Week 36 2011 13.9.2011

Tendring Topics………on Line


‘Why don’t they eat cake?’


I do not recall ever before having heard quite such blatant rubbish on tv as that put forward to urge the abolition of the higher rate of income tax!

It is worth giving some thought to what this ‘higher rate’ actually amounts to, and who has to pay it. It applies only to those with a taxable income of £150,000 a year or more. That is a sum so large that it is all but meaningless to most of us. It works out at over £2,884 per week or, if you prefer, £12,500 per calendar month. Do you know anyone with that sort of an income? Probably you don’t, neither do I. Perhaps to members of a government that includes 17 millionaires it may seem pretty commonplace - middle of the road in fact. I don’t think though that I am even acquainted with anyone who wouldn’t consider those liable to the higher rate of income tax as being very wealthy. These fortunate people are required to pay back 50% of any income above £150,000 a year. Hardly, it might have been thought, likely to cause the ‘victims’ of the tax serious hardship!

The idea of abolishing that higher rate of income tax received a boost last Wednesday (7th Sept) when 20 top financial experts wrote an open letter to the Financial Times urging that course of action. The very rich should be charged only the standard rate of 40 percent that I, and a great many others of us, have to pay on at least part of our incomes. The removal of the higher band of income tax would, so they claim, remove a brake on Britain’s economic recovery and allow us to forge ahead into a golden future. Among the flood of protesting emails responding to this item on BBC Breakfast was at least one asking if any/many/perhaps all of those twenty financial experts were themselves in receipt of incomes in excess of £150,000 a year and therefore had a personal financial interest in the matter.

On that same Breakfast programme another financial expert explained that entrepreneurs from overseas were dissuaded from setting up small businesses in this country when they were expected to pay back half their incomes to the government. If the higher tax band were retained all those with the best brains would emigrate. In any case, few people actually paid that tax because they are astute enough to protect their wealth by putting it into off-shore accounts in tax havens or in retirement trusts and the like.

I have been trying to think of a small business that could be expected to provide its founder and owner with an income in excess of £150,000 – drug dealing, gambling, the arms trade, money lending, the sex trade, organised crime perhaps. They’re all that come to mind and they are all activities we can comfortably manage without. Every listener to that broadcast must surely have known that no one at all has to pay half his income in tax – half of any income in excess of £150,000 is a very different matter.

To even think of increasing the incomes of the wealthy in a time of growing unemployment – particularly youth unemployment - while cutting public services and benefits to the poor, the sick and the disabled, is an obscenity. In lack of sensitivity and human understanding it is comparable with the ill-fated Queen Marie Antoinette’s famous suggestion when told that the poor of Paris were clamouring for bread ‘Why don’t they eat cake?’

Let us hope that it doesn’t have similar consequences!

I am more than ever convinced that Britain’s hope of mending our ‘broken society’ and discovering our country’s true ‘greatness’, lies in narrowing, certainly not widening, the yawning gap between the wealthiest and the poorest of our nation. A good start could be made by reviewing our income tax system and, with the aim of eventually making it truly progressive, bringing the threshold of liability for the higher rate of tax down from £150,000 a year to £100,000, while simultaneously seeking out and closing those currently legal loopholes by means of which the seriously wealthy avoid carrying their fair share of the country’s financial burden.

‘Those who sup with the devil need a long spoon’


So says the proverb and I think it likely that some of our politicians and police officers wish that they had had a rather longer spoon when they fraternised with Rupert Murdoch and the top executives of News International.

James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and representative, and two former senior employees of News International have been recalled for further questioning by the House of Commons Select Committee. The evidence of the latter two absolutely contradicts that of James Murdoch. On which testimony, I wonder, will the Committee base its final report?

The Committee’s continuing activities have prompted our Prime Minister to comment that perhaps he had allowed himself to get a little too close to representatives of News International, but this had been because he had been eager to explain the Government’s policies to the top management of all the news media – not just the Murdoch Press.

I don’t really think that the proprietors of the Guardian, the Independent, and the Daily Mirror enjoyed quite the same measure of Prime Ministerial attention as did the owner of the Times, Sunday Times, News of the World and the Sun, either from our Prime Minister or most of his predecessors. I am sure that no-one would dream of criticising Mr Cameron for explaining government policy to any or all of them. What is a matter of concern though, is the extent to which our present, or any past, Prime Minister may have been prepared to bend or change the emphasis of government policy in order to ensure friendly headlines, news stories, and feature articles and reviews in a powerful section of the national press. Remember the Sun’s boast after a Thatcher electoral victory – ‘It was us wot done it!’

