Week 43 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

Our ‘free press’ and the politicians……. just who controls whom?

          I have been observing the current quarrel between ‘the press’ and all three main political parties with astonished fascination.  Our free press is, so its representatives insist, the envy of the civilised world.  It is the safeguard of our hard-earned freedoms and must be at all costs protected from interference by scheming politicians.  Ed Miliband’s recent protests against  the Daily Mail’s  vilification of  his father as an ‘enemy of Britain’ is, so it was claimed, an example of attempted interference; ‘Just what one might expect from the son of a committed Marxist’, was implied.

            I knew nothing about Ed Miliband’s dad until recently. However I now know that he was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who subsequently served on a destroyer in our Royal Navy, and took part in the D-day landings on the Normandy beaches. That surely speaks for itself.  I am old enough to remember that the Daily Mail in the 1930s supported the Nazis in Germany, and Hitler and Mussolini’s pal General Franco in Spain.  I remember too the Daily Express, a newspaper with a very similar outlook to that of the Mail assuring us throughout 1938 and the early part of 1939 that ‘There will be no war this year – or next year either!’ There really wasn’t much to be proud of in our ’free press’ in those days.

            With regard to the present concerns of ‘the press’, my own anxiety is almost the exact opposite of theirs.   Unless UKIP triumphs in the next General Election, I don’t really think there is the least possibility of our press coming under government control in any way comparable with that of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or the USSR.   What is a matter of concern is the way – often quite blatant – in which the owners of the press have manipulated and bent the minds and wills of our top politicians.

            I have little doubt that the credit/blame (delete as preferred) for the creation of New Labour lies as much with Rupert Murdoch as it does with Tony Blair and Lord Mandelson.   Remembering The Sun’s boast that, ‘It was the Sun wot done it’ when in 1992 persistent vilification of Neil Kinnock by that newspaper led to an unexpected defeat of the Labour Government, Tony Blair and a few of his colleagues moved the Labour Party’s policies far enough to the right to win the approval of the head of News International.  While Tony Blair was in control, the Sun supported New Labour. Rupert Murdoch acknowledges his own over-riding influence on the political outlook of The Sun, but claims that the editor of The Times has complete freedom of action.  No doubt, but the editor of that once-illustrious publication is well aware of the owner’s views and would be very foolish to ignore them.

            He who pays the piper calls the tune.  On a much more humble scale, I had complete freedom of action when I wrote Tendring Topics (in print) for the Coastal Express. No-one even dreamed of telling me what I could, and what I could not write.  However my awareness of the fact that adverts from Estate Agents and Used Car Salesmen kept the free weekly on the road, made sure that any criticism in my column of either occupation was very limited and discreet.

            Mrs Thatcher courted the good will of Rupert Murdoch and other senior figures in the News International Empire. So did Tony Blair and so, to a greater extent than either of them, did David Cameron and senior members of his government.  John Major was an honourable exception – and John Major suffered for it at the hands of the The Sun.  Of course there were no written agreements between any senior politician and the rulers of the press.  It was just that they were all good friends and the political leaders knew what their friends’ views were (on Europe for example, on immigration, on anything that might cause inconvenience to the extremely wealthy) and bore them in mind when formulating party or government policy.  They were also, of course, well aware of which policies would and which would not produce positive headlines in the Sun!

            It is sometimes claimed that the newspapers have little effect on the way that people vote.  I simply don’t believe this is true.  The newspapers do influence public opinion, and can do so without publishing a single word that isn’t true.  Out of the thousands of newsworthy events that occur every day, most are probably politically neutral.  Of the ones that aren’t, the editor who wishes to succeed in his profession gives those that support the owner’s views, headline and ‘feature article’ treatment.  News stories that oppose those views are either ignored altogether or tucked away half-way down an inside page.   When did you last read a positive story about the European Union, about Green Energy or about the contribution that immigrants make to our economy in the Sun, the Daily Mail or the Daily Express?   Remember that the Sun, arguably the most noxious of the three, has over seven million readers – the largest readership of any daily in the UK.   Of course a sizeable proportion of those seven million believe every word they read – and vote accordingly.   

            Lord Leveson in his report, touched on the way in which newspaper proprietors and their senior staff may influence politicians but, as far as I am aware, offered no solution. I don’t believe that very wealthy individuals, who need not even be British citizens, should be able to control such a powerful means of moulding public opinion. Perhaps a national newspaper or regional newspapers, could be run by an organisation similar to the BBC, which (since it is criticised from both the left and the right) probably gets the balance of its news bulletins and discussion programmes about right.

