Week 41 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

A Helping Hand

       

   It is a sad comment on today’s world (or perhaps on my state of mind!) that my heart sank when, responding to a ring on my front door bell, I found two personable young women smiling at me.  Were they hoping to sell me something, seek my financial support for some worthy cause; or try to persuade me to become a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness?   It was none of those things.  They were calling on me and my neighbours  to publicise the help that is available from our local Citizens’ Advice Bureau.  They gave me a flyer, reproduced here, giving contact details and the range of their service and – no doubt noticing I was leaning heavily on a stick! – assured me that if, when I needed help or advice, I couldn’t get to their office they would gladly send an adviser to my home.

            They also handed me a very useful little leaflet entitled Quick Guide to Welfare Reform which sets out the effects of the Government’s recent changes to Social and Welfare Services, how they may affect us and what we can do to help ourselves if we are affected. The leaflet tackles the replacement of Disability Living Allowance with Personal Independence Payments, as well as Social Fund Reform, Universal Credit (replacing a number of currently means-tested benefits) the Benefit Cap, the Bedroom Tax and Council Tax Benefit. In each case brief advice is given on ‘what can I do?’ to those affected.

            Supposing, for instance, you are currently receiving Disability Living Allowance and you get a letter (as, if you haven’t already had one, you undoubtedly will!) from the Department of Work and Pensions informing you that that allowance is coming to an end and asking if you want to claim Personal Independence Payments.  If you fail to claim PIP your payments will simply stop.  Your local Citizens Advice Bureau will help with your application for PIP, with appealing the decision if you are not awarded PIP, with finding out what other benefits may be affected and advising you on coping financially if you have a drop in income.

           

A Nation of Debters!

Nowadays practically everyone is burdened with debt to an extent that was unheard of in my pre-World War II childhood and youth.  In those days if you wanted something badly you ‘saved up for it’ perhaps for months or even years.  My parents had a horror of debt that, to some extent, they have passed on to me.  I remember them discussing far into the night whether or not to buy a radio (in those days it was a wireless set of course!) by hire purchase or, as my dad disparagingly described it, ‘on the never, never’.  They did decide to do so in the end!

            How very different things are today!  ‘Saving up’, was struck a mortal blow with the advent of the credit card.  Do you remember the posters advertising the very first ones?   ‘Barclaycard takes the waiting out of wanting!’  Daytime commercial television owes much of its finance to adverts for those easily obtainable (but less easily cleared!) payday loans – ‘Two or three hundred pounds till next payday – just to get you through a one-off crisis’.   But, of course, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to pay back the whole of that loan plus interest, on your next payday – and the interest will begin to accumulate!

            Then there are debts resulting from government policies.  Student loans, to pay tuition fees and living costs, can amount to £20,000 or more – a debt that can hang over former students’ heads for the whole of their working lives.   House purchase by means of a mortgage loan is strongly encouraged by the government that has the ideological aim of creating \a nation of home owners.  That may be the result in twenty or thirty years’ time.  In the meantime though it creates only a nation of home buyers – a nation of debtors, any one of whom could lose his or her job at any time, default on the mortgage payments and become homeless.

            It is no surprise therefore, to discover that debts are among the most common problems about which Citizens Advice Bureaux are consulted.  They can’t make debts disappear but they can help you to sort out your household budget and perhaps negotiate with your creditors to work out an acceptable way for you to deal with that debt burden.

            Debt is like a cancer.  The sooner it is caught, the more likely it is that there will be a happy ending.  The borrower should consult the local CAB before being ensnared by a loan shark or a payday loan provider.  If you live in the Tendring District phone the number on the flyer at the beginning of this blog.  I think I am right in saying that wherever you live in the United Kingdom there will be a CAB within a few miles.  I know that Tendring Topics….on line has readers in the USA, in Russia, in mainland China and elsewhere in Europe and the world. Debt is a universal scourge that ignores national borders.  I can only hope that there are similar services in their countries for those who need them..

A Housing Bubble?

            I have never pretended to understand economics.  I hope though that I have my fair share of common sense.  It is obvious to me that when the demand for an object or a service increases more rapidly than that service can expand or the objects can be supplied, the price of that service or those objects will rise.

            This is what happened with the housing market in the 1990s.   The demand for houses (spurred on by the political ambition of home ownership for all) outran the supply.   Thanks to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ legislation (that the New Labour Government had lacked the courage to repeal) there was no large stock of publicly owned homes to help keep rents down, so private landlords raised their rents as high as ‘the market’ permitted. The ethical principle of the 'free market'  is, of course, to get as much as you can grab for as little as you can get away with. 

            The demand for home ownership increased.  To encourage purchasers, banks and building societies were prepared to lend 95 percent of cost of house purchase – in some cases even 100 percent, with perhaps an additional loan for the purchase of furniture.  On day-time commercial tv, money-lenders touted for custom; ‘Never mind if you’re unemployed, disabled and have a low credit rating.  We may still be able to help you with a loan’.  ‘Then thrived the usurers’, as Shakespeare might well have put it had he lived at the end of the 20^th century instead of the 16^th!

            Inevitably the bubble burst.  Thousands were left with huge debts and homes that had lost their value overnight. Thousands were made homeless, having lost their homes (that they had thought they owned!) and their savings.  Banks and building societies had to seek government help and the government used our money to rescue them.  That – as the former governor of the Bank of England repeatedly told us – is the cause of the country’s financial problems.  It wasn’t the poor, the unemployed and the disabled who produced the financial crisis from which the government is now trying to extricate us, but the banks and the money lenders aided and abetted by a business friendly government.

