21st April 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

I’m not alone!

            I had begun to think that I was a solitary voice crying in the wilderness in my dislike of ‘right to buy'  and, if the Conservatives win the general election, its progression from the tenants of local authorities to those of Housing Associations.  However I was pleased to read in the Church Times that Dr. David Walker, Bishop of Manchester, has condemned it as making economic nonsense and being morally indefensible.   David Orr, Chief Executive Officer of the National Housing Federation also describes the extension of ‘right to buy’ to tenants of Housing Associations as fundamentally the wrong answer to our country’s housing problems since it involves the transfer of large sums of money to private individuals who are already some of the best and most cheaply housed people in the country.   Furthermore, he says that it is completely unfair to the tens of thousands of tenants of private landlords who haven’t the remotest possible of ever becoming home owners. 

            With the general election coming ever nearer I might be asked, and I have indeed asked myself, why – since I am so strongly opposed to the present coalition government – I don’t wholeheartedly support the Labour Party, which is the only political force with a realistic possibility of replacing them.

            The reason is that there are a few political objectives about which I feel strongly.  My support, little and feeble as it may be, goes to any party that shares those objectives.

            I believe very strongly that the enormous gap between the incomes of the very wealthiest and the poorest in our country is scandalous – the largest in Europe and one of the largest in the developed world.   Its narrowing should be a government priority.

            During the decade of Labour rule that gap widened and Ed Miliband’s Labour Party has no plans to use income tax, or any other effective means, to narrow it.

            Compelling local authorities and/or Housing Associations to sell dwellings to sitting tenants at discounted prices is a betrayal of earlier and wiser generations who provided those homes for letting to eliminate homelessness, overcrowding and sub-standard housing.  ‘Right to buy’ should be repealed as a major cause of our present housing crisis.

            New Labour failed to repeal ‘right to buy’ when it had the opportunity to do so and Ed Miliband has actually apologised for the Labour Party’s earlier opposition to its introduction.

The possession of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, does not protect our country from attack any more than carrying a knife protects an individual.  It might encourage any ill-disposed country, or terrorist group, possessing similar weapons to use them against us before we had a chance to use ours. The threat of using nuclear weapons is only effective if we are in fact prepared to use them.   If we ever did so we would be guilty of mass murder and possibly responsible for a chain of events that could result in the extinction of the human race.  We should cease our reliance on nuclear weapons as an ‘ultimate deterrent’ and disarm our Trident Nuclear Submarine fleet.  Reliance on Nuclear Defence has been rightly described as Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD!

Meanwhile, the coalition government has run down our regular army which can be used for genuine ‘defence’ as distinct from acts of vengeance, for peacekeeping, and for replacing ‘outsourced’ private enterprises, when they fail to fulfil the public services for which they have been contracted.  Where would we have been had the army not been available to replace the firm that had contracted to provide security for the Olympics and had failed to do so?

David Cameron has announced that a future Conservative Government would replace the existing ageing Trident Submarine fleet with four new state-of-the-art nuclear submarines costing billions of pounds.   Ed Miliband has been at pains to assure the electorate that he would not oppose this.

I believe that a responsible government needs to carry out a thorough review of Britain’s foreign policy, beginning with referendums on our membership of NATO and our ‘special relationship’ with the USA.  These have resulted in our blindly following the American lead into the illegal invasion of Iraq (into which we were led by deliberate lies about Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and its complicity with the outrage of ‘9/11’) and the unwinnable war in Afghanistan, despite our experience of failure in similar wars in that country in the 19^th century!  We have not had reciprocal support from the USA, particularly in the recovery of the Falklands from invasion by Argentina.

More recently, while our EU partners are struggling with the Kiev government, the Russian government and the Ukrainian rebels to secure a lasting peace in Ukraine, our coalition government has given, and is giving, military support to the Kiev government – a government that has lied repeatedly to obtain NATO support, has ruthlessly shelled its own people, and has driven over a million Ukrainians into seeking refuge in Russia.