            I wouldn’t like to see national newspapers under the control of politicians.  But they are at least answerable to us at election time.  I would prefer that to their being controlled by a foreign cosmopolitan billionaire, who is answerable to no-one but himself and owes no loyalty to Britain or to British traditions and culture.

The British Red Cross Society

          A few months ago Ingrid Zeibig, a German friend of mine, sent me a photograph that brought vividly to the forefront of my mind events of nearly seventy years ago when I spent eighteen months as a prisoner of war in Italy, followed by a further eighteen months in Germany.  Particularly in Italy, where I was in a large POW Concentration Camp in northern Italy I learned what constant nagging hunger meant and what could be its consequences.

       
           Now, my doctor would probably tell me that I am overweight. Then my face fell in, my ribs protruded, and my weight fell day by hungry day. Scarcely a week passed without one of my fellow-prisoners dying of hunger related disease.  During that time we had the opportunity of having our photographs taken and sending home to our parents or wives.  My mum took one look at mine and tore it up.  She couldn’t bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow I had become. What kept us alive and never completely devoid of hope during that dreadful time, was the delivery to the camp of food parcels from the British, or sometimes the Canadian, Red Cross Society.  Each parcel contained tins of meat or fish, dried or condensed milk, margarine, a tin of jam or honey, tea or coffee, sugar and biscuits.  We were supposed to get one each, every week, but in Italy delivery was very spasmodic and sometimes we’d go for weeks without a parcel.  Then, when they arrived, the Italian guards insisted on opening each parcel and piercing every food tin so that its contents had to be consumed almost immediately.  We all believed that this was done out of spite and envy but, on reflection; I suppose it was to prevent our saving food to eat if we escaped!

           

There’s Ingrid with a genuine World War II Red Cross Food Parcel originally intended for a hungry POW!  I could practically see – and taste – the contents.

In Germany things for me (though by no means everyone had the same experience) were much better.  I was at a small working camp. Our guards weren’t bad chaps, our rations were better (they realized that they wouldn’t get much work out of us if we weren’t better fed!), the Red Cross parcels came regularly and were distributed unopened. And, of course, when you’re working with food, as we often were, you don’t go hungry!  I have tried always to support the British Red Cross and have often thought of those food parcels and how pleased we were to see them.  The photo that Ingrid sent me was of her with one of those parcels!  She was visiting Colditz Castle (now it seems to be a museum) with a friend, and the parcel – just as I remembered them from my POW days - was among the exhibits.

            I received that photo some months ago but I was reminded of it last week when I learned that the British Red Cross was again distributing food parcels to the hungry – but this time to the hungry in our own country. And Freedom from want was one of the ‘four freedoms’ for which we thought we were fighting in World War II! How shameful that one of the world’s wealthiest countries – that can afford to give tax hand-outs to its wealthiest citizens and patrol the world’s oceans with nuclear submarines - has an underclass that depends on Food Banks and Red Cross Parcels for survival, that this winter will have to decide whether to eat or heat, and spends its coppers ‘having fun’ with the national lottery in the forlorn hope of escaping from soul-destroying poverty to extreme wealth!

           And top politicians have the effrontery to claim that we’re all in this together!

           

             

           

           

             

Week 13 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Happy Easter to all Blog readers!

          This week is an important one for all of us.  There has been – at last – agreement among politicians on the way in which the press should be regulated following the publication of the Leveson Report.  We will have had time to digest the effects of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Budget, which was presented to Parliament last Wednesday the day after last week’s blog was published, and it is the final week of the 2012/2013 Financial Year.  The main force of the government’s austerity programme will begin to be felt a few days into the following week.

A depiction of Christ’s Resurrection in St James C of E Church in Clacton-on-Sea.  The risen Christ is asking weeping Mary Magdalene ‘Why weepest thou?  Who seekest thou?’

           

It is also ‘Holy Week’ the final week of the season of Lent which comes to a climax on Good Friday with the remembrance of the rigged trial and cruel crucifixion of Jesus Christ whom we Christians believe to have been the incarnation of that true light of God that St John declares in verse 9 of the first chapter of his Gospel, 'enlightens everyone who comes into the world’. This is sometimes known as the Quaker Verse because it gives scriptural authority to the Quaker assertion that there is a divine spark, ‘that of God’, within every man, woman and child in the world, irrespective of                                                  their colour, race or creed.

            Fortunately for all humankind the agony and grief of Good Friday was overcome on that first Easter Sunday morning by Jesus’ resurrection and his appearance to the weeping Mary Magdalene.  Blinded by her tears she had imagined that it was the gardener who was sharing her pre-dawn vigil until Jesus made himself known with those kindly words ‘Why are you weeping? Who are you seeking?’ and with incredulous recognition her sorrow turned to joy.   That miraculous resurrection gives Christians the assurance that, in the end, good will triumph over evil.  Compassion, love and forgiveness will ultimately triumph over greed, hatred, selfishness, fear, and thoughts of vengeance, and the will of God ‘will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven’.

