet ‘pricing made easy’ obtainable from any post office.

The price of postage stamps designated simply ‘First Class’ and ‘Second Class’ is, as the economists say, ‘buoyant’. As postal charges increase, so do their values. A ‘First Class’ stamp purchased five years or longer ago is valid today, even though today’s first class postal charge will be a great deal higher than it was when the stamp was bought.

For the past two years I have suggested at Christmas time that buying sufficient 1st Class and 2nd Class ‘religious’ Christmas stamps for use on correspondence throughout the year, is an effective and non-aggressive way of affirming our Christian faith. I do it myself. It was made easier last year by the fact that, since all the special Christmas stamps were reproductions of church stained-glass windows, they could all have been considered to be ‘religious’.

Purchasing a supply of those first and second-class stamps was also a profitable thing to do! Those who have followed my suggestion will have made a worthwhile investment! Those stamps have gone up in value by 2 pence each. I have always been a long way short of brilliant at mathematics, but I think that that means a tax-free increase in value of about six percent in the four months since their purchase. These days it would be difficult to find another investment yielding a similar short-term profit!

Expensive Executives

A few months ago I commented on a report that Tendring Council’s three most highly paid officials were facing redundancy. Although this has still not been officially confirmed, there now seems little doubt that the report was correct.

The Daily Gazette is chiefly concerned about the size of the ‘golden handshakes’ that they will receive on their departure - £200,000 between them – but it seems to me that there are other, more important, issues involved. As a former (quite lowly paid!) council official, I am astonished at the three posts that are, so we learn, the highest paid on the Council’s staff.

There’s no surprise about the Chief Executive. His reported salary of ‘over £120,000 a year’ may seem enormous to most of us but it’s little more than petty cash to the Chief Executive of Essex County Council, whose income is reported by the Taxpayers’ Alliance as being about £200,000 – more than that of the Prime Minister! But then the County Council has loads of our money to spend, and they don’t even have to go to the trouble of collecting it. That’s Tendring Council’s job.


Clacton’s Town Hall. Nerve centre of Tendring
District Council

The second most highly paid post is that of Deputy Chief Executive. Now that does seem astonishing to me bearing in mind that the Council also employs experienced professional men and women – solicitors, financial experts, engineers, surveyors, architects, environmental health experts. Surely one or two of them must be both better qualified and of greater importance to the Council than a deputy – even of someone as important as a Chief Executive. That’s strange enough, but the third man is not the Chief, nor the Deputy but the Assistant Chief Executive. He and the Deputy are both said to have salaries of over £100,000 a year.

The other matter that perplexes me is the reason for their departure. Councillor Neil Stock, the Council’s Leader, attempts to brush it off as a fairly routine matter. He is reported as saying, ‘The report is all about succession planning. When you have three senior officers nearing retirement age, you need to manage their exit. That is why this report was drawn up’.

Really? If they’re ‘nearing retirement age’ why not plan their replacement and wait till they retire before worrying about how much they are then to be paid? There will be no need for ‘negotiations’. Their ‘lump sum retirement payment’ and annual pension is laid down by national agreement. The picture of Chief Executive John Hawkins, Chief Executive, in the Gazette doesn’t suggest to me that he’ll be drawing his state pension and getting his bus pass and free tv licence in the very near future. But perhaps he’s older than he looks.

It can hardly be said that the three of them have been incompetent or disappointing in their performance in office. They were steering Tendring Council’s course during the year that the Government’s Audit Commission declared it to be the best performing Council in Essex and in the top flight of well performing Councils in England.

Could it be that that is why they have now lost favour? Were they too closely associated with the recent Tendring First administration and therefore the present rulers of Tendring (with their majority of one) wish to replace them with a person or persons more sympathetic to their philosophy?

It will be a sad day for local government when councils are not prepared to accept that their professional officers will give of their very best to their employing authority, whatever its political orientation may be. It will be an even sadder day when professional officers give them reason to believe that such doubts are justified.

‘Not from my bank account!’

Everybody knows that our country is in a financial mess. Everyone agrees that it is a mess from which we can escape only by cutting government services and/or increasing taxes. There is almost complete unanimity within the national press, the general public and politicians of all parties about this. Disagreement is about which services should suffer from the inevitable cuts, and who should bear the burden of the increased taxes. Sadly, most of us seem to think that the services on which we have come to depend should be sacrosanct and that we, and the group to which we happen to belong, should be exempt from increased taxation.

Pensioners have been among the first to complain about their ‘derisory’ pension increase this year and about the perceived threat to their winter fuel allowance. This is understandable because those pensioners who have no other source of income beyond the state pension manage to survive only with the help of the other benefits available to them.

Working people too, see their jobs and their incomes threatened. Many have had to choose between a pay cut and redundancy. Some have not had that option and have lost their jobs. Will job seekers allowances and other social security benefits be cut in the economy drive? I have no doubt that the strikes affecting rail and air travel, and threatening to spread to other fields, are less about existing pay and conditions of work than about the reorganisation, rationalisation and down-sizing that threatens all their jobs in the future.

Increases in VAT affect disproportionately those on the lowest incomes. They increase prices, fuelling inflation and holding back recovery from recession.

There has been agreement between many employers and employees about halting the planned national insurance contributions increase. The money that would have been raised by this increase could be recouped by ‘efficiency savings’ says Mr David Cameron. I’ve heard that before from other political leaders, only though, when in opposition! In any event, isn’t the current crisis one that demands both efficiency savings and increased national insurance payments?

Then there are those, usually in the upper income brackets, who see the threat of rises in income tax rates as heralding a red revolution! I was amused to see the higher rate of income tax that is being introduced this year described in a popular newspaper as ‘a direct attack on middle England’. It will require those whose incomes exceed £150,000 a year to pay in income tax 50 percent of income above that sum. ‘Middle England’ indeed! I wonder how many readers of that newspaper have incomes even approaching that?

We are continually being told that if we try to tax the seriously wealthy proportionately to the rest of us, we’ll be driving the best brains and the wealth creators out of the country. Do they mean the scientists and engineers whose work keeps our industries competitive; perhaps the surgeons who save lives daily; perhaps even the top politicians and top public servants, whose decisions and competence affect us all?

Hardly! Few of those buy national football teams, have palatial villas on the shores of the Mediterranean or entertain influential politicians in their luxury yachts! Those who might be driven away are foreign expatriates who have made millions fleecing their fellow countrymen and have come to Britain to spend them, and our own home-grown successful gamblers and money-lenders. Isn’t gambling and money-lending what the stock market and the merchant banks (whose greed and incompetence triggered this crisis in the first place) are all about?

Disillusion with politicians, a yawning gap between the incomes of the richest and poorest in our society, a perception that the wealthy and privileged are escaping the worst effects of a financial situation that is impoverishing the rest of us; these are dangerous ingredients, possibly presaging a political fundamentalism even more deadly than the religious fundamentalism by which many feel threatened today.