It might have been expected that UKIP, claiming to be fighting for the UK’s independence, would have agreed with my ideas for a radical revision of Britain’s foreign policy..  It seems though that they’re happy enough having our foreign and defence policies dictated by foreigners from across the Atlantic.

 I have never trusted Nigel Farage whose meteoric rise to fame reminds me too much of Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany in the late 1920s and early ‘30s.  I hadn’t realized though until the election campaigns got into their stride that he was campaigning under false colours.   Ukip, under Nigel Farage, isn’t battling for UK Independence.  He and his disciples just want to sever our connection with Europe to which we are linked by geography, history and culture, and to the European Union in which Britain has an equal and influential voice..  If they were honest they’d just describe themselves as Europhobes.

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, I’d like the new government to accept the need for early and decisive action to combat and alleviate the effects of the global climate change that is taking place before our eyes. Already we have seen unprecedented drought and bush fires in Australia and parts of the USA. There has also been severe coastal flooding in parts of the USA and a period of unseasonably arctic conditions extending from Canada almost as far as Florida.  Island nations in the Pacific, and parts of the Indian subcontinent have been threatened with extinction. Even in the equable UK there are many households still suffering from the effects of last year’s floods in Somerset and in the Thames valley.

Nigel Farage denies that unprecedented climate change is taking place or – if it is - that human activity has any responsibility for causing it.  Given the opportunity he’d stop all government financial support for wind farms and solar farms.  He’d encourage the extraction of every last ton of coal from British coalfields and the last barrel of oil from our inland and off-shore oil reserves.  He’d tear up the British countryside by ‘fracking’ gas or oil from the beds of shale deep below our feet.

The other party leaders have more respect for the urgent warnings of scientists world-wide and for the need to take urgent action in the face of otherwise inevitable catastrophe.  Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband, on one or other of whom prompt action surely depends, are aware of this.  Both are fully determined to take resolute action…….but not just yet.  Only in the Green Party’s election literature has the threat of climate change featured prominently.   Only the Green Party shares the concerns that are important to me. In Clacton’s by-election I voted tactically for the Conservative Candidate because I thought he had the best chance of defeating the turn-coat former Conservative now Ukipper, Douglas Carswell, who was in fact elected.  For the General Election I shall follow the advice that I quoted in this blog a week or so ago, given by Polonius to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, ‘This above all, to thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not  then be false to any man’.

I shall vote for Chris Southall, the Green candidate.   He is a local man, living with his family in Burrs Road He is a trained engineer and has been self-employed for most of his life, working as a potter, computer engineer, drummer and with people with special needs.  He has been both a school governor and a parish councillor.  Chris practises what he preaches.  He and his family live in an ‘Eco house’ with a Permaculture Land Centre that is sometimes open to the public. 

He may be unlikely to win the election but a vote for him is not a vote wasted. My vote, together with those of all who vote Green at the General Election, will give national politicians an idea of the growing number of folk in the UK who care passionately about world peace, fairness and justice, and the future of the world in which we live.

            Voting for the whole of Tendring District Council will take place on the same day as the General Election.  In my (Alton Park) ward I have a choice between two Labour and Co-op, two Conservative, and two UKIP candidates.  I shall vote for the Labour and Co-op hopefuls, more in the hope of keeping the Ukippers and the Tories out than of getting those for whom I am voting in!

           

             

              

             

           

           

             

Week 38 2014

Tendring Topics ……….on line

‘Don’t tear our happy family apart!’

            That is the message that David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, leaders of the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour Parties, took with them on their separate journeys to Scotland last week in a desperate attempt to boost the number of NO votes in the referendum to be held in that country on 18^th September (only three days away as this blog is published!). This will decide whether or not Scotland becomes an independent nation or remains part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as it is at this moment.

            They have left it a little late. Over 150 years ago Benjamin Disraeli, destined to become a distinguished Prime Minister and to be regarded as the founder of the modern Conservative Party, declared in his political novel, ‘Sybil, or the Two Nations’  that Great Britain had already been torn apart ‘horizontally’ into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor.  He wrote vivid descriptions of the squalor and abject poverty in which  working people lived in the early part of Queen Victoria’s reign.  Since then circumstances have improved for all of us. However, the yawning gap between rich and poor caused by that ‘horizontal tear’, dividing Britain into two nations grows wider year by year. This is a direct result of the actions and failure to take action of the political predecessors of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband.  It widened during the decade of Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ rule, and is widening again today as the coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats rewards the wealthy and penalises the poor!