            I hope to join with others in giving thanks for that assurance on this Easter Sunday morning.

 Our ‘Free’ Press

          At the beginning of this blog I mentioned that, at long last, agreement had been reached by the political parties about regulation of the press.  Perhaps that statement should be qualified.  The politicians have indeed agreed, but membership of the group of newspapers to be subject to regulation is voluntary.  The editors (or would it be the owners who make the decision?) of one or two newspapers have reluctantly agreed to join ‘the club’ but others are strongly opposed to it.  Unless a clear majority decide to ‘sign on’ the whole elaborate arrangement could surely collapse.

            I was  interested in the comments of Ian Hislop, Editor of Private Eye a hard-hitting publication that I always enjoy reading, during the course of a BBC tv news programme on Tuesday 20^th May.   He pointed out that the press practices that have caused outrage among both celebrities and members of the general public – phone hacking, bribing or attempting to bribe the police or public officials, using recorded material in stolen mobile phones, unwarranted intrusion into the private concerns of members of the public by means of force or deception, were already criminal offences.  Why was it that they hadn’t been pursued before by the forces of the law?

            I think it likely that it was for the same reason that Jimmy Savile was allowed to get away with his activities for so long, and locally and on a much smaller scale, how Lord Hanningfield’s extravagant expense claims as a member of the House of Lords and Leader of Essex County Council, didn’t attract official attention for several years.  Those who knew or suspected wrongdoing had mortgages to pay and families to support.  The person they suspected had powerful friends who clearly had no such suspicions. They may though have had control of the future of any potential whistle-blower, whose promotion, job and whole future could be at risk. It would be best not to say a word without absolute, cast-iron proof.  Even then, it might be wiser to leave it to someone else to blow the whistle.

This brings me to the question of the ownership and control of our ‘free press’.  It is surely wrong for the means of influencing public opinion and swaying the mind of the electorate to be in the hands of wealthy individuals.   It is even worse if those individuals are not British – whether they be Russian oligarchs or American news media millionaires.  Such owners of the press wouldn’t dream of asking their editors and reporters to print anything that is untrue – but those employees know that their future careers will be enhanced if they select material that supports the newspaper owner’s preferences and prejudices as being newsworthy, and reject or put on a back page material that opposes them.  Meanwhile those owners, or their trusted lieutenants, seek the acquaintance and friendship of top politicians.  They don’t, of course, seek to bribe or bully them – but they leave them in no doubt about which policies and actions would ensure favourable headlines and news stories.

            This is not something that could happen.  It is something that has happened and I believe is still happening.  I don’t know the answer but I do know that a ‘free press’ tightly controlled by wealthy individuals isn’t free in any real sense of the word.  While I’d hate to see a government controlled press, I’d hate even more to live under a government controlled by the machinations of foreign media millionaires.       

‘It's all right for some!’

 On Wednesday 20^th March, most of us were trying to work out whether we would be better or worse off after George Osborne’s Budget.  Beer drinking motorists seeking daytime care for their children, who have been deterred from house purchase by the size of the deposit required, may well be better off – at least for the time being.  

            A few privileged employees of Barclays Bank had no such worries.  For them – despite the banking scandals of the past year – Christmas had come early!  On the same day that Mr Osborne was making his annual Budget Speech, Barclays were announcing that they were paying a total of £38.5 million in bonuses to their top employees.   At the top of the hand-out tree was their Head of Investment Banking who was given shares worth £17.5 million!  He may have had a few personal cash-flow problems – or perhaps he knew something about Barclays that we don’t – because he promptly cashed the lot.

            Barclays Chief Executive didn’t do quite so well.  He pocketed a mere £5.3 million worth of shares of which he cashed only half.

            It’s nice to know that these two gentlemen will also be getting a hand-out from a grateful government next week when the income tax on their take-home pay above £150,000 will be reduced.  Who was it said, ‘We’re all in this together’?

Talking about income tax reminds me………

          …….that one feature of the Chancellor’s Budget will benefit me if I’m still around to take advantage of it in April 2014, when it comes into force.  The first £10,000 of my income will be tax-free.   I’d rather that it wasn’t though.  I don’t think that those whose income is less than £10,000 a year should be ‘freed from the burden of income tax’

            Income tax is the only form of taxation that is levied directly in accordance with our ability to pay it.  VAT and taxes on petrol, alcohol, the lottery and the like are the same for wealthy and poor alike.  Consequently they hit the poor the hardest. Income tax could be properly graded so that it has the same impact on us all.  I’d like to see the same percentage of every adult’s gross income be their first and most important tax demand – an ‘annual membership fee’ for the very considerable privilege of being a British citizen.

