30th March 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘There’s no point in voting – they’re really all the same!’

          That’s one of the standard reasons given by those who can’t be bothered to vote in Parliamentary Elections.   The really sad thing is that they’re not far out.  In times gone by – certainly before World War II and I think for some time afterwards, political parties had a clearly defined purpose and we all had a pretty good idea of their ultimate aims. Leaders and members of the Conservative Party, as their name suggests, thought that the social order in our country and the way that industry and commerce performed were pretty well OK.  Conservatives agreed that some things might need a slight tweak here or there, but generally speaking they felt that history had come to an end and that we Brits were currently living in the best of all possible worlds.

            The Labour Party on the other hand, believed that there was a great deal wrong with our present social and economic system and wanted to change it.  They were influenced by the great reformers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, by Christian concern for the poor and disadvantaged (‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek..........He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich he hath sent empty away) and to some extent by the revolutionary ideas of such thinkers as Marx and Engels.  They thought it possible that they could, by democratic means, create an earthly Paradise – fulfilling William Blake’s prophecy in his great poem Jerusalem ‘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’

            The Liberal Party, originally the Party of the rulers of industry and commerce in conflict with the land-owning gentry of the Conservative Party, sat uneasily between Conservative and Labour, declining in power and influence throughout the twentieth century, though enjoying a temporary popularity at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Love them or hate them, the three parties were quite clear in their objectives and those who had votes (it wasn’t till well after the end of World War I that there was universal adult suffrage, and eighteen year olds didn’t get a vote until after World War II) knew exactly why they voted for the party of their choice.

Now, thanks largely to Tony Blair and his New Labour, all that has changed. All main political Parties now support the Market economy in which everything and everybody has cash value.  Job satisfaction – enjoyed by many thousands (including myself) in the past – has been replaced by a struggle for personal wealth in which everyone grabs as much as he or she can demand for as little as they can get away with.  Leading New Labourites like Lord Mendelson declare that they ‘have no problem with billionaires’; well (while thousands of their fellow Britons are homeless and reliant on voluntary food banks to keep their families fed) they should have problems with billionaires.

            Both Parties accept that top bankers must be paid in millions a year, plus more millions as bonuses – because ‘that’s the only way we can attract the very best brains’ to make Britain great again.  Those ‘best brains’ who demand and receive millions of pounds for their services are the very people who, as was repeatedly affirmed by the recently retired Governor of the Bank of England, caused the current financial crisis.  They were also responsible, if only by default, for the banking scandals that have made the press headlines in recent years.;  miss-selling of insurance (for which the banks have had to pay millions of pounds in compensation),  fiddling interest rates and assisting very wealthy clients to become even richer by tax avoidance.   If those are the kind of things that result from appointing (at enormous expense)  the very best brains to head our banks, perhaps we should find out what the ‘second-best’ brains can do.  At the very least they’d come a bit cheaper – and might not be quite so good at feathering their own nests!

            George Osborne is already set to impose further austerities on a long suffering public sector.  He says that he only proposes to impose the same economies this year as he did last year.  He will be imposing them on already sadly depleted services.  Does he really imagine that if you empty half the water from a bucket one year, you can pour out the same volume of water from that same bucket the next year without emptying it?

So far the competing political parties have been much more eager to denigrate their opponents than to tell us what they themselves propose to do to solve Britain’s problems.  The Conservatives promise more of the same medicine and warn us that electing a Labour Government will create chaos. The New Labourites point out that the Tories are already wrecking the NHS and will probably try to solve its problems by mass privatisation.  Well, my medical practitioner (family doctor) service is certainly not as good as it was when the coalition took over government and the government’s bungled reforms have without doubt played a part in this deterioration.  Now they are proposing that pharmacists should take on some of the tasks previously undertaken by doctors.  That has the potential of creating long queues waiting for service in pharmacies as well as in doctors’ waiting rooms.

              For many years the British government’s annual expenditure has exceeded its annual income resulting in a ‘deficit’ that is filled by borrowing.  Central Government’s strategy must be the reduction, and eventually the elimination, of that deficit.  There are two ways in which this can be done; by reducing expenditure and by increasing income.

            Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats have all chosen the path of reducing expenditure – not on obviously wasteful practices like maintaining a wildly expensive ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ which is neither independent nor an effective deterrent, maintaining an ‘armed presence’ in the Middle East, and unquestioningly  supporting the USA in such military adventures as the invasion of Iraq and of Afghanistan, not to mention blindly backing the Kiev government in the civil conflict in Ukraine.  No, the government has concentrated its demand for economies on benefits for the poor and the unemployed and on local government services – education, maintenance of highways and footpaths, social services, libraries, public parks and gardens, refuse and recyclable collections and so on; all the services in fact that make the difference between civilisation and barbarism.