            No government ever agrees to a referendum unless it feels confident that a majority will vote the way that that government prefers. Two years ago, David Cameron felt quite sure that a referendum on Scottish Independence to be held in September 2014 would yield a comfortable NO majority vote. He was happy to agree to its being held. He insisted on a simple IN or OUT vote because he thought, probably quite correctly, that there might well be a large number of voters who would hesitate to vote for full independence but would like greater autonomy for Scotland.   I have little doubt that he now wishes that he had offered Scottish voters that ‘middle way’.   If the Scots had been offered the choice of greater autonomy within a looser British federation, it would certainly have split the nationalist vote and might well have made it possible for the present system to continue unchanged.  Now – faced with the real possibility of a majority YES vote, he is having to offer ‘greater autonomy within the UK’ as a bribe to try to win over a few thousand still-undecided or YES voters. Thus, even if the Scots Nationalists fail to get a majority YES vote they will have achieved considerably greater autonomy – as well as having retained the possibility of full independence at a later date; not perhaps a win/win situation but far from being a total defeat either.

      
             The possibility that an independent Scottish Government might try, in at least one part of Britain, to narrow the gap caused by that horizontal tear that makes one nation into two, the poor and the wealthy, is one of the reasons why if I were a Scot, I’d be voting YES in that fateful referendum in a few days time.  Other reasons are the hope that independence might result in country free of nuclear weapons and without Trident nuclear submarines, and a country that wished to remain in a more closely integrated European Union but was questioning whether it benefited from membership of NATO and from a very one-sided ‘special relationship’ with the USA.

            Within the United Kingdom these are all issues that are not available for negotiation and (except for EU membership) on which we will never be given a chance to vote.  Oh yes – and it would be nice to live in a country virtually free of the neo-Fascism of Ukip!

And the effect of a YES majority on the rest of us?

           I don’t live in Scotland and, as far as I know, I don’t have a single Scottish ancestor.  I am about as southern-English as it is possible to be.  On several happy camping holidays though, my family and I have travelled the length and breadth of Scotland from the border to John o’ Groats and from the Isle of Skye to the east coast.  We liked the Scottish people and the mountains and the lochs – though we never learned to love the Scottish midges and few would deny that we generally get better weather at home on the north-east Essex coast!  We don't call a drizzle a 'Scotch Mist' for no reason!

            If the referendum on the 18^th yields a YES majority I’ll congratulate our Scottish neighbours and wish them well.  If I were half a century younger I’d be considering emigrating there! I can’t though ignore the fact that we English would miss them badly.  There would be no group of Scottish MPs to challenge the more outrageous of the coalition government’s policies. It is very likely that we would have to endure a Conservative/Ukip coalition government – perhaps a succession of them! We would probably leave the EU without bothering to go to the expense and trouble of a referendum. Outrageous Ukip demands would be likely to result in many responsible Conservatives repudiating the coalition, and the Ukip leader deciding that ‘because of the mess we have inherited from the previous Con/Lib.Dem. coalition government it will be necessary to have temporary single-party government under firm leadership, to ensure the speedy implementation of necessary emergency measures. The country’s political leader will adopt the traditional English title of Lord-Protector and will continue in office until those measures have been introduced and enforced’.

            No, I don’t really suppose that England’s future would be quite as dire as that in the event of a YES majority. During what is proving to be an unconscionably long lifetime I have discovered that, particularly where political issues are concerned, outcomes are very rarely as good as optimists had hoped – but are even less frequently as bad as pessimists had feared.   I do remember though how, in Germany in the late 1920s and early '30s, many people first dismissed Hitler as a funny little man with a Charlie Chaplin moustache and some really daft ideas – a bit of a fruit-cake in fact.  Later, major German industrialists and traditional military leaders thought they could control him and use him for their purposes – but he and his brown-shirted followers controlled and used them – and the Third Reich was born.  I hope that I didn’t spend seven years of my late teens and early twenties playing a tiny role in the destruction of that Third Reich, only to live to see comparable developments in 21^st century Britain!

