24 January 2015

Tendring Topics………on line

Keeping things ‘in proportion’

          I am not one of Lord Mendelson’s greatest admirers.  He was one of the creators of New Labour which, to win elections, surrendered the Labour Party’s soul and converted British politics into a pale imitation of the politics of the USA. There is precious little difference between the objectives of the two main parties.   They only differ in how best to achieve them.  In office Tony Blair, Lord Mendelson’s friend and political colleague, continued the process begun by Mrs Thatcher of turning the UK into a Prime Ministerial dictatorship.

            However, I am inclined to be on Lord Mendelson’s side in his current disagreement with Ed Miliband and his shadow Chancellor Ed Balls.   It is, I think, shameful that multi-millionaires in this country are likely to pay a much smaller proportion of their income in taxation than those whose income is so low that they pay no income tax at all, but do have to pay the government every time they buy an object or service that is subject to VAT or purchase something that is subject to customs duty, like a packet of cigarettes or a pint at a pub.  Multi-millionaires also, of course, pay a much smaller proportion of their income in taxation than do those mythical beings who David Cameron always claims he is eager to help – average hardworking wage earners who pay income tax and, of course, the indirect taxes and custom duties that this government prefers

Ed Miliband’s mansion tax may not be intended to be a one-off tax to help the NHS – or any other good cause – out of its current crisis, by taking a few hundred thousand pounds from the bank accounts of the super-wealthy, but that’s how it sounds.  I think that the government should be fair to both the wealthy and the poor by claiming an equal percentage of the gross income of all of us to fund public services.   The obvious way to do this is by means of the income tax system, the only tax that is linked to ability to pay.  I think we should consider it not as an imposition but as a privilege to pay our annual subscription towards the not-inconsiderable benefits of being a British Citizen, or towards our permission to live and work within the UK.  We would then all have an equal stake in the prosperity or economic failure of our country.  We really would be all in this together!

            Income tax is the obvious means that a government could use to level the economic playing field but another way that would help to do this would be – as Lord Mendelson suggests – adding additional tax bands to the Council Tax system.

            Blog readers past the first flush of youth will recall the ‘bad old days’ in which local authorities, County, Borough and District Councils raised part of their income by means of ‘the domestic rates’.  These were an annual charge on each dwelling within the district.  Nobody enjoyed paying them but they were based on the estimated rental value of the property. They therefore had at least a rough relationship to the income of the occupier of the occupier or occupiers

Mrs Thatcher’s government changed all that.  Instead of the rates we were to have a ‘community charge’ (almost instantly rebranded ‘the poll tax’) which taxed each individual equally regardless of whether that individual was a millionaire or a refuse collector.  It took no account whatsoever of ability to pay. The rating system may have been disliked but the poll tax was actually hated.   It was just such a tax that had provoked the medieval ‘peasants revolt’.  In the late twentieth century it produced wide-spread demonstrations, riots and the eventual fall of the Thatcher government.     

The Poll Tax was replaced by the ‘Council Tax’. This is based on the estimated purchase value of the property and therefore makes a pretence of bearing some relationship to the income or wealth of the householder.  Properties are classified as being in one of eight ‘tax bands’, the lowest of which is under £40,000 and the highest £320,000 and above.  A glance will make it clear that those bands are hopelessly out of date.   I suppose for £40,000 you might, just possibly, get some kind of a shack in an area like the Brooklands Estate, Jaywick  just a couple of miles from my home – but that estate has been declared to be the most deprived area in the UK!

At the other end of the tax bands the situation is even more ridiculous.  The highest tax band for Council Tax is £320,000 and above. I agree that in the Clacton area you would get a very nice property for £320,000 – but not in many other parts of the UK

Do you ever watch ‘Escape to the Country’ ­on BBC tv.   Briefly it’s about very fortunate (and often very hard working and gifted) folk who have made a fortune in London, or Manchester or Sheffield or wherever and are now seeking a residence ‘in the country’.  A BBC presenter introduces them to three or four ‘desirable residences’ in the area of their choice.   It’s not a programme I like to watch.   I have spent too much of my professional life trying to help people who are homeless, or overcrowded or living in squalid conditions, to enjoy seeing well-heeled folk looking over a luxurious home and complaining that ‘the view isn’t quite what we’d hoped for’ or ‘the paddock isn’t really big enough for Rosalie (their spoilt brat!) to exercise the pony we’ve given her for her birthday’.