            All the main parties reject the other way of reducing the deficit; increasing the government’s income by taxation.  There are ways in which this could be done with minimal hardship.  I have suggested in this blog that all state ‘benefits’ should be subject to income tax – winter fuel allowance for the old, children’s allowances, attendance allowance, free tv licence, free prescriptions and so on. This wouldn’t affect at all the really poor who don’t pay income tax.  It would affect the rest of us (several would affect me!) but they wouldn’t impose a crippling burden on anybody.  It would at least reduce the scandal of elderly millionaires getting exactly the same winter fuel allowance and other universal benefits as the rest of us oldies.

            Nor, I think, would a penny or two-pence on the standard and higher rate of income tax cause real hardship to anyone.  We’d only lose a little of the taxable part of our income.   I’m no mathematician but I believe that penny or tuppence on each pound of our taxable income would make a tremendous difference to our country’s finances.   Yet David Cameron promises that a new Conservative Government would not raise the rate of VAT (he could naturally be expected to prefer indirect taxation that disproportionately penalises the poor).  Much more shamefully, Ed Miliband, Labour leader, promises that if he leads a Labour government, there will be no increase in either the standard or the higher rate of income tax.

            Perhaps the cynics are right and they really are ‘all the same’.  They’ve certainly all got the same ultimate aim.  No – it’s not to make our country a better place in which to live.   It’s to get sufficient compliant MPs elected to enable them to form a government and, having done so, to hang on to power for as long as they can manage to get away with it. 

It’s still worth while to vote though – and our duty to those who in the 19^th and early 20^th Century – laboured and endured derision, arrest and imprisonment for the right to do so.  If you can’t bring yourself to vote for a candidate, then vote against the candidate whose policies you most dislike.  Put your cross against the name of the candidate most likely to defeat him or her!

And, of course, in this General Election we’ll have at least two credible alternatives to those of the three traditional parties.  There’s UKIP and there’s the Green Party.  UKIP consists of Nigel Farage and his followers.  He wants to get us out of the European Union and to limit immigration. For other policies he’ll just jump onto any bandwagon that promises a few extra votes, but generally speaking, his policies are well to the right of the most hard-line Conservatives.  A quite astonishing number of prominent Ukippers – MEPs and other senior party members, have departed from Ukip ‘under a cloud’. I can imagine no circumstances under which a Ukip candidate will get my vote.

The Scots the Welsh and the Northern Irish all have nationalist alternative candidates for whom they can vote.  I shall vote Green because they are working towards a fairer and a more sustainable Britain of which it might truly be said we are all in this together.  They won't achieve this in my time but perhaps my grandchildren’s generation will bring it about. As yet at least, the Greens are not tainted by the determination to achieve office at any price –  and I wish them well.

I’m sorry if any –or all – of the above sounds like a history lesson.  It isn’t that to me.  It’s the story of the United Kingdom during my lifespan, from the first quarter of the 20^th century to the first quarter of the 21^s.  

            

Week 3 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

Climatic Change

          A fortnight ago I commented in this blog that four damaging storms in the one month of December were more than just coincidence.  I had no doubt that they were part of a world-wide pattern resulting from global warming and climatic change.  If the New Year has brought in any change it has been a change for the worse.  Cornwall and Wales have had an almost continuous battering by wind and sea for day after day.

There have been deaths and flooding both from the surging sea and from drenching rain falling on already sodden ground.   The Somerset Levels have filled with flood water and supplies have  had to be taken by boat to some inland communities.  Meanwhile, a blast of Arctic Air is producing polar conditions through Canada and the northern half of the USA with hospitals having to deal not only with hypothermia but frostbite!  Temperatures lower than those at the South Pole have been recorded! Our tidal surges, damaging gales and floods are just a small part of a global problem.

            This had all been foreseen.  As I pointed out in my blog; The signal fires of warning, they blaze but none regard.  And so through night to morning, the earth spins ruinward’.  A Cambridge University professor, interviewed on tv explained that as long ago as the 1980s, scientists had warned the world’s governments that climatic change, largely the result of human activity, would produce extreme weather conditions world-wide – and so it has.  Desperately trying not to appear to criticise the government, the professor said that of course the prime minister and chancellor had wider economic issues to consider. He did regret though that they had found it necessary to cut the grant to the Environmental Agency, striving to alleviate some of the worst effects of these extreme conditions.  A much-travelled Blog reader, on his way to Cornwall on business, sent me this email:

This kind of weather is exactly as predicted in my Climate Change booklet I got from the UN in Geneva.

Flooding and Wind disasters have gone up around the world massively in the last 10 years, and are set to continue to get worse as there is more and more heat energy in the atmosphere.

But your MP thinks it’s all a load of rubbish! Let’s hope his home is flooded out.

Well, I do try to avoid having such uncharitable thoughts about our MP and I don’t think it at all likely that either of his comfortable homes will be flooded.  I do wonder though if he has now considered the possibility that the Australian authority on whom he based his climate-change-denial might just possibly have been wrong and virtually all other scientific opinion right.