 Our own by-election

            The possibility that Ukip could develop into an Anglicised NAZI Party and its leader into an Anglo-Saxon Adolf Hitler will certainly be in my mind when I place my cross on the ballot paper on 9^th October. United Kingdom Independence Party sounds innocent enough, and Nigel Farage seems a pleasant enough fellow – enjoying a fag and a drink, and not a bit like everyone’s idea of a scheming politician.  Quite so, but then who would have expected the mildly cranky National Socialist German Workers’ Party to become a movement of extreme right-wing nationalist thugs prepared to use any means – mass murder, torture, genocide – to achieve their ends.  Hitler too; we think of him as being an unscrupulous raving rabble-rouser, but he had an unquestionably magnetic personality and could be good company when he chose to be.  Certainly he too was no-one’s idea of a scheming politician.

             The national press is forecasting a landslide victory for Douglas Carswell and his Ukippers.  I can’t think why. Our former MP has deserted the political party that has loyally supported him and has forced a totally unnecessary by-election only seven months before a scheduled general election. That by-election will cost us taxpayers something like £100,000.  He presumably hopes to bask in the glory of being Ukip’s very first Member of Parliament.  That should guarantee him  a top job if and when Nigel Farage forms his first government!

            Douglas Carswell and his Ukippers are certainly working hard for his election and don’t appear to be short of funds.  I, and presumably all Clactonians, have been deluged by leaflets – I’ve had at least five of them (two a couple of weeks before his defection!) telling us what a wonderful fellow he is and how lucky we have been to have had him as our MP.  I have also had a leaflet from the Labour Party.  The Conservatives have been handicapped by not having a new candidate waiting to be selected, but they’ve chosen one now and I wish local man Giles Watling, actor and Frinton town and district councillor, success in this expensive, absurd and totally unnecessary by-election.

            I had a doorstep Ukip canvasser calling at my home before the Conservative candidate had been selected.  He was armed with a list of voters, a clip-board and a ballpoint pen. He seemed to have expected me to be an enthusiastic Ukipper and  may have been a little taken aback when I told him I was hoping that Douglas Carswell would be roundly defeated in this by-election, and that all Ukip contestants in all future elections would have the same fate.  I intended to vote for the candidate most likely to defeat him, and that - for this by-election and for the very first time in my long life – I intended to vote for the Conservative Candidate, whoever he or she might be!

Week 1 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Seeing the Old Year out and the New Year in!

            I wish all blog readers a very Happy New Year of peace and hope.  2013 was, so the top politicians will undoubtedly say, the year in which the UK finally began its recovery from the financial crisis that has been crippling us.  The political leaders of the government lose no opportunity of blaming the crisis on the profligacy of its predecessors. However the recently retired Governor of the Bank of England, who was surely in the best position to know, made it clear that it was in fact the greed and incompetence of the Bankers (political supporters of the present government) that was responsible.

            I think that he was probably correct – but that doesn’t mean that the previous government was blameless.  They should have spotted what was happening and re-introduced the curbs and restrictions on the bankers that had been abolished by their predecessors to free them for their task of wealth creation.  In fact it freed them to feather their own nests and to ruin the country.  An earlier Labour Prime Minister is said to have been ‘dazzled by duchesses’.  Tony Blair and his associates were blinded by billionaires!

            It certainly is good news that economic recovery is beginning, that output is increasing and that there are fewer unemployed.  It’s a pretty hollow recovery though when thousands of those who are in work are also officially ‘in poverty’, when money-lenders and the gambling ‘industry’  are thriving, thousands are homeless, and the fastest growing activity in England’s green and pleasant land is the establishment of food banks where charitable giving prevents the poor from actually starving to death, and ‘Crisis at Christmas’ takes a few hundred rough sleepers off the streets and – for a couple of days – gives them a tantalising glimpse of something approaching normality. 