One recent Prime Minister, John Major declined to pay homage to Rupert Murdoch and News International. It was to his credit – but he didn’t remain very long in office did he? It is for this reason that I believe very strongly that no substantial part of the British news media should be under the ownership, influence and control of a single individual, certainly not of an individual who is not British and who owes no loyalty to Great Britain, or to British and European values and traditions.

Who is being subsidised?


The residents of ‘Middle England’, through the columns of their self-appointed mouthpieces in the press (I have in mind in particular the Express, the Mail and the Telegraph) constantly remind us that they, as hard-working, honest and respectable citizens, have to subsidise the life-styles of unemployed layabouts, single parent families, old folk who are no longer making a contribution to society, other people’s children’s care and education, public transport, a European Union that they wish they had never heard of and so on, and on ……and on.

I have just heard it confirmed that I, and quite a few mostly old folk like me, are quietly subsidising the comfortable lives of a great many devoted readers of those newspapers. We, the unwilling and unwitting benefactors of aspiring Middle Britain, are those who have paid off our mortgages and are truly home owners. We have since built up a few thousand pounds of savings in savings accounts in the Banks or Building Societies that had lent us the money with which we had purchased our homes. Those accumulated savings are month-by-month diminishing in value, as inflation at twice the rate originally forecast by the government, outstrips the meagre interest that they nowadays earn. They will continue to shrink while the Bank Rate fixed by the Bank of England remains at the record low level of half of one percent.

And who gets the benefit of the value creamed off our life savings? Why, the keen go-ahead young couples who probably describe themselves as home owners but are, in fact, home buyers. The real owners of their homes, as they’ll quickly find out if they default on their mortgage payments, are the banks or building societies that loaned them the purchase money and now hold the deeds of their homes.

The interest that home buyers are paying is at a record low level, kept there artificially by the continuing absurdly low bank rate. The idea is, no doubt, that this boost to their income will give them more cash in their pockets which will encourage them to go out and spend – and get the wheels of Britain’s economy moving again. It is, of course, simply robbing Peter to pay Paul and on this occasion I am one of the Peters. I’ll survive. My savings aren’t substantial enough to attract a great deal of interest even if the bank rate and mortgage interest payments rose. It must though be a severe blow to those elderly people depending upon the interest on their savings to finance their retirement.

‘Our Holiday Season is ending early, due to lack of interest ……..from Tendring Council’.




Camping beneath the pines in September sunshine

 During the late 1970s and early ‘80s, after my retirement from Tendring Council, my wife and I would often take a week’s holiday with our motor-caravan in late June and another early in September. The roads and the camping sites were less busy than in July and August, the children were back at school (ours had long since left school!) and the weather was often warmer and sunnier than it had been in the height of the holiday season. Sea temperatures too are often higher in September than in June and early July.

I have noticed that a great many, particularly elderly or childless couples do the same thing. The September weather this year has so far been disappointing but, who knows, there could be an Indian summer towards the end of this month or even into October. Those who decide to visit the Essex Sunshine Coast a little outside the peak of holiday season this year are likely to be disappointed by the reception they receive.

Many of Tendring’s Tourist Information Centres closed and the Council-run beach patrols stopped operating on 1st September. John Halls, Walton-on-the-Naze Town Mayor is furious. He is reported in the Daily Gazette as saying that there are still people coming here and holidaymakers can often be seen here until October. ‘This town relies on the tourist trade and we are trying to extend the holiday season, not cut ii short as soon as we reach September………Not all children have even gone back to school yet, and people don’t feel safe on the beaches without a patrol there. They have done a lot of good this summer but if someone gets stuck on the rocks now they will not be there to help’.


Needless to say, Councillor Stephen Mayzes, Tendring’s Tourism Boss, has an answer. ‘It is considered to be the end of the season, the schools are going back and there are far fewer people around. We have got to look at how many people are actually going into the information centre. We did a study last year and worked out that it was costing us about £7.00 for every person who walked into the centre’. Mr Mayzes would like to see in the future a hi-tech replacement for the centre. He has in mind an interactive screen that would allow people to explore tourist information all year. I can’t imagine anything more likely to put people off Walton forever than having to consult a giant computer screen rather than a friendly and helpful information officer! A virtual information office for virtual people – real people, on holiday, won’t want to go near it!