            Levied on everyone, from the very wealthiest to those on minimum wage or ‘benefit’, it would of course mean that a much larger sum was collected from the wealthy than from the poor.  But we would all part with the same proportion of our income.  No one would starve or be rendered homeless by having to pay it – and I believe that quite a low percentage of gross income (30 percent perhaps) levied on every adult without exception would make it possible for the minimum wage and unemployment and similar benefits to be higher.   We would all have a stake in the country’s prosperity.  We would truly, ‘all be in this together’.

England’s most deprived area

                                                                         

 An Avenue on the Brooklands Estate taken by a ‘ Guardian’ photographer.  

The Guardian newspaper sent a reporter, Ms. Amelia Gentleman, to Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate  on Budget Day to discover how England’s most deprived area would be likely to fare under Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget.  In her report Ms Gentleman described the Brooklands Estate as consisting, ‘of small houses, some barely bigger than beach huts, packed together along potholed lanes’. Many of the residents were, ‘entirely dependent on the welfare system which the Chancellor described as “bloated”.  With 51 percent of adults receiving benefit, the Brooklands Estate acts as a test zone for the impact of government welfare reform.   Residents here will experience the changes in great numbers as they roll out later this year.  They are already feeling the effects of tightened eligibility to some benefits…………As well as being named the most deprived place in England and Wales in 2011, the area was found last year to have the highest number of young people not in employment or training, with a third of 16 to 24 year olds claiming jobseeker’s allowance, more than five times the national average of 6 percent.

Later in her report she comments that, ‘Brooklands’ population has always been transient but recently officials have noticed a bigger influx of families from London – possibly as a result of housing benefit changes in the capital, which are forcing families to search for cheaper housing elsewhere’.  A house price survey had revealed that Brooklands is one of the easiest areas in the country to buy a house.  Bungalows there are on sale for around £20,000.

            She reported that many people living in the area , ‘would like to sign up to Osborne’s vision of an aspiration nation, and become hard-working home-owning taxpayers’ but that there simply aren’t the jobs in the area to make it possible for them to fulfil that dream. ‘There are 3,500 unemployed people in the surrounding Tendring District competing for just 500 jobs currently being advertised’.

Making the most of the Budget!

A economics expert on BBC Breakfast tv on 21^st March pointed out that, thanks to the Budget, if we drank 10,000 pints of beer – we would save £10!

           

  

Week 18 2012

Tendring Topics........on Line

 ‘The Proof of the Pudding…………’

            It was about three years ago that I decided to have a solar water heating system installed.  My bungalow has a south-sloping roof and Clacton-on-Sea has, statistically, a good deal more than an average number of hours of bright sunshine.   I was then in my late eighties and knew perfectly well that I would be unlikely to recover the capital cost of installation.  However, thanks to the present government’s fiscal policies, it seemed probable that the money saved would be greater than the interest the cost of installation was earning in a bank savings account.  In any case, again thanks to government policy, my banked savings were inexorably decreasing in value as each month passed.

            The solar water system installed was a complicated one – a development of the very primitive solar systems that I had envisaged when writing my books about domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage twenty years earlier!    An additional small hot water storage cylinder was provided in the roof space. A temperature controlled pump circulated an antifreeze solution in a closed circuit between the solar panel on the roof and the new cylinder to warm the water stored in it.  A second electronically controlled pump exchanged this solar heated water with cooler water in the main storage cylinder. The flow and return pipes between the boiler and the main cylinder remained unchanged.

            The system worked very well when it was working properly.   My monthly direct debit payments for gas and electricity dropped from over £100 to something over £70. There was a lot that could go wrong though – and did!  Faults were always promptly put right by the installers. I called them teething problems though it must be said that some of them carried on well into the system’s adolescence!!  Last year at this time, we had had a hard winter in which I had let the gas boiler run night and day for several days.  Several faults had occurred and had been rectified. My monthly payments rose to £98.  I began to ask myself if it had all been worthwhile!

           

            Providentially (though it didn’t seem like that at the time!) last summer my main hot water storage cylinder failed.   It had been in constant operation for nearly a quarter of a century.   Its heat exchanger was covered with hard water scale. The gas boiler was taking an unreasonably long time to heat the water in the cylinder. 