            It seems quite likely that there will have been a ‘consumer boom’ in the few weeks running up to Christmas with tills in the local shops ringing merrily and ‘on line’ shopping flourishing as never before.  How much of that mini-boom has been funded by borrowed money – credit cards stretched to their maximum and pay-day loans making sure that the kids weren’t disappointed on Christmas morning and that there was plenty on the table later in the day?  The next few weeks will be the time of reckoning when creditors will demand that those debts be repaid – with interest.  For many it will be a far from happy New Year.

            I believe that our country will never truly prosper until it has narrowed the ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the poor; until the proportion of the income of the wealthy that is paid in income tax is the equivalent of the proportion of their income paid by the poor in indirect taxation – VAT and customs duties.  Until that happens it is simply untrue to claim that the ‘benefit system’ means that the poor are being subsidised by the wealthy.  On the contrary it is the pennies of the poor that make it possible for the wealthy to live in luxury.

            I am fully convinced that the government’s principal source of revenue should be an income tax set at a percentage  of each citizen’s gross income, before he or she has a chance to siphon it off into offshore tax havens or ‘charitable trusts’.

            There’s nothing particularly revolutionary in the idea that taxation should be by a percentage of income rather than a fixed sum.  The medieval church demanded ‘one tenth’ (a tithe) of its members’ income.  That’s probably why tithes were so unpopular with land owners and prosperous farmers!  In the public services, and I think in much of the private sector too, pay rises are a percentage of the employee’s current pay.   That’s how it is that, certainly in local government, a chief executive may claim proudly that his two percent pay rise was exactly the same as that of the most humble clerk.  Two percent of £100,000 is a considerable sum of money. Two percent of the minimum wage is a pittance.

            If pay rises are given in percentages, thus widening the gap between poor and wealthy with every pay increase, why should not income tax be levied on exactly the same principal to narrow that gap?   

Four times is more than coincidence!

            I am not a James Bond fan.  I have never read a James Bond novel, nor have I ever watched a James Bond film.  However there can be few of us who don’t know that James Bond prefers his cocktails ‘shaken but not stirred’ (can anyone really tell the difference?).   Perhaps slightly less well known is his comment when misfortunes befall him that ‘Once is happenchance, twice could be coincidence, but three times means enemy action’.

            Well, during December 2013 we have, not just  three but four times, experienced winter storms that have swept in from the Atlantic with 60, 70, 80 mph gusts of wind that have uprooted trees, brought down power lines cutting off electricity supplies, turned over high-sided vehicles and damaged buildings.  Torrential rain has brought flooding (some householders have had their homes flooded again and again) and the storm that occurred during the first week of December was accompanied by a tidal surge of the same magnitude as the one in 1953 that had brought death and devastation to many communities along the east coast.  The fact that there were no fatal casualties this time is attributable to improved sea defences, the efficiency of local authorities in evacuating threatened areas and providing temporary accommodation for those displaced, and above all perhaps, to the accuracy of the Meteorological Office’s weather forecasts.

            Four damaging storms in one month in temperate Britain (a phenomenon that has never occurred before in my nearly 93 years) - and the winter of 2013/2014 has only just begun!  Surely that – coupled with unseasonable hurricanes and snow storms in the USA, uncontrollable bush fires in an even-hotter-than-usual Australian summer, and the most destructive cyclone ever recorded devastating the Philippines, should  be enough to make even the most stubborn sceptic (our own Clacton MP for instance) accept that potentially catastrophic climate change is taking place and should be the very first concern of every government in the world!

A Family Christmas Celebration            

               

                                   Christmas Family Lunch – Double Tree Hotel, Cambridge, 25.12.2013

My family and I were extremely lucky over the Christmas period. A damaging storm kept me awake most of the night before Christmas Eve. By morning the wind had dropped and in the early afternoon my elder son drove me to Cambridge where I stayed, with eight members of my immediate family, in the Double Tree Hotel beside the River Cam.  Christmas Day was calm and sunny.  We did a little tour of Cambridge’s grey-stone colleges and of the river on which, many years earlier, I had enjoyed punting.  We later had a convivial traditional Christmas lunch at the hotel.  Boxing Day morning was again calm and sunny and in the afternoon I was driven back to Clacton-on-Sea and home!  It had been a very happy family occasion.