Once bitten, twice shy.  The money-lenders, having been rescued with our money, were determined not to be caught out again.  There was still a demand for homes – still no great reserve of social housing to keep rents at a reasonable level.   Interest rates have been kept artificially low but lenders could sieve out risky borrowers by demanding a much larger deposit than in the past before agreeing to a mortgage.  Often twenty-five percent or even more of the purchase price was demanded.

Is history about to repeat itself?  When the government first announced their help-with-the-deposit scheme that guaranteed all but five percent of the deposit on a mortgage, I commented in this blog that the demand for homes ‘at affordable prices’ would now outstrip the supply. Those ‘free market forces’ that are so popular in government circles would ensure that  house prices would rise – perhaps as another bubble expanding to bursting point?   Since then the Institute of Directors, the Institute of Chartered Surveyors and the national Chambers of Commerce are among those who have warned of the same danger. 

Has the government heeded?  Not a bit of it.  They have expanded the scheme to include the purchase of existing houses as well as new-builds and at the recent Conservative Party Conference it was announced that the scheme would begin immediately instead of in a year’s time as had been earlier announced.  It does of course need the co-operation of the Banks and Building Societies. Only Lloyds and RBS (over both of which the government can exercise direct control) have so far agreed to take part. In the meantime, house prices are rising.  I suppose that, as a home owner with my mortgage long since paid off, I should be pleased. I’m not!

           

Week 32 2013

Tendring Topics….on line

‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’

          This was the advice that, in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, the old and worldly-wise Polonius gave his son Laertes when he was departing the shores of Denmark for England; a distant foreign land where debt was only one of the many perils facing an inexperienced young Dane travelling abroad for the first time.  Today England is part of a United Kingdom with a national debt that its government tries with only limited success to reduce, and in which a great many of its inhabitants get deeper and deeper into personal debt.  Perhaps things were different in Shakespeare’s day because nowadays the ‘lenders’ usually do quite well out of it.

 Payday loan companies, whose advertisements help daytime commercial television to survive, claim to give a badly needed service to folk with a temporary financial problem.  Their potential clients are the many thousands of people in Britain today in steady jobs with just-adequate salaries paid monthly. 

Suddenly, perhaps a fortnight before payday, the family car, or the tv, or the freezer breaks down, or perhaps there is an unexpected visitor.  It may need no more than £200 or £300 at the most, to solve the problem, but the ever rising cost of living coupled with pay freezes has meant that there are virtually no savings.  A Payday Loan will solve the problem.  Give the firm a ring and within minutes, the sum required will be in the borrower’s bank account.  Pay it back on payday, with what seems a very small interest charge and all will be well. How simple and straightforward it sounds.

But, of course, it isn’t.  If the borrower’s salary is only just sufficient for a normal month’s expenditure, once the loan and interest have been repaid the borrower won’t have enough left for the next month’s living expenses.   I had seen it happen often enough with Council House tenants’ rent arrears.  Those who are unable to pay the rent on one rent day are unlikely to be able make a double payment a week later.  The council didn’t charge interest on money owed in this way. It was usually possible to make an arrangement for the defaulting tenant to free himself from debt by paying just a small sum extra each week until it was cleared.  Payday loan companies do charge interest.  They’ll extend the loan period and the interest will begin to add up – sometimes to as much as 4,000 percent of the original loan!

I am glad that Archbishop Welby, who spent his earlier years in the realms of high finance, does see the problem – and hopes to use the resources of the Church of England to solve it.  He is planning to encourage the Church to support and extend the country’s credit unions. They could prove to be an alternative source of emergency lending that would eventually put the payday loan companies out of business.

Credit Unions could be described as local community banks. Members pay their savings – whatever they can afford - into their Union account and then, when a domestic crisis arises, they can borrow the sum required at a much lower rate of interest than that offered by any commercial organisation.  They can then repay it in instalments over twelve months though, if they are able to do so, it is to their advantage to pay it back by larger instalments over a shorter period of time.

There are currently about 400 credit unions in Great Britain with over a million members.  At the end of last year they held about £807 million in savings and there were about £627 million on loan to members.  The Church of England isn’t proposing to run credit unions but will offer its premises for their use and offer any other support that they need to ensure their success.

 Colchester and the Tendring District are served by the Colchester Credit Union set up in 2002.  It currently has 550 adult and 400 young members. Chris Burrows, the union’s secretary is quoted in the daily Gazette as saying that there has been a strong public interest since the Archbishop made his statement with 17 new membership applications the day after the statement made the headlines in the national press and nine people offering their support as volunteers.

The union lends sums of up to £3,000  to a total of about £20,000 a year, a figure that has risen since the government’s austerity programme began to take effect.  Colchester Credit Union tries to keep its interest rate for borrowers at one percent per month.  If you live in our north-east Essex area you can contact the Colchester Credit Union on info@colchestercreditunion.co.uk   or phone 01206 798823.

I wish the Archbishop of Canterbury every success in his campaign though I think he is a little optimistic in his hope that it will put the Payday Loan Companies out of business.  The present government’s policies with student loans and its offer of  help in meeting deposit requirements for house purchase mortgages encourages borrowing, but does nothing to encourage the small-scale regular saving on which Credit Unions depend. I fear that Wonga’s and other payday loan companies’ adverts will continue to keep day-time commercial tv going for a while yet.    