I suppose I haven’t made a terrible error about the responsibilities of a District Council ‘Tourism boss’? I had the possibly silly idea that his task was to attract tourists and other holidaymakers to our Holiday Coast. Mr Mayzes response to a prestigious camping and caravanning club making use of the playing field of the Coastal Academy during the holiday period, and his action in prematurely closing Information Centres and ending Beach Patrols, makes me wonder if his task is the precise opposite – to discourage strangers from making their way here and to keep our golden sands and holiday facilities unsullied for the enjoyment of ‘natives only’. If so, he is doing very well!

Week 33 2011 23.8.2011

Tendring Topics…….on line


‘I wouldn’t want to be a bobby……..’

Among my very early memories are Sunday School outings from St. Thomas’ Church, Ipswich in the late 1920s. There would be about twenty us aged between six and ten, in an open charabanc (an early 20th century word for a motor coach) on our very excited way to Felixstowe or, if the church’s finances were particularly healthy that year, to sandy Walton-on-the-Naze or Clacton-on-Sea. A couple of still-young Sunday School teachers would be striving to keep us in order.

As we travelled we sang at the tops of our unbroken voices the not particularly edifying folk songs of our age, time and place. The words of one verse of a song that our treble voices bellowed with redoubled enthusiasm as we approached a policeman on point duty (this was long before there were traffic lights!) were:

I wouldn’t want to be a bobby;
Dressed in other people’s clothes.
With a belly full of fat
And a sausage on my hat.
I wouldn’t want to be a bobby!

Well, I suppose that a uniform was ‘other people’s clothes’ and I do remember policemen as being rather corpulent in those days. But, ‘a sausage on my hat’? Perhaps in those days policemen’s helmets had a crest vaguely resembling a sausage. I just don’t remember – it was over eighty years ago!

I’m not quite sure what policemen looked like in the late ‘20s – but there’s no doubt that this is what I looked like. I wasn’t much good at rifle drill – either then or later!


Most of the policemen took it in good part, waved to us and smiled good-naturedly. There really were quite a few ‘Dixons of Dock Green’ in the Police Force when I was sevenish.

A policeman’s life (no-one calls them ‘bobbies’ these days) may or may not have been an enviable one in those days, but I think that they were generally liked and respected by most of the population.

That isn’t so today. Nowadays there are whole neighbourhoods in which they are regarded as natural enemies and the very worst thing that any member of such a neighbourhood can do is ‘grass to the cops’ about anything whatsoever. I remember one of my grandsons telling me, when he was in his early teens, that that was one of the lessons that he had learned at his school in North London.

Then again, those of us who regard ourselves as law-abiding citizens have been shocked and disgusted at allegations of bribery and corruption at high level (and no doubt lower level too) in the Police Force and of, sadly well documented, cases of police brutality.  Nor should  forget that it was Tottenham Police's inept, incompetent and ill-considered actions that resuted in the death of an unarmed (and presumed innocent) man, and triggered the nation-wide riots.

Against that though, we must set the dogged determination and acts of heroism of ordinary policemen (and firemen and ambulance staff) during the recent unprecedented scenes of violent rioting. Recalled from holiday and – at the beginning – grossly outnumbered, they did all that they, or anyone else, could have done to counter and contain the violence.

They were, we are told, unprepared for the scale and extent of the violence. Of course they were. Never before had there been such destruction and widespread looting, aided and encouraged by electronic means of communication. Within three days though, the situation was well under control. Recall of police officers from leave and effective co-operation between the country’s police forces had stopped the riots, hundreds of alleged rioters had been arrested and restoration work had begun.

By that time of course, the top politicians had returned from their holidays. They then had the unbelievable impudence to suggest that it was their return and their ‘decisive action’ that had turned the tide! I am not a bit surprised that the Chief Constables were outraged – and that they haven’t hesitated to voice their feeling. It isn’t so very long ago that David Cameron rebuked an army chief in Afghanistan for having dared to criticise some of the government’s policies and actions. ‘You do the fighting’, Mr Cameron suggested, ‘and leave me to do the talking’. Perhaps someone should now tell him ‘You do the talking’, no-one would deny that he is very good at that ‘and leave the details of the policing to the Police’.

I am not surprised either that our senior police officers are offended at David Cameron’s inviting a former Police Chief from the USA to lecture them on gang control. He is said to have had some success in that field in New York and Los Angeles. London is not New York; Birmingham is not Los Angeles, the Met. is not the NYPD and British Police Forces, unlike those in the USA, are not yet, thank Heaven, under the direct control of politicians.

If England’s top policemen need to know more about ending gang power they’d be better advised to see how Scotland’s Strathclyde Police Service successfully tackled Glasgow’s notorious gangs. Come to think of it, Mr Cameron might find it a good idea to invite Scottish Chief Minister Alex Salmond to Westminster to advise him and his political colleagues in the government, on future avoidance of riots of the kind that we have recently seen in England.