Whatever else our Prime Minister may be, he is certainly neither stupid nor ignorant (though his grasp of 20^th century history sometimes seems to be a bit shaky!)  I have no doubt that he is well aware of the accelerating effects of climate change and of the urgent need for all nations in the world to work together to counter them.  However he is constrained by the need to hold his Party (which has its fair share of ‘neanderthalers’) together, to keep on the right side of the millionaires who control the popular press, and to do nothing to imperil his Party’s chances in the now-not-so-distant General Election.   Today (8^th January) he has publicly conceded that the extreme weather we are experiencing may be the result of global warming.  The next few weeks could make it clear whether David Cameron really is a great statesman with his country’s, and the world’s, interests at heart – or whether he is just another successful politician.

Our Iron (hearted?) Chancellor

            I do wish that George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, could manage to have a less self-satisfied smile on his face as he tells us that, despite the growing economy and falling jobless figures, we’ll have to endure increasing austerity for two years after the next general election.  This will involve making further billions of pounds of savings, a large proportion of which will have to come from ‘welfare’. His previous forecasts have been mostly wrong so we can always hope that this one will be too – not least with regard in the assumption that he’ll still be chancellor after the next election.

Once again the poor (they’re the ones who’ll be affected by cuts in the welfare budget) will be the ones to suffer.   The lengths to which Mr Osborne will go to prevent the really wealthy from experiencing even the slightest inconvenience is really astonishing.   You’ll recall that one of his early acts as Chancellor was to reduce the tax payable by those liable for the highest rate of income tax.  That’s people with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year (roughly £2,885 per week!)   I am tired of hearing the oft-repeated tale that if the government dares to ask the wealthy to pay the same proportion of their income in tax as the poor, they’d simply up sticks and leave the UK.

                                                                           

Let them go if they want to; but I suggest that those who care so little for their native land that they’ll live abroad rather than pay their fair share of meeting its financial needs, should automatically lose their British citizenship – which would be restored to them only after they had paid the income tax for which they were due.

Here are some ideas to raise a few extra million (or possibly billion) pounds that, unlike his austerity measures, would make no-one homeless or unable to feed their family or buy them the necessities of life:

Restore that extra payment on the highest band of income tax and reduce the level of liability for that tax from £150,000 to £100,000 a year, a figure that is much more than twice the average income in the UK. This is surely a very moderate and reasonable suggestion.

Make all universal state benefits liable for income tax. Those, like myself, with a supplementary pension from our former employment, already pay tax on our state retirement pension, so why shouldn’t we pay it on winter fuel allowance, attendance allowance, free tv licences, free bus passes and so on?  This would mean my paying a little more income tax  for my fuel allowance, attendance allowance (paid because of my limited mobility), and tv licence – but it wouldn’t seriously impair my living standard.   Others might have to pay rather more but folk whose income was so low that they were not liable to pay income tax would be unaffected.

How much those two measures would raise for the exchequer I don’t know. They would, of course, raise much more if we had a properly graded income tax system in which we all paid a percentage of our gross income in tax.  However much or however little it raised, it would make those with low or average incomes (those hard-working taxpayers top politicians are always on about!) feel that perhaps we are all in this together and the whole thing isn’t just a ‘Robin Hood in reverse’ conspiracy to rob the poor and give to the rich, as it seems to be at present.

‘What’s in a name?’

            ……..asked love-sick Juliet Capulet in what is probably Shakespeare’s best-known play.  There can be quite a lot, as our Clacton MP Douglas Carswell may have found out when he invited readers of his Newsletter to describe him in two words.  I wonder what he was hoping for – Clacton’s Crusader, the People’s Voice, Brussels’ Scourge perhaps?   I wonder if they were among those that he received.

            Hardly surprisingly, his request was greeted with derision by his opponents. Norman Jacobs, described in the Clacton Gazette as a ‘respected historian and Labour supporter’ said that the two words that came to his mind were ‘diddly’ and ‘squat’, words that had been used together by former Tendring Council leader Peter Halliday to describe his opinion of Mr Carswell’s contribution to the town.  I have been acquainted with Norman Jacobs for some years, often supporting his point of view – sometimes opposing it.  I really believe that he could have done better than that – and I wondered if I could.  Stringing words together into a readable narrative is the only real skill I have ever possessed.  Could I summarise our MP’s qualities in just two words?

            The two characteristics that come to my mind whenever Douglas Carswell’s name is mentioned are his fervent Europhobia and his conviction that, if climatic change is taking place, it is part of a natural cycle and nothing whatsoever to do with human activities.  It follows that all this business about finding renewable sources of energy and reducing the ‘greenhouse gases’ in the atmosphere is waste of time and money.

             ‘Climate change denying Europhobe’ uses twice as many words as those requested in Douglas Carswell’s invitation.  Then it came to me – I’m not really sure if it is one word or two but it certainly sums up succinctly my view of our MP.  How about Crypto-Ukipper,* a Conservative MP who prefers Nigel Farage’s outlook to that of David Cameron?

* Ukipper is pronounced You-kipper. You won’t find it in any dictionary yet, but give it a year or two………