It’s very unusual for one of those very comfortable and very desirable homes ‘in the country’ to change hands for as little as £320,000.   That sum would probably buy a roomy three bedroom home in one of London’s more pleasant suburbs.  That means that an executive officer of a biggish enterprise or a middle-grade civil servant, living in a comfortable but hardly palatial home in Cheam or Twickenham would pay exactly the same Council Tax as the owner of a ‘Downton Abbey’ or similar stately home or family mansion.

There should be at least three higher tax bands, ending at homes valued at £2 million pounds or more, to bring something like fairness to the Council Tax system. The Council Tax bands, like the income tax system, need urgent reconstruction to make sure that those who have done best from our market economy should pay at least as big a proportion of their wealth in tax as those who have been less fortunate.

A trusted ally – or a ‘pariah state’?

In recent months I have been quite proud of the fact that I am a member of the Church of England as well as of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).   I welcomed the Church’s decision to ordain women as Bishops as well as Priests.   I have applauded the Archbishop of Canterbury’s campaign to replace ‘pay day lenders’ with local ‘credit unions’ and his criticism of economic policies that have led to the proliferation of Food Banks throughout the UK.

That enthusiasm suffered a severe blow this (23^rd January) afternoon when I learned that, to comply with government guidelines, the authorities of Westminster Abbey would be flying our national flag at half-mast in mourning for the King of Saudi Arabia.  It suffered a further blow with the news that the Prince of Wales (a future ‘Defender of the Faith’) together with our Prime Minister were to fly to Saudi Arabia to express their condolences.  I suppose that the Prince is aware that any expression of the Faith that he will pledge himself to defend is strictly forbidden in Saudi Arabia and that any Muslim in that country who converts to Christianity is likely to be executed!

Saudi Arabia’s disregard for democracy and human rights makes North Korea seem like a liberal Paradise!  Torture is routinely practised in Saudi gaols and public executions, amputations and floggings are daily occurrences.  The case of a blogger who considered the possibility that Saudi Arabia might become a secular state and who is being publicly flogged with fifty lashes every Friday until, if he survives long enough, he has received a total of 1,000 lashes, has recently made the press headlines.  Women in Saudi-Arabia are said to be much more free than they were a decade or so ago – but they are still forbidden to drive cars or leave their homes without a male escort (husband, father or brother).

Most of those involved in the 9/11 outrages in New York were Saudis.  Saudi Arabia is the home of the noxious fundamentalist Islamic faith that IS (the Islamic State) is trying to impose in Syria and Iraq and that Boko Haram is imposing, even more blood-thirstily, in sub-Saharan Africa. Donations from oil-rich Saudi millionaires financed IS during its early days. They possibly still do so.

Do we really need oil (and arms sales) so badly that we are prepared to befriend a state whose philosophy is the exact opposite of the British values that David Cameron and his colleagues are so eager to propagate?

   

week 8.11 22.2.11

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘You are old Father William, the young man said,
And your hair has become very white…….
Yet nobody cares when you’re ill and in bed
I really don’t think that is right!’

The first two of the lines of verse above are Lewis Carroll’s and can be found in Alice in Wonderland. The other two were inspired by the Health Service Ombudsman’s recent report on the treatment of some old people in NHS Hospitals. It was a report that made those who, like me, have left both youth and middle age behind them, and who are becoming aware of increasing physical (and possibly mental) disability, feel a tremor of apprehension at the possibility of needing hospital treatment at some time in the future.