            One of the operatives of Solar Power Ltd. my installers, suggested that I should replace the old cylinder with one of their recently developed ‘dual action’ solar cylinders and thus greatly simplify my system.  It would, I was assured, give me trouble-free service.   It was quite simple really.  The small cylinder in the roof space and the second circulating pump were dispensed with.  The new hot water storage cylinder is rather larger than the old one and is very heavily insulated.   It has two separate heat exchangers inside; one, in the top one-third of the cylinder is connected to the flow and return pipes from the boiler.   The other, near the base of the cylinder, has flow and return pipes connected to the solar panel on the roof.  There is just one electronically controlled pump which circulates an antifreeze solution through this latter heat exchanger when the liquid circulating through the solar panel becomes hotter than the water in the storage cylinder.  

During the summer, it would be possible on sunny days to switch the boiler off and rely entirely on the solar panel and that lower heat exchanger for all domestic hot water.   Even in the winter just an hour or two of sunshine would be sufficient to preheat the water in the cylinder before it passed through the boiler. Less gas would therefore be needed to bring it to the required temperature.

            The new ‘dual action’ cylinder was installed in mid-July.  At about the same time I took advantage of a Government grant and had my roof space heavily insulated by a specialist firm.  As we moved through autumn into winter the prices of electricity and gas rose dramatically and the government cut services and benefits.  Some old – and not so old – people were faced with a stark choice; Eat or Heat!

            My new solar hot water system was working perfectly.  It had no ‘teething problems’.   I could hear its pump switch on to warm the water in the storage cylinder, as the solar panel on the roof began to heat up.  I felt that that extra insulation above my ceilings was helping to retain warmth in my bungalow.  I awaited the annual review of my E-on account with both anxiety and hope.  Had the new system plus the insulation cancelled the effect of the price increases?  Would my monthly direct debit payments stay unchanged?  Was it just possible that they would be reduced?  The proof of the pudding is in the eating!

            That proof arrived last week – a large official communication from E-on.  I opened it with some trepidation, but I need not have worried.  My hopes had been more than justified.  My account was comfortably in credit.  £74.64 would be repaid to me within the next few days and, with effect from 1^st June, my monthly direct debit payments would be reduced from £98.00 to £62.00.   Solar power plus insulation had saved money!

            My improvements had been made towards the end of July.  They had therefore been effective for only nine months (the least sunny nine months) of the year.  Next April there should, with any luck, be a further reduction.  However, as I shall be celebrating my 91st birthday in three weeks time, it would (if I were a gambling man) be unwise of me to bet too heavily on my ever seeing that reduction!

            I hope, by the way, that I am not so pleased with the success of my own efforts to reduce my energy bills as to forget that there are many old people, and many poor families, who are not able to take similar action. They really do sometimes have to choose between Eating and Heating!   I wish I could solve their problems as effectively as I have solved my own.

An Evil Empire?

          When the Leveson Enquiry first began its work, I wrote in this blog that I had little doubt that the nefarious press practices of phone and email hacking, and the even more corrupt and illegal practice of bribing and/or threatening the Police and other public officials, would be thoroughly investigated and exposed.   I thought it likely though that there would be far less investigation and exposure of an exercise of press power that affects every single one of us but is probably not even illegal.  It is the way in which those who own and control the news media influence the policies and decisions of senior politicians, thus promoting national policies to the advantage of those owners and controllers rather than that of the rest of us – the nation as a whole.

            On 25^th April Mr Rupert Murdoch, whose News International owns forty percent of Britain’s national press and has similar holdings in North America and in Australia and New Zealand., assured the Leveson Enquiry that he had never asked a favour of Mrs Thatcher or of any other British Prime Minister.  It was a claim that was dismissed by the Daily Mirror (not a Murdoch publication!) as codswallop.  I have little doubt though that the Mirror was wrong and that Rupert Murdoch’s claim was literally true.

            Mr Murdoch wouldn’t condescend to ask a favour of any politician. Why on earth should he?  He doesn’t seek their favour.  They seek his.  Tony Blair created New Labour, reversing everything for which the pioneers of the Labour Movement had fought, to gain the approval of Mr Murdoch and the electoral support of the Sun.  David Cameron, while still in opposition, interrupted a family holiday in Turkey to fly to Rupert Murdoch on his private yacht on the Mediterranean.  In office he consulted with him and his lieutenants again and again, inviting him to the back door of 10 Downing Street to escape the notice of the non-Murdoch press.   Cameron appointed Andy Coulson, former News of the World Editor, to be his personal spin doctor and pursued a neighbourly relationship with Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s ‘right hand woman’.  Rupert Murdoch doesn’t need politicians’ favours.   They need his!