I am sure Mr Salmond would be pleased to suggest reasons why, while England’s High Streets were being trashed, plundered and burnt, Scotland’s remained riot-free!


The worst – and the best – of human nature


Extraordinary how those riots seem to have shown us the very worst and the very best of human nature and of our fellow mean and women. While they were taking place we saw people consumed by greed, hatred and delight in chaos and destruction. In the immediate aftermath though there were the hundreds of willing volunteers who turned out with their brooms and their buckets to try to clear up the mess.

There were scores of examples of  acts of kindness to the victims of the violence too. Neither of my sons lives very far from the scenes of some of the worst of the rioting in Tottenham. One of them has told me about a local barber who at 89 (he makes me feel like an idle layabout!) was still cutting hair in his own barber’s shop in Tottenham. His premises were among those trashed by the rioters. His customers and other local people launched a ‘Keep Aaron Cutting!’ campaign with its own web site and raised thousands of pounds to help him re-establish his business. I have no doubt that there have been other such incidents that have remained unreported.

I do not find the demands for zero tolerance and tough sentencing from the press, Members of Parliament (who think they have found a vote-winner!) and some members of the public, very appealing. A great many of those who are being convicted had hitherto had clean records but were caught up in the excitement and frenzy of the moment. Whatever penalty they may receive from the court will be nothing compared with the fact that they will now have a criminal record that will affect them for the rest of their lives.

Nor do I think it right that Council tenants should be faced with eviction if they, or any members of their families, are convicted of an offence that has nothing whatsoever to do with their tenancy. Why should they alone be subject to the extra punishment of homelessness for which the council, who may or may not know all the circumstances, acts as judge, jury and executioner?

I was impressed by remarks made in a tv interview by Sir Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Lib.Dems. and an experienced prosecuting barrister. He said that MPs in Parliament make the laws, but that it is the magistrates and the judges, who are able to acquaint themselves with all the relevant facts of each case, who should pass judgement and determine the sentence. Politicians should neither applaud nor condemn their decisions.

‘Let he who is without sin among you, cast the first stone!’


Mr David Cameron, our Prime Minister, was on terms of intimate friendship with people accused of bribing the police and prying illegally into the private lives of innocent citizens. He appointed as his head of communications Andy Coulson, a former editor of the News of the World who had been arrested in connection with the phone hacking scandal, and whom it now appears was being paid large sums by News International while working for the Prime Minister! Mr Cameron justified his appointment by saying – rather self righteously I thought – that he believed that ‘everyone should be given a second chance’; everyone, it seems, except young rioters and especially young rioters who live in council houses!

Building a New Jerusalem, ‘In England’s Green and Pleasant land’

I have been reading the Church Times, and passing it on to friends, for almost a year. It is an independent Anglican weekly that covers the whole spectrum of Church of England tradition, and comments, always sympathetically and constructively, on news from other Christian traditions. I have particularly appreciated its friendly assessments from time to time of current Quaker faith and practice. In last week’s issue there was a long feature article, Vision of service, not private gain by Jill Segger, a Quaker, who urged that ‘The Quaker testimonies offer an alternative approach to industrial action’.

It also comments, usually very wisely, on national and international affairs. As one would expect, the riots and their aftermath have consumed a considerable amount of newsprint in the past week or so.

Last week, under the headline, ‘More is broken than Mr Cameron admits’ a leading article commented on the Prime Minister’s speech on mending ‘the broken society’. Below is the final paragraph of the article.

‘We wrote last week about the triumph of materialism and individualism. Any attempt to tackle the consequences of these on what Mr Cameron calls “the poorest part of our society” must acknowledge that the poor do not have a monopoly on moral drift. In the 289 sentences of his speech, just four, right at the end, touched on examples of moral decline found elsewhere in society “in the banking crisis, in MPs’ expenses, in the phone-hacking scandal”. His conclusion? “We need to think about the example we are setting”. Yet white-collar criminals have none of the excuses of desperation, inadequacy and hopelessness found among the poor. If the Prime Minister wants to reverse the “slow motion moral collapse”, in the nation, he needs to look far wider than he does at present’


My own conviction is that at the very heart of the ills that plague our country today is the enormous and ever widening gap between the incomes of the wealthy and those of the poor and under-privileged. Narrowing that gap could establish a foundation on which we could all together build a mended and truly 'big' Society based on firm moral values. That is surely an aim that all men and women of good will can share.

I will 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.