Some elderly patients had been left unattended, in pain and with open wounds. Some had been unwashed and had no opportunity for a bath or shower. Some, unable to feed themselves or attend to their own toilet needs, had pleaded in vain for help. These were, of course, only ‘a minority’ of elderly patients but the fact that they were a substantial minority should be a cause for shame.

I listened with interest as an ‘authority’ on the subject explained on tv that the problem was one of lack of communication. Nurses and other carers need to listen to their patients and discuss their problems with them. I began to wonder if that ‘authority’ lived in the same world as I do!

It was seven years ago, when she was just eighty, that my late wife Heather, having had a broken hip repaired in Colchester General Hospital, found herself, for rehabilitation, in the Kate Grant Ward of the Clacton Hospital. Heather had had a wider-then-most experience of hospitals. Illness led to her spending time in several London hospitals in her childhood. At the age of 24 (when we had been married for just two years) she spent two years in a Sanatorium with pulmonary and laryngeal TB, including two months in Papworth Hospital undergoing major surgery. In middle age she spent two brief periods in the Essex County Hospital for minor gynaecological surgery.

Visiting Heather at what was then the British Legion Sanatorium at Nayland. It had been taken over by the newly created NHS. Heather had to put on a stone in weight before having major surgery at Papworth Hospital near Cambridge which, at that time, specialised in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis

She was not a complainer. She had never liked being in hospital, but she was always cheerful and optimistic and prepared to make the best of it. She made friends with the nurses and other patients, and helped where she could. In the Sanatorium she made friends with whom she corresponded for the rest of her life.

It was only in Clacton’s Kate Grant Ward that she was desperately unhappy and keen to get out and come home at any price. It was not that the nurses or other members of the staff were unkind, uncaring or incompetent. There were simply not enough of them. One or two nurses or nursing assistants may well be adequate for a ward in which a good proportion of the patients are able to get into and out of bed, put on their dressing gowns and attend to their toilet needs and their meals. One or two nurses are not enough to cope with a ward of ageing or elderly women, the overwhelming majority of whom are unable to walk unaided.

Added to this is the (new?) rule that no nurse or nursing assistant may ever attempt to lift a patient on her own. This is an operation for which two helpers are always required. Then again, nurses disappear from time to time ‘for their breaks’ and at weekends regular nurses disappear and are temporarily replaced with ‘supply’ staff who know nothing of the patients. Is it surprising that getting the patients out of bed and dressed and back into bed again at night are operations that can take hours? Is it surprising that bells are unanswered; cries of distress unheard, and patients become incontinent for the first time in their lives? I wouldn’t for one moment suggest that any nurse should do lifting beyond his or her capacity, or be denied a break or a weekend off, but there should be enough nurses and/or other staff to cope with the special circumstances that exist in a ward of this kind. When that is done the nurses may well have the time and energy to ‘communicate’ better with their charges and discuss their problems. Perhaps, in the past seven years, things have changed in the Kate Grant Ward. I hope so – but I hope that I never personally find out!

For a week I arrived at the hospital before 8.00 am so that I could get Heather out of bed, washed and dressed. I spent most of the day there and I was always there in the evening to get her undressed and into bed again. I did this to impress on the Nursing Sister in charge of the ward that I was well able to be my wife’s carer. There was no need therefore to delay her discharge until a ‘care package’ could be organised. I soon realized though that by doing this I was also providing a real support for the hard-pressed nurses; a foretaste of David Cameron’s Big Society perhaps?

My most vivid, and most painful, memories of the time that Heather spent in Clacton Hospital were her distress when I parted from her every evening, and her joy ‘I thought you were never coming’ when I turned up in the morning. Until then I hadn’t fully appreciated the sense of loneliness and desolation that can overwhelm patients when they are alone with their thoughts in what they feel to be an uncaring atmosphere.

The late John Betjeman caught a glimpse of it in his poem Five O’clock Shadow, the time of the day when the visitors have departed. Here are the first and third verses:

This is the time of the day when we in the men’s ward
Say ‘one more surge of the pain and I give up the fight’.
When those who struggle for breath can struggle less strongly.
This is the time of the day that is worse than the night.