A Republican Britain?   Not for me.

          A job that I thoroughly enjoyed during the seven years that I was Tendring Council’s first Public Relations Officer, was talking to – usually bright teenage – students from overseas about the British way of life and, in particular, about British local government. Most were either French or German and there seemed to be always two questions that I was asked at the end of my talk.  ‘Why do you British have such winding roads with so many corners to turn? and ‘Why do you British still have a monarchy while most other European countries are republics?’ 

I wasn’t really competent to answer the first question but I would disarm them by quoting G.K.Chesterton’s ‘Rolling English Road’.  It begins, ‘Before the Romans came to Rye or out of Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road’, and even the French students were amused at a subsequent verse, ‘I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire, and for to kill the Frenchmen I did not much aspire, But I did bash their bayonets because they came arrayed to straighten out the rolling roads an English drunkard made!’

To the question about the monarchy I was very pleased to give a reply that was not only the one the Council would expect from their PRO but one with which I personally agreed.  We have a constitutional monarchy because it works for us.  It means that we have a head of state who is outside (neither ‘above’ nor ‘below’) politics.  What’s more, he or she will have been brought up and educated for the role probably for many years before becoming our Sovereign, and have had years more experience of government than even the wisest and most knowledgeable politician. A hereditary sovereign can’t override the intentions of an elected government but is in an ideal position to act as confidante, to advise, and to warn of the possible consequences of any proposed action.  Elected political heads of state must have the uncomfortable knowledge that although just over half of the electorate wanted him or her as their leader – almost half most certainly didn’t.  A head of state appointed from among distinguished citizens merely as a figure-head would lack the knowledge and experience of a hereditary monarch to advise and, when necessary, warn political leaders.  The UK isn’t alone in having a constitutional monarchy - Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway also have a similar form of government.  They are all, I think, countries in which most Britons would feel ‘at home’.

Yes, I am an egalitarian and am opposed to privilege, but I believe that the privileges of inherited wealth are infinitely greater and more noxious than those of inherited rank.   Who do you think will be able to have the fuller, more fulfilled, more truly privileged life – the recently born Prince George of Cambridge or the son of an American media billionaire, an oil-rich Saudi prince, or a Russian oligarch endowed with millions of roubles courtesy of ‘freedom loving’ Boris Yeltsin?  Prince George won’t be able to choose his own friends, his own girl-friend and partner (without careful vetting) and his own occupations.  He will spend his youth and middle-age preparing for a post that very possibly won’t become vacant until he is an old man. His whole life will be spent under press scrutiny. Every word that he speaks in public will be recorded by reporters praying for an indiscretion that will make the next day’s headlines!  It’s certainly not everybody’s idea of the ideal career!

I wish him well.  His mum seems to be a pleasant and amiable young woman (though hardly ‘that nice girl next door we see go off to work every morning’) and his dad, involved in air-sea rescue, has, at the moment, a thoroughly useful job.  The news media, including the BBC, certainly went overboard at his birth – the Sun (which rarely, if ever, has a kind word to say about his grandad the Prince of Wales) even temporarily changed its name for the occasion!  But then, the new prince is a mega-celebrity and I suppose that in this celebrity-obsessed age, that’s what we must expect.   Like all his family, he will be very wealthy.  But if the kind of taxation system that I am constantly advocating in this blog – a universal annual income tax consisting of a fixed percentage of the gross income of every British citizen and permanent resident (rich and poor alike) - were to become the principal source of government revenue, his privileges, and those of the offspring of the American media millionaire, the Saudi prince and the Russian oligarch would all be cut down to size.   In my Britain, ‘royals’ would be expected to pay the same tax as everyone else but they would, of course, be entitled to claim expenses incurred as a result of the demands of the job.

Striving to replace a constitutional monarchy that has evolved over 1,000 years with a republic, while tolerating our current economic system, is  an irrelevant distraction, hindering rather than furthering progress towards the building of a New Jerusalem ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.     

  

Week 27 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘The King was in his counting house, counting out his money’

            These days, of course, it wouldn’t be the king but the Chancellor of the Exchequer.   For me, Chancellor George Osborne lost all credibility and respect when, at the same time as introducing an austerity programme that penalised the poor and disadvantaged, he reduced the liability for income tax of the seriously wealthy; those with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year!   Quite apart from the flagrant injustice of penalising the poor and rewarding the rich, I find it incredible that any Chancellor of a country with a serious deficit problem should deliberately, and despite widespread protest, cut off a source of revenue. That the source consisted of very wealthy people who would barely notice the loss compounds the irresponsibility of the action.

             The Chancellor expects to be credited with ‘helping the poor’ when he raises the threshold of liability for income tax, thus ‘taking thousands of low-paid workers out of the income tax system altogether’. It isn’t only the poor who are helped.  Raising the tax liability threshold benefits all income tax payers, including the very wealthiest.  What’s more, being ‘taken out of the income tax system altogether’ automatically makes those affected into second class citizens, patronised by ‘we tax-payers who have to support a nation full of slackers and scroungers!

            Last week’s financial statement continued the tradition that the Chancellor and his colleagues have established.  Can they possibly really believe that the poor are to blame for their poverty and that that there is work in plenty available for those who genuinely seek it?  Extending to seven days the time that elapses before an unemployed person can sign on to claim job-seekers’ allowance suggests that they do.  Unemployed and penniless people and their families still need to eat, pay the rent, and buy other necessities during those seven days.  How else can those without savings do so without resorting to the ‘help’ of a loan-shark or one of those pay-day loans that are so deceptively easy to obtain and so very, very difficult to pay off.