            Murdoch has never concealed the fact that he owns and controls newspapers to promote political causes - unfettered free enterprise and extreme Euroscepticism!  Politicians who support those causes can expect the support of the Murdoch press empire – those who don’t can expect derision!   When, after a Tory electoral victory, the Sun claimed ‘It was us what done it!’ it was no idle boast.

            If we really want a free and independent press (independent of ‘big business’ as well as of the state) we will make certain that it is impossible for a substantial section of it to come under the control of one individual, particularly not someone who is a foreign national, has his home and principal interests outside the United Kingdom, and owes and acknowledges no loyalty to our country, its culture, and its traditions.

 ‘I don’t believe it!’

            My nature is, I think, to be somewhat credulous and unsuspicious; the uncharitable might say ‘gullible’.  I tend to believe what I have been told until I have good reason to do otherwise.  On balance, I prefer, very occasionally, to be deceived, rather than to suspect wrongly that someone is deceiving me.  There are limits to my credulity though. I find that these days those limits are constantly being overstepped by politicians and others in the media spotlight.

            Take, for instance, the case of Mr Jeremy Hunt, Culture Minister.   Mr Hunt took over from Lib.Dem. Vince Cable the decision about the ownership of the residual BSkyB shares when Mr Cable was trapped into remarking that he had declared war on Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire was eager to acquire BSkyB in its entirety.  Mr Hunt was on record as an admirer of News International, so David Cameron obviously felt that he could be depended upon to make an absolutely impartial judgement and arrive at the decision everybody (well, everybody whose opinion mattered) wanted!

            Adam Smith, Mr Hunt’s principal adviser, seems to have imagined that our Government was the political wing of News International (it was a mistake anyone might have made!) and carried on a considerable email correspondence with News International on that assumption.  What I find difficult to believe is that, considering the nature of the ‘advice’ that Mr Hunt must have been receiving from his adviser, he still had no doubt that he would  be able to make an impartial judgement on the disposal of those BSkyB shares.  I am reminded of the story of the judge in America’s ‘wild west’ who told a captured bandit, ‘We’ll give you a fair trial – and then we’ll hang you!’  

              There is little doubt in my mind that the acquisition of the whole of BSkyB by News International would have gone ahead ‘on the nod’ had not the extent of News International’s phone hacking activities come to light at a crucial moment – and Rupert Murdoch had decided that it would be politic to withdraw his bid for those shares rather than to risk its being refused on the grounds that News International was an unsuitable organisation.

That brings me to the other news story that has stretched my credulity beyond its limits.  I just cannot believe that Rupert Murdoch, the astute news media superman, who prided himself on keeping a tight rein on all his enterprises, on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Antipodes, could possibly have allowed himself to become a victim of a conspiracy of his underlings to prevent his learning about the wide-spread phone and email hacking that had become the practice in at least part of his British media domains.  He was, so he claimed, a victim of that conspiracy and not its source.

            As Victor Meldrew, anti-hero of One Foot in the Grave, used to proclaim on our tv screens, ‘I  don’t believe it!’

‘The Cruellest Month!’

          T.S. Eliot begins his poem ‘The waste land’ with the remark that ‘April is the cruellest month’.   April 2012 certainly was that for our Prime Minister and the coalition government.  A unpopular Budget benefitting millionaires was followed by a scathing comment from one of his own Conservative MPs that he and his Chancellor of the Exchequer were ‘two arrogant rich boys who don’t know the price of milk’

Then there were those emails to which I have referred above – and Lord Leveson’s disinclination to stray into the Prime Minister’s domain and decide whether or not Jeremy Hunt had breached ‘the Ministerial Code’.   Almost at the end of the month came the pronouncement of Scotland’s Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop that the government’s policies were benefitting the rich at the expense of the poor.  On the same day came the official revelation that the richest of rich Britons had become even richer!   The rest of us don’t need official confirmation to know that we have become poorer!

This week are the local government elections.  The Prime Minister must surely be praying that the electorate will concentrate on local issues!

           

           

           

           

Week 4 2012

Tendring Topics..........on Line


‘When the Bon Marché was shuttered…….’

            ……..When the feet were hot and tired,

           Outside Charringtons we waited, by the STOP HERE WHEN REQUIRED’

            So wrote the late Sir John Betjeman in his poem Parliament Hill Fields, a graphic evocation of part of the London scene of days gone by.  Sadly it seems that Clacton’s Bon Marché in Pier Avenue may soon be closing its shutters for good as its parent company Peacocks is threatened by the current financial crisis and is endeavouring to sell off its long-established satellite.