Below the windows, lots of loving relations
Rev up in the car park, changing gear at the bend.
Going home to a nice big tea and an evening of telly.
‘Ah well, we’ve done what we can. It can’t be long till the end’

‘Concentrate on something else – and it won’t hurt so much’

That’s the kind of advice that dentists used to give their patients before getting to work with their drills. Perhaps they still do.

Something similar seems to have motivated both politicians and newspaper editors in recent weeks. In Britain, government cuts threaten public services on which we have relied for many years. The number of unemployed is steadily increasing. Folk who had imagined they were ‘home owners’, when they were really only ‘home buyers’, are threatened with homelessness when they find themselves unable to continue their mortgage payments. Young people leaving universities with degrees are unable to find employment but are burdened with a lifetime of debt that, the government tells them ‘reassuringly’, they may never clear! Inflation has risen steadily. It is now at 4 percent (double the government’s ‘target’) and experts forecast a rise to 5 percent. Meanwhile incomes remain static or actually fall. In the Middle East, the ‘west’s’ policy of selling arms to, and supporting corrupt and tyrannical regimes. is rapidly falling apart. Worldwide, natural disasters make clear the reality of Climate Change, but national governments decline to take effective action to counter it.

It might have been thought that these circumstances provided both politicians and the popular press with plenty of material to arouse their fear and anger. But those haven’t been the issues that have aroused most ire. They have preferred to concentrate on the trivial and the irrelevant. Take, for instance, the case of the army’s redundant warrant officers. Twenty, one actually serving in Afghanistan, were sent their redundancy notices by email. All the indignation has been vented on the email. It should surely have been concentrated on the redundancy, no matter how those concerned were informed of it. Does it make sense to discharge 20 experienced professional soldiers, still in their forties, while a war of attrition is being waged in Afghanistan – and while millions of pounds are being spent on nuclear submarines armed with Trident missiles purposelessly prowling the oceans?

Then there are the two rulings of the European Court of Human Rights – that most prisoners in Britain’s gaols should have the right to vote, and that after fifteen years, sex offenders should have the right to appeal against their names being retained on the register of offenders. From the outrage in press and parliament you’d have thought that an invading army had landed on our shores! We would be better engaged in persuading a majority of those of us who are not in prison, to vote, rather than making sure that prisoners can’t. It would surprise me if many prisoners want to vote anyway. I reckon though that most of them would welcome with enthusiasm the possibility of cash compensation for having been refused that right!

As for sex offenders; they have been punished for their crime. Surely it isn’t unreasonable to consider the possibility that those who have lived an unblemished life for fifteen years since their discharge from prison may have permanently changed their ways. The right to appeal doesn’t mean an automatic right to have their names removed. In many cases it well be decided that they should remain on the register.

Ah well – these issues gave us all something about which to think and vent our indignation. For a few days they successfully diverted us from the real threats to our world and our civilisation.

A part-time job?

A short while ago Colchester Borough Council approached Tendring District Council with the idea of ‘sharing’ an expensive Chief Executive – in effect ‘Two for the price of one!’ They were rebuffed, but have now reached agreement to share a Chief Executive with Braintree Council. Colchester’s Chief Executive is currently paid £117,107 and Braintree’s £119,000. It is claimed that the agreement will save Colchester £150,000 a year, and we must surely assume that Braintree is hoping to achieve a similar saving. Mathematics was never my strongest subject at school but I can’t quite follow the arithmetic there.

I believe that Tendring Council’s outgoing Chief Executive enjoyed a salary comparable with those of both Colchester and Braintree. He also had two Assistant Chief Executives each on a salary higher than that of any other Council employee.

Colchester and Braintree are by no means unique nowadays in sharing a Chief Executive. Tendring Councillors must surely be wondering if they have been paying three very substantial salaries for what now appears to be regarded as a part-time job!