            It isn’t likely that very many people will criticise the decision to deny the winter fuel allowance to elderly Brits. living in countries enjoying milder winters than those in the UK. It hadn’t even occurred to me that those who choose to live permanently overseas had been receiving it!  The countries affected are residents in European Union countries bordering on the Mediterranean, including France but excluding Italy.   At first glance that seems ridiculous. Surely winters in, for instance, Calais and Rouen must more closely resemble those in Britain than do winters in Naples or Palermo?

            Probably so – but the decision is made by a comparison between the average winter temperature in south-west England and the average winter temperature throughout the country concerned.   Italy’s average winter temperature is brought down by the permanently snow-capped Italian Alps and by the peaks of the Apennines extending down ‘the spine’ of Italy. I doubt if many, if any, ex-pats live among those peaks…………… but rules are rules!

            I really don’t understand why the Chancellor is so reluctant to use income tax to make winter fuel allowance and other benefits fairer, and yield revenue to narrow that deficit much more easily and painlessly than anything that he has done so far.  The state retirement pension is subject to income tax.  I can see no valid reason why all benefits (in fact, all sources of income) shouldn’t be similarly taxed.

            The only conclusion that I can reach is that the Chancellor’s political outlook, and that of his colleagues sees something morally wrong  in the idea that we should be taxed in accordance with our ability to pay.   A couple of pence in the pound on VAT or customs duty may lose a few votes, but it is tolerable because ‘the rich man in his castle’ and ‘the poor man at his gate’ pay exactly the same amount.  That clearly is the government’s idea of us ‘all being in this together’.

            A tax for rich and poor alike based proportionately on ability to pay?  Unthinkable – that’s the road to red revolution and the end of civilisation for ‘people like us’ (with a Rolls in the garage, a yacht in the marina, and a second home in Majorca).

            Mrs Thatcher must have had much the same idea when she replaced the rating system for the local financing of local government by the Poll Tax.   Rate demands had, admittedly very imperfectly, reflected the wealth or poverty of the householder.   The poll tax was the same for us all, the millionaire, the slum dweller and the rural cottager.  A late 14^th century version of the Poll Tax triggered the Peasants’ Revolt.  The late 20^th century version triggered revolt against Mrs Thatcher and her government and led to her eventual downfall at the hands of her own supporters. I think it unlikely that I shall still be around to see the eventual consequences in the 21^st century, of robbing the poor to make the wealthy even richer.

Clacton County High School

          My two sons were both pupils at Clacton County High School in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.  Both did very well there and I have always followed the progress of the school with a warm interest.

            I was very pleased therefore to read in the Clacton Gazette that the CCHS is in the top twenty percent of schools for raising pupils’ educational standards from admission at 11 to completing their GCSE examinations at 16.   Sue Williamson, chief executive of the Secondary School Admission Test education group, is reported as saying ‘Clacton County High School should be congratulated for their stunning performance in adding value to their students’ achievements.  It is one of the best schools in the country in outperforming expectations for their pupils and improving their future prospects.  There is plenty that other schools could learn from their success’.

            So far, so good.  It isn’t quite the whole story though.   On a back page of the same Gazette are to be found tables showing the percentage of pupils from each school and educational  establishment in Colchester and the Tendring District who went on to University or other Higher Education Institution.  These give a rather different picture.   Out of 110 school leavers from Clacton County High School 44 percent went on to Higher Education Institutions but only 6 percent went to the top third of these (that is, to a good university).  Not a single pupil from any school or other institution within the Tendring District gained admission to either Oxford or Cambridge Universities.  Things have been very different in the not-too-distant past.

  Peter Hall B.A.(Cantab) aged 21, on his graduation day. Selwyn College Chapel is in the background.  He was subsequently made an M.A.     

My elder son left Clacton County High School in 1970 at the age of 17, having sat and passed his ‘A’ level exams with outstanding results,. He had been  accepted by Selwyn College, Cambridge to begin his life there as an undergraduate from September 1971. He would then be just 18.  He spent his ‘gap year’ working in the store room of the Eastern Electricity Board HQ in Clacton, learning something of the ‘real world’ of work before he began his studies.  In 1971 he was one of  at least four CCHS sixth formers who became students at Cambridge University, all of whom graduated with honours.  Those four I knew about personally.  There may well have been others whom I didn’t know who started at either Oxford of Cambridge that same year.

       I don’t believe that young men and women of Clacton at the end of the 1960s were cleverer than those of the first decade of the 21^st century.  While it is possible that they were prepared to work and study harder (there certainly weren’t the distractions then that there are today) I think that their expectations and those of their teachers were higher, and that their teachers were more inspiring – and perhaps more skilled.

            Clacton County High School has proved itself brilliant at instilling a basic education into what may sometimes have been unpromising and perhaps resistant human material.  I believe though that the low percentage of pupils gaining admission to the best Universities – and none at all to Oxford and Cambridge – demonstrates that the school is failing its more gifted and hard-working pupils.   

           

   .

Week 4 2013

Tendring Topics......on line

‘When will they ever learn?’

          This was the refrain of a protest song ‘Where have all the flowers gone’, written by Pete Seeger in the 1950s and sung by the author and by, among others, Joan Baez and Marlene Dietrich.  Type that title into Google and you can read all about it – and hear it sung on YouTube by its author!