            The Peacock Group, like the country as a whole and many of its inhabitants, is seriously in debt.  A spokesman for the Group is quoted as saying that the board and its advisors have been discussing possible restructuring with its creditors. No agreement has been reached but discussions with other possible investors are taking place. He added ominously, ‘To protect the business while discussions with such investors are going on, the directors of the Peacock Group have filed a notice of intention to appoint an administrator’.

            Compared with many other towns Clacton-on-Sea hasn’t done too badly during the past few years.  The gap left by the closure of Woolworths and that left by the closure of the Co-op Departmental Store in Station Road have both been filled, though in each case with less prestigious enterprises employing fewer people than their predecessors.   The much-criticised re-design of the town centre has, I think, been found attractive by visitors, though it was surely idiotic to move the Tourist Information Centre from its central position at the junction of Pier Avenue and West Avenue, to the Town Hall.

Could this now be changing?  Pierre Oxley of the Clacton Chamber of Trade says, ‘If we do lose Peacocks and Bon Marché it would hit us hard. I always think that one empty shop leads to more appearing.  It looks like it is going to get harder and harder for businesses this year’.

Other depressing local news is that the number of unemployed within the Tendring District has risen steadily for five consecutive months.  There are 170 more people unemployed today than at the same time last year.  Nationally eight percent of 18 to 24 year olds are unemployed.  In the Tendring Area the figure is almost 12 percent, well above the national average. On the plus side, there have been more vacancies at Tendring’s Job Centres – the number has risen from 500 last November to 635 today.  Cheering perhaps, but it still means that there are about six applicants for every job vacancy!

A day or two ago I listened to a young man who has never experienced employment being interviewed on BBC Radio 4.  He has qualifications in gardening and regularly goes up to the local golf course where there is a half-promise of work some time in the future.  He is, of course, the kind of young man whom local authority parks and gardens departments were once seeking.  He would have started off on menial jobs like weeding flower beds and clearing them of rubbish, and gradually learnt his trade.  Who knows? He could have been another Alan Titchmarsh in the making!

However local authorities no longer have their own Parks and Gardens Staff.  They have to employ private contractors for the work that those departments once undertook.  In any case, the kind of jobs that this young unemployed man is capable of doing in the first instance are precisely those that supporters of David Cameron’s Big Society are hoping will be done free by enthusiastic volunteers!

How much longer will it be, I wonder, before that young man is not just unemployed but unemployable?

Waste and Recycling Collections

          I don’t think that I am likely to be accused of being an uncritical admirer of the current Tendring District Council and its policies. I had thought though that its members had reason to be proud of their waste and recycling collection service.  Householders are all issued with a supply of black plastic sacks for unrecyclable waste and a green box for items that can be recycled. These, in our district, are paper and cardboard, metal cans of every kind, and plastic bottles.

            Collections of both refuse and recyclables take place regularly, both on the same day each week.  Our council has stayed with a weekly collection while many others changed to fortnightly to save money.   I have been sorry that glass jars and bottles are not included among the recyclables.  It isn’t easy for those without a car to take glass containers to the nearest bottle bank and, for those who do have a car, burning petrol by making a special car journey for that purpose is surely defeating its purpose.

            Despite this reservation I was very surprised and disappointed to learn a month or two ago, that the Tendring District’s record for collecting recyclables was the poorest in the whole of Essex!  It is presumably in an effort to remedy this situation that the Council and their contractors Veolia intend to introduce a restructured collection system within the next few months.

            Every householder will be issued with a red recycling box for paper and cardboard only and two new green boxes, one large and one small, for cooked or raw food waste, in addition to the existing green box (which will then be used only for metal cans and plastic bottles) and the black plastic sacks used for residual waste.  The small new green box for food waste is to be kept in the kitchen and is intended to be emptied into the larger one to be kept out outside. 

The black plastic bag of unrecyclable waste will be collected and the large food waste container will be emptied ever week.  The red box of paper and cardboard and the green one of cans and plastic bottles will be collected on the same day but on alternate weeks.

            I realise that, now that I do no gardening and am living alone, I have virtually no food waste!   I use mostly frozen or otherwise ready-for-cooking vegetables and prefer vegetarian dishes though I am only a somewhat half-hearted vegetarian.  I never prepare and cook more food than I can eat in one meal!  Mind you, even in my previous married life when I was a keen gardener I would have had no food or other organic waste for the Council’s bins – I had my own garden to keep productive and my own compost bins to feed for that purpose!

            The Council’s new scheme seems a bit complicated but I hope that we’ll get used to it and that it will be a success.  As I ride round Clacton on my ‘iron horse’ I notice that on ‘collection days’ there are a substantial number of homes with several black plastic bags bursting with rubbish on display and not a green recyclables box in sight.  If Tendring is to move up the recycling ‘League Table’, dealing with these non-co-operating householders must be a top priority!