Heather and I punting on the Cam in the summer of 1975.  Just to remind blog readers – and myself  – that I haven’t always been a decrepit old man!

I can’t forget though that while we were enjoying ourselves in a comfortable hotel and returning to our warm and comfortable homes, thousands of fellow Brits were, some for the second or third time, refugees from flooded homes or were trying to survive a miserable Christmas in icy cold homes with no electric power for lighting, heating or cooking.

            It is surely time for our politicians to stop worrying about what may happen in the future and concentrate on the climatic disaster that is threatening us - and the whole world -  now!

           

             

Week 35 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

Our Brave New World

          At the end of the 1960s I was, as a Public Health Inspector, involved with a great deal of Health Education work.  Consequently Clacton Council released me for one morning each week to attend a two-year part-time course for teachers of adult ‘further education’ at the local Adult Education Centre.  It was very interesting, though by the time I had completed the course and passed the appropriate City and Guilds examination I had been appointed as the town’s Housing Manager.  The qualification was useful though when, in 1973, I applied successfully for the post of Public Relations Officer to the newly created Tendring District Council..

            I remember vividly our very enthusiastic young ‘further education’ tutor.  The  1960s had seen the dawn of the electronic age and he was tremendously enthusiastic about the benefits that it would bring to everybody.  The day was coming, he said, when no-one would need to do more than a few hours of work for perhaps just three or four days a week.  Humanity was heading into a golden age in which everyone would have vast amounts of leisure time.  It would be our task (he made it seem like sacred mission!) as teachers of adult education, to teach folk how to fill those unaccustomed hours of leisure positively and for the greater good of humankind.

                    How astonished that young man would be (perhaps he is, because he was a decade or so younger than me) at the world of the 3^rd millennium – half a century later.  The advances in electronic science have been greater than he could possibly have imagined. His promised ‘leisure time’ though is being endured, rather than enjoyed, by two and a half million unemployed, while those who have work are having to work harder and for longer hours than ever before.  Many shops and other businesses are open seven days a week. The government is doing all that it possibly can to tempt, persuade or coerce young mothers to entrust their children to professional ‘carers’ and get back into paid employment, and for the chronic sick and disabled to do any work of which their failing bodies or minds are still capable.

       

         In the 1960s marriage was still the norm.  Most married women preferred, at least once children were born, to pursue careers a mothers and home-makers.  Nowadays it is common for couples to live together as ‘partners’ before, or perhaps instead of, marriage.  Both of many such couples need to work to ’manage’ a burden of debt imposed upon them at least partly by government policy – repayment of student loans can take a working lifetime, and the government actively encourages mortgage debt in pursuit of its unrealisable ideological aim of ‘home ownership for all!’.

            The gap between the incomes of the wealthy and the poor is wider than it has ever been.  The new Chief Executive of a failed bank on a salary of £1 million a year, is considered to be ‘self-sacrificing’ because he agrees not to be handed a six figure bonus for a couple of years!  Meanwhile state benefits to the poor are capped, stricter means testing of benefits are imposed and the state-friendly national press derides the unemployed as ‘scroungers’ and ‘shirkers’.   More and more people are dependent upon food banks and charity handouts for survival.