          When will we ever learn?   It might have been thought that we Brits have had a surfeit of military adventures in North Africa and the Middle East.  It was, no doubt, an achievement to have toppled Saddam Hussein - but at what a terrible cost! Iraq was laid waste, its infrastructure and public services destroyed.   Tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed and many thousands more maimed and permanently disabled.   And, of course, there were scores of British and American dead and wounded. What's more, our illegal intervention provided El Qaeda with a powerful recruitment incentive.

 The war against Saddam is over but Iraq is far from being a country at peace with itself.  The sectarian hatred and violence that we continue to see in Belfast, is trivial compared with that between Iraq's Sunni and Shia Muslims.   In the north of the country the Kurds yearn to be part of an independent Kurdistan incorporating the Kurdish minorities in Turkey and Iran. Members of Iraq’s Christian community, under Saddam Hussein a free and influential minority, are now subject to violent persecution and physical attack. Those who can get out are doing so.  Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, Christians, identified with ‘interfering infidels from the west intent on destroying our religion and historic culture’, are suffering increasing persecution from militant Islamists.  A worker at the Algerian gas plant caught up in last week’s terrorist attack and hostage taking, told us on tv that he had explained to the terrorists who had captured him that he was an Algerian and  Muslim.   ‘You’ll come to no harm’, his captors had assured him. ‘We’re after these crusaders!’

British, American and other NATO forces have been engaged in Afghanistan for a decade.  We are constantly being told how this that or the other area, that two years earlier was ruled by the Taliban, is now under the control of the Afghan government and its NATO allies.  Yet the Taliban still remains capable of launching attacks within Kabul itself and there have been an increasing number – 60 last year – of allied soldiers killed by members of the Afghan forces whom they have been training.  Within a couple of years all NATO combat forces will have been withdrawn and it is confidently believed that the forces of the Afghan government will by then be capable of engaging the Taliban fighters themselves.  They may have the capability will they, I wonder, have the inclination?  Does the ordinary Afghan soldier or peasant really see much difference between NATO forces and the forces of the Soviet Union that, a decade or so ago, the Taliban and other insurgents (with the covert support of the UK and the USA!) managed to oust?

Syria, like Iraq, once had a thriving Christian minority that worshipped freely and without fear.  Now, identified with the tyrannical regime that had allowed them to survive, they find themselves under attack from the rebel forces that we and our allies recognise as Syria’s legitimate government.   Can it really be the intention of ‘the West’ to cleanse the Middle East of Christian minorities and to support governments of militant Islamists from whence recruits for Al Qaeda and similar terrorist organisations spring?   Whatever our intentions may be, that is the effect our actions are having.

Now the French are sending troops to Mali, a former French colony that is under attack from Islamist Arabs in the north of the country supported by Algerian jihadists and armed former supporters of Colonel Gaddafi who have found their way into Mali from Libya*.  The UK is helping transport troops and supplies but is not (so far!) otherwise playing an active part in the conflict.  The French troops, supporting Malian government forces, are expected to make short work of the rebels.  So, of course, were the allied forces in Afghanistan.  They have been there for ten years – and they’re not out yet!

Isn’t it time that we in ‘the west’ paused and gave a little more thought to whom we are supporting, whom we are opposing – and why we are doing either?   The British National Party is totally abhorrent to me and I am reluctant to give the slightest credence to any of its declared policies.  I do think though that their demand that we should withdraw our troops without delay from any country where the majority of the population is Muslim is worth consideration.  Is our military presence wanted there by most of the ordinary people?  Is it harming or helping minorities holding another religious faith? Is it discouraging terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda, or is it encouraging recruitment for them?  Is it closing – or widening – existing sectarian and/or ethnic divisions? Whatever our hopes or intentions for those countries may be, are they really worth even a single human life?

*Was the terrorist attack and subsequent hostage situation on the gas installation in the remotest part of Algeria a consequence of that French action?  The experts insist that it was a well-planned attack that couldn’t possibly have been organised on the spur of the moment.   I think it possible that the attack had been planned to take place  some time in the future but that the French action had provided a useful propaganda reason for bring it forward.

‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be…..’

                   Such was the advice that, in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Polonius  gave to his son Laertes before he set sail for England.  This suggests to me that even in Shakespeare’s time, England was known as a country in which it was all too easy to fall into the hands of the moneylenders.  It certainly is today – and I’m not referring to ‘the deficit’ and the national debt that worries politicians so much.  I am talking about the burden of personal debt carried by far too many of my fellow Brits.   It is a burden that leads to domestic violence, breaks up marriages, renders families and individuals homeless, can motivate criminal activities and  can lead to suicide.

 The local daily Gazette records that research has found that in the first fortnight of 2013, seventeen percent of us were still paying off bills incurred before Christmas 2011!  Richard Aldridge, Chief Executive of Colchester’s Citizens Advice Bureau told a reporter that he wasn’t surprised by that figure. He said that, ‘Last year Colchester CAB debt specialists helped clients to write off more than £3.6 million.  The average debt was about £8,000.   One of the highest debts was more than £200,000 – and that was excluding a mortgage loan’.