Just how ‘free’ is our ‘free’ Press?

If here is one thing about which all the witnesses at the Leveson enquiry into the behaviour of the press agree, it is that no-one wants a government controlled press.  We have seen the results of that in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union.   Our press must remain free and uncontrolled by politicians.  Although the excesses of which a ‘free press’ is capable have been made clear for all to see, there remains strong opposition to any kind of statutory control.

But just how ‘free’ are our newspapers?  Privately owned, they are subject to market forces like everything else in a market economy.  For their survival they depend heavily on their revenue from advertising.   The wise editor makes certain that he (or she) doesn’t upset too many advertisers too often.

This operates at even the very lowest level.  As many blog readers know, this blog is a direct descendant of the Tendring Topics comment column that I wrote every week in the Coastal Express (it actually changed its name several times but that is how I always thought of it!) for twenty-three years.   The Coastal Express relied heavily on advertising revenue from Estate Agents and from the sellers of new and used cars.  Nobody warned me, but my reason told me that it would be foolish to be too critical of either estate agents or used car salesmen!  So I wasn’t.  Searching back through my memory I don’t recall a single occasion on which this thought affected anything that I wrote – but it could have done.

Similarly, one of the witnesses at the Leveson Enquiry commented that if a reporter saw that his employer was enjoying cosy tea parties with the Prime Minister and other senior Ministers, and that a former senior colleague had been appointed as the Prime Minister’s personal spin doctor, his reports were likely to be slanted accordingly.

Rupert Murdoch made no bones about the fact that he controlled the Sun for political purposes (‘It was us wot done it’, boasted the Sun after a Tory victory) but is proud of the fact that he gives the editor of The Times free rein.  Very creditable – but surely the editor of The Times is well aware of Mr Murdoch’s general political philosophy and is unlikely to promote a point of view strongly opposed to it.  He who pays the piper calls the tune, and if he doesn’t actually call it – well, the piper knows his general musical taste. As a modern proverb that I heard recently put it, ’If you must hide your light under a bushel, make sure everyone knows under which bushel it is hidden!’

By the promotion or rejection of news stories as much as by direct persuasion, the news media does sway public opinion and thereby influence the results of local and general elections.  The BBC and the ITV set admirable examples of objectivity.  Perhaps newspapers should be run by independent editorial boards on similar lines.

I would not like to see government controlled newspapers, but the government does at least comprise politicians whom we can influence and ultimately accept or reject.   On balance I would prefer to read a newspaper run by people who are answerable to the electorate than by immensely wealthy individuals, answerable to no-one, who may not be British citizens and therefore owe no loyalty to our country; or Brits who have their fortunes stashed away in an overseas tax haven and who therefore escape our burden of taxation.  It is one thing for the very wealthy, whether they be Russian oil oligarchs or British or Trans-Atlantic multimillionaires, to own football teams, luxury yachts and half a dozen palatial homes – but quite another for them to control the means of influencing our thoughts and our choices.  They will inevitably serve their own best interests, which are very unlikely to be the same as ours!

An Early Learning Aid

            A modern silent movie’s nomination for this year’s film awards  took me back to my childhood when all films were silent!   Poole’s Cinema in Ipswich’s Tower Street, favoured by my parents because I was a member of a national daily’s ‘birthday club’ that gave me free admission, ‘when accompanied by a paying adult’, continued to project silent films long after all other local cinemas had gone over to ‘talkies’.   I well remember my first talkie – it was a ‘who-done-it’ called ‘The Argyle Case’ and I saw it at the Ipswich Regent Cinema (it’s still there I believe) in the late 1920s or early '30s.

            It has been only fairly recently when failing hearing has made me glad to make use of the subtitles nowadays available on tv programmes, that I have realized what a valuable learning aid those silent films must have been.  To really enjoy them you had to be able to read – and to read fast – before each caption disappeared and its successor appeared on the screen.

            Kids who might have scorned to read a ‘boring old book’ were desperately eager to know what ‘Buck Jones’ or ‘Tom Mix’ had said to the crooked Sheriff before leaping onto his trusty steed and galloping off to save the heroine from ‘a fate worse than death’*.   There was just one way to find out – learn to read!

            That accounts for the fact that, while I understand there are plenty of illiterates and semi-literates around today, during the seven years I spent in the Army from 1939 till 1946, I met only one chap who couldn’t read battery orders and couldn’t communicate with his mum and dad, and his girlfriend.  We had all spent our early childhoods speed-reading the subtitles of those silent movies!

*Yes, some of us were quite eager to find out what that was too!