Depersonalisation

            A week or two ago I wrote in this blog about the many times when, on Clacton Railway Station, the ticket office is unmanned, there are no staff visible (there may be one or two employees tucked away in an office somewhere!) and rail passengers have to be content  with a time table on the wall, a ticket machine and printed warnings about the penalties for travelling without a valid ticket.  What more, I asked rhetorically, could travellers possibly want?  Below is some sound advice for the successful entrepreneur in the 21st century:

           Employing  HRUs (Human Resource Units, or flesh-and-blood men and women) is rarely cost-effective  They expect to work only a third (at the most) of each 24 hour day and to take at least one day off every single week!  They expect to be paid enough to enable them to feed, clothe and house not only themselves but their families, and enough to allow them to save for a pension when they can work no longer.  They expect to be paid when they are off sick or on holiday and it’s difficult and expensive to get rid of them when they’re surplus to requirements.  Where possible it always makes financial sense to use a machine rather than an HRU, and the electronic age is making that possible in more and more fields of what was once thought of as human activity.

I hate it!  It’s not just because every pound saved by using a machine rather than a human means another person unemployed.  That comes into it of course, but personally I don’t like drawing Cash from a machine instead of from a friendly bank or post office counter-clerk.  I don’t like phoning a once-friendly help-line and being told by a mechanical voice that if I want this, press 1, if I want that, press 2 and if I want the other press 3, or – worse still – being referred to a website!  I don’t like buying things ‘on line’.  I’d rather go to a shop and see and feel what I am proposing to buy.  Often I’d like to chat about my purchase.  There was a time when shop assistants were knowledgeable about the things (cameras and photographic equipment, fishing tackle, camping equipment) that they sold, but those days are over.  Often nowadays there aren’t even instruction booklets.  ‘Full details are available on-line sir – you’ll find the website address on your purchase!’

I am not alone.   I had thought that it might be my age that gave me this dislike of machinery and fondness for poor frail and often failing humanity.  However I have received an email from a regular blog reader, some thirty years younger than me, that expresses even stronger feelings than my own.  Here it is:

You may remember me expressing dismay at the de-personalisation we are suffering; Benefits being administered by Call Centres all over the country; Libraries with automatic book check in and check out machines;  Cafes reduced to a bank of vending machines;

Some Supermarkets (M&S Moorgate) with 90% automatic tills; Almost all Barclays banks “upgraded” to a hall of ATMs with a hotline to a call centre to arrange loans;  Plans to close ALL ticket offices on the London Underground and take no cash on London buses – everything paid for by Contactless Credit Cards and Oyster Cards.

 The final straw today, in the Evening Standard, was that Brent Council has opened up a brand new Civic Centre and has a Hologram Person directing people where to go in the entrance lobby. Apparently the machine holds a tablet where you can key in questions and are told where to go by a simulated voice

I know 1984 came and went without George Orwell’s worst fears being realized, but even he didn’t see this coming.  How long before they decide we don’t need People in Call Centres, because robots are cheaper and voice recognition software is good enough? – 10 years maximum is my guess.

And of course the Internet is really part of the problem because although it provides more opportunities for people to talk to other people on social web sites, it allows so many public and private organisations to hide behind a web site – often not even providing a phone number or an address or the name of any member of staff.

Then the other amazing thing is people living in two worlds at the same time. Over many decades we have become used to people listening to music from ever smaller music players while they walk and work.  Today though I saw several people WATCHING a video on their mini iPad, with earphones in their ears as they WALK through the tube station.  Can you believe it, a completely parallel fantasy existence whilst actually walking in the real world!

            I haven’t seen anything like that.  I am sometimes alarmed though when I am on my mobility scooter and see someone walking towards me on the footpath while engaged in an animated conversation on a mobile phone – sometimes even tapping out a text message as they walk.   They are obviously in a world of their own and relying on anyone in their way to step aside and let them pass.  Now that’s something you just can’t do when you’re on a mobility scooter!

A sign of the times

          A new Aldi Supermarket is being built almost opposite the recently re-opened Century Cinema in Clacton-on-Sea.  It is expected to open in mid October and there will be thirty job opportunities for local people. Aldi Management recently had two ‘open evenings’ to interview applicants for these forthcoming vacancies.

            I am told that over 1,000 hopefuls turned up to ask for for one of those thirty jobs!  Yet much of the press persists in propagating the government-friendly myth that most of those surviving ‘on benefit’ are scroungers and slackers who don’t want work.  I'd like to see the editors - or better still - the owners, living for a few weeks on 'job seekers allowance'!