            National figures reveal that one in five consumers started the New Year with more than £5,000 credit card debt and one in seven people in the east of England  struggles to keep up rent or mortgage payments.   Mr Aldridge warns (as I have done in this blog) that the increasingly popular ‘pay day loans’ are  a short-term fix and that interest can get racked up to ridiculous levels, as much as 4,000 per cent a year!   The CAB helps people to understand their income and expenditure and to look at priority debts such a keeping a roof over their heads and paying fuel bills.  ‘We know the situation is going to get worse when welfare benefits change in April.  The sooner the CAB is contacted the sooner there can be help to resolve the crisis.  There is no magic wand, but help is at hand’.

          Meanwhile the Government, that never lets us forget about national debt, seems able to regard  remarkably philosophically. debts incurred by hundreds of thousands of British citizens.   For the past two years the number of applicants for places in Universities has fallen sharply.  The reasons are painfully obvious; the huge burden of debt with which graduates are burdened and the difficulty they have in finding appropriate employment.   A government spokesperson says plaintively that, ‘They don’t seem to realize that they have to pay nothing up front and that they only have to start reducing that debt when they’re in a well-paid job’.  I can well imagine that that kind of argument might satisfy the thoroughly irresponsible and the ‘shirkers and scroungers’ about whom we read in the national press.  It doesn’t appeal to people who, like me, were brought up with a horror of debt and who try to live within their means, avoiding it at all costs.  Had students depended on loans instead of means-tested grants in the early 1970s, we would certainly not have encouraged our elder son to become an undergraduate at Cambridge.  It is all very well to say that graduates don’t have to begin repaying their loans until they are in a well-paid job; that is just when responsible graduates want to start buying a home in which to settle and raise a family. For many of them that student loan debt is likely to be hanging over their heads for the remainder of their working lives.

            Then there’s this urge – encouraged by the government and by the popular press – to buy your own home.  All young couples in a stable relationship (oh dear – only a few years ago I would have written ‘all young married couples’!) are assumed to want to ‘get their feet on the home ownership ladder’.  I have just heard on a commercial radio station a property developer urging that ‘with interest rates at a record low level, now is the time to buy!’    Interest rates undoubtedly are at a very low level but house prices aren’t.   Nor are the deposits required by banks or building societies before granting a mortgage loan.  Furthermore few working people nowadays are in a position  to say with confidence that they’ll  be able to keep up the mortgage repayments for the twenty or thirty years that will elapse before they hold the deeds of their home. It is only then that they will be truly home owners, and not just home buyers liable to be rendered homeless if they default on those mortgage repayments.

            Napoleon is said to have remarked with contempt that ‘the English are a nation of shop keepers’.   We’re certainly not that these days.  The most profitable shops are part of nation-wide or international enterprises, probably with their headquarters and their controlling ownership overseas.  What we are nowadays is a nation of debtors and – increasingly – a nation of debtors who are not only unable to repay their debts, but even to pay the interest on them.

           

           

Week 2 2012 12.01.2012

TENDRING TOPICS………..ON LINE

A Nation of Debtors!

            It was only a few weeks ago that I commented in this blog on the dangerous lure of ‘Pay Day Loans’; the offer – by a bank or other financial institution – to lend a relatively small sum of money ‘just till payday’ to deal with some sudden crisis (a burst pipe, a forgotten family birthday, an unexpected visitor) that may have arisen just at a time when you have nothing in reserve and only just enough money to see you through till payday!

            It all sounds so very sensible and straightforward.  It is a short term-loan ‘only till payday’ perhaps just a fortnight away.  It is of a relatively small sum, possibly £300, possibly £500 and, before you accept it, you know perfectly well how much interest there will be when you pay it back.  That too, will seem a very small sum and well worth the convenience of having the money when you needed it.

            And it would be fine, except for the fact that having paid it back with its small amount of interest, you won’t have sufficient money left in your pay packet to see you through the expenses of the next month!   The only answer may be to seek another payday loan, and another, and another, with that ‘small amount’ of interest becoming very large indeed.  Because of all this I wasn’t in the least surprised to learn of the government’s concern about the very large number of 25 to 35 year olds were seriously in debt, many of them as a result of reliance on ‘payday’ or similar loans to get them through a crisis.

             Nowadays being in debt has become regarded as the natural, the normal, even the expected human condition.  In my childhood and youth things were very different.  My parents had a horror of debt.  They believed that if there was something that you wanted you should save up until you were able to afford it.  Then, and only then, you could buy it.  ‘Hire purchase’ was only just coming into common use.  It was regarded with suspicion.  My Dad worked out that buying ‘in  instalments’ meant that in the end you were paying anything up to twice as much as those who bought it outright.  He called it the Kathleen Mavourneen system (there was a song of that name containing the line ‘It may be for years, and it may be for ever’!)  I do remember my parents, after hours of discussion, buying just one object on hire purchase – it was a rather good (for its time) Murphy wireless set!

            I inherited their fear of indebtedness. I needed a car for my job.  I bought a second-hand one for cash – out of my savings.  Later I was able to buy a motor-caravan.

New Year, 1979 - My bungalow home and the Toyota Motor-caravan in which Heather and I spent many happy holidays.

Later too, my wife Heather and I took out a mortgage to buy the home I now live in.  I was worried about the burden of debt involved, but at least I had a secure job (that was in the late 1950s – how many jobs are really secure nowadays). About that time I increased the spare-time freelance writing that I had started several years earlier. As well as freelance journalism I wrote several commercially successful books about domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage.  To reduce our debt I paid every penny I earned from this source to the Building Society until my mortgage had been paid off – ten years earlier than the agreed completion date!   Heather and I were debt-free!

What helped to pay for that bungalow and motor caravan!

            It was during those years that debt became a normal and accepted thing.  Do you remember when credit cards (Barclaycards were the first I think) were introduced.   They encouraged us to get into debt.  No more of that tedious ‘saving up’ before you could buy that new vacuum cleaner, that fridge, or that new lawn mower.  Barclaycard, I remember, ‘Took the waiting out of wanting’.  Wise credit card users paid off the debt quickly to minimise the interest payments.  Unwise ones paid a little off and then bought something else that they ‘just couldn’t manage without’. They stayed permanently in debt, month by month helping to enrich the bankers with their interest payments.

            Then came the Thatcher years - and government policies that I believe future historians will see as having done incalculable harm to the British way of life.  There was the unrealisable dream of Home Ownership for All.   It continues to this day.  Quite recently David Cameron spoke of the pride and joy felt by those who held the key ‘of their own home’ in their hands for the first time.   He didn’t mention the anguish and despair felt by those same home buyers when (possibly thanks to Government policy) they lose their jobs - and their homes - and have had to hand those keys back to the real owners, the money-lenders who provided the mortgage.

            No doubt remembering what a successful vote-buyer the ‘right to buy’ legislation (compelling local councils to sell their housing stock to sitting tenants at knock-down prices) had proved to be in the Thatcher era, David Cameron is trying it again – this time demanding that councils offer up to 50 percent discounts (well, it isn’t his money that he is generously giving away!)  I doubt if the idea will work a second time round but, if it does, yet more folk will find themselves in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds – and the reserve of affordable homes for letting will take yet another tumble!

            Then there are student loans. Every single graduate Member of Parliament received free tuition and, if he or she needed it, generous living allowances for their time in University.   Since the Thatcher/Blair era though, Parliament has decreed that the most promising members of the younger generation leave university and enter the world of work (when they can find any!) with a burden of debt of between £20,000 and £40,000!  What hope have they of ever getting their feet on the home ownership ladder?   They are assured that they don’t even have to begin paying off that debt until they have a substantial income.  Many of them will never pay it off completely though they will have the knowledge of that debt hanging over them throughout their lives. 

Oliver Goldsmith wrote in The Deserted Village that ‘Ill fares the land to hastening woes a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay’.   In Britain today men and women decay in enforced unemployment while nationwide, it is personal debt that accumulates!

A tv ‘Soap’ – and Real Life

          Aficionados of the tv hospital ‘soap’ Holby City (yes, I am one of them) will remember that a month or so ago there was a strong story line about the development of a plastic surgery department that would augment the hospital’s finances by serving a number of private patients.  A distinctly dodgy surgeon and his colleague carried out a number of breast enhancements using poor quality implants from a source in which the dodgy surgeon was discovered to have a strong financial interest.

            Patients complained, the story broke in the press and (as happens rather more often in ‘soaps’ than in real life) the guilty surgeon was killed in a car accident leaving his innocent (well, comparatively innocent) colleague and the hospital to clear up the mess and suffer the consequences.  The surgeon’s career seemed to be over and Holby City hospital threatened with closure.  Just now though, as does happen in ‘soaps’, it looks as though both may be saved!          

             We Holby City fans are now seeing the same drama, but on a much bigger scale, being enacted in real life.  A considerable number of women, in the UK, in France, in Germany and elsewhere have had surgery in which substandard implants from a now bankrupt French manufacturer have been used.  Some of those implants have already ruptured and though their contents have not been proved to be harmful to health I doubt if all the victims are quite convinced of this.

            The German government, typically incisive, has decided that the substandard implants will be removed and replaced and that the government will meet the cost of this.  Our government, equally typically indecisive, has maintained that the substandard implants do no harm whatsoever – but now agrees that all implants carried out by the NHS will be removed and replaced at public expense.  They hope that all the private enterprises that have carried out implant surgery will do the same.

             Some, no doubt, will.  Some can’t, because they are in administration.  Others will remember their first duty is not to their patients but to their shareholders.  They are in business to make money, not give it away.   The NHS will ‘take up the slack’ and accept the responsibility of any private enterprise that cannot or will not fulfil its obligations.   Their first duty, as a publicly owned body, is to the patients.

            So, once again – as with the failing banks – the public sector (that means us taxpayers) will be helping out a greedy and incompetent private sector.  We should beware of private contractors being invited to fulfil functions previously in the public sphere.

            In ‘the market place’ the buyer is trying to get ‘the best at the lowest price’.  The seller, on the other hand, is intent on getting ‘as much as he possibly can for as little as he can get away with’.  In this instance the fact that those French suppliers were trying to ‘get away with’ substandard implants was discovered before any serious harm was done.  Who knows what may happen next time?

‘Constant dripping wears away the stone!’

          I am reminded of that proverb when I think of the way in which an increasing number of us have year after year protested, apparently in vain, about the enormous – and constantly widening – gap between the incomes of the wealthiest members of our society and those of the poorest.  I originally drew attention to it for no other reason than that it seemed wrong that some of our fellow countrymen had no roof over their heads and didn’t know from where the next meal was coming, while others owned luxury yachts, national newspapers, football teams, and half a dozen palatial residences world-wide!

            More recently a carefully researched publication (The Spirit Level’) revealed that levelling of incomes benefited everyone in society – not just its poorest members..  Investigation showed that those countries with the narrowest gap between the incomes of the rich and poor had less crime and violence, more stable relationships, fewer divorces, better health and better standards of education than those – like Britain and the USA – that had a wide and ever-widening gap.

            For years the victims of this injustice suffered in silence but during recent months the constant dripping has produced world-wide peaceful protests (the Occupy Movement) particularly by young people.  In the UK the ‘squatters’ at St, Paul’s Cathedral are the most evident, but by no means the only manifestation of a movement that has produced protests throughout Europe, in the USA (both in Wall Street and widely across the Union) and in Russia.

            Could it be that David Cameron, our Prime Minister, is the latest convert to the ‘New Levellers’?  Disturbed by huge rises in executive pay and bonuses in the private sector in the midst of government induced austerity, he is urging that shareholders should have more power to regulate executive pay, and that there should be no rewards for failure.

Predictably perhaps, these modest suggestions have produced outrage in the ‘business community’.  It is quite all right (a good idea in fact) to complain that the Chief Executive of a local authority or a hospital board is earning more than the Prime Minister, but to criticise the fact that the annual income of  the Chief Executive of an international corporation would be enough to hire six prime ministers smacks of Bolshevism!

            I believe that compliance with the Prime Minister’s suggestions would have only a tiny effect on the income gap.  Much more radical action than that is needed. However our cause is now being noticed at high level. I can only suggest that we ‘carry on dripping’.  

             

            

Week 43 1.11.2011

Tendring Topics…….on Line


‘You read it first….here!’

That may not be quite true. The idea of narrowing the gap between rich and poor has been around a long time and blog readers may well have seen and been attracted to the idea long before I became an enthusiast. Many years ago though, when I was writing Tendring Topics (in print) in the Coastal Express, I recall saying that my idea of a good Budget was one that narrowed that gap and a bad Budget was one that widened it. It follows that I have seen many more bad budgets, even during the reign of New Labour (now there’s something for which Ed Miliband should have apologised!), than I have seen good ones.

Over the years I have changed or modified my views on a great many issues, but the desirability of levelling incomes throughout the United Kingdom is a cause from which I have never wavered. For a long time I seemed to be one of a tiny minority, but within the past few weeks tens of thousands world-wide have shown their support in the only way open to them – in mass demonstrations. They started in Greece and Spain but have spread throughout the world, one of the largest and most vociferous taking place in New York, the very heart of the capitalist world. There have been few or none in Scandinavia – a prosperous corner of northern Europe where that gap between rich and poor is already narrow. We have had them in Britain too, and very peaceful and well mannered they have so far been. Their best-known manifestation has been the tented camp at the entrance of St Paul’s Cathedral. A headline in the Daily Mail announced the ‘The portrait of a very middle class protest: A poet, a mother and even an extra from Downton….just who is at the Tent City demo?’ Goodness, was the voice of Middle England going soft on Loony Lefties?

Daily Mail aficionados will have been reassured by Richard Littlejohn’s feature in the inside pages. It began in unwontedly conciliatory mood, ‘It would be understandable if the crowd demonstrating outside St. Paul’s was comprised of self-employed small businessmen and women’, but went on, ‘Predictably, though, it was the usual gormless rent-a-mob you always find on these anti-globalisation demos – Toytown Trots from Mickey Mouse Universities, social workers, lecturers, full-time mature students and Swampy wannabes’. He seems to have visited a different demo from whoever wrote the news story!

Mr Littlejohn’s most offensive rant was reserved for a member of the clergy, ‘None of these demos is ever complete without a daft vicar from central casting. Playing the Derek Nimmo character on this occasion was Rev Giles Fraser, who asked the police to move off the steps of St Paul’s and declared his support for the protesters’.

George Bernard Shaw once remarked that the Daily Mirror was for those who couldn’t read, and the Daily Mail for those who couldn’t think. That was before Mr Littlejohn’s time. The Sun may have replaced the Mirror as the choice of the illiterate but it’s nice to know though that at least one pre-war British tradition is unchanged!

Later News

I am very sorry that, as a result of the demo outside St Paul’s, the cathedral has closed to the public. I suppose that the Health and Safety reason must be that the presence of the demonstrators, even if they tried to co-operate, could prevent fire or other emergency workers gaining ready access to the building in an emergency, and could hinder a rapid evacuation if required.


I am sorry not only because I think it wrong for the public to be prevented from attending any place of worship, but because I support the cause of the demonstrators. Preventing free access to the Cathedral is unnecessarily alienating folk who might otherwise be expected to support those protesting against the rule of Mammon.

Since writing the above, the Cathedral has been at least partially opened to the public and the Cathedral Authorities and the Bishop of London are holding discussions.  I do hope that it isn't all going 'to end in tears' - or in violence. 

The Money-Lenders


Everyone tends to watch more daytime television after retirement than they ever did while going out to work. I am no exception. Six or seven years ago it seemed to me that daytime commercial tv was largely financed by ambulance chasing ‘no win, no fee’ lawyers, and by financiers eager to lend large sums of money to folk who, in their own interest, should never be allowed to borrow it! ‘Never mind’, the adverts insisted, 'if you’re old, haven’t got a job, have a low credit rating or have been refused a loan elsewhere, we may be able to help you.'


Times have changed. No longer do we see the adverts from those benevolent moneylenders eager, so it seemed, to throw good money after bad. Nowadays they offer only relatively small ‘payday’ loans. It is all so simple and straightforward. You are getting along nicely until, half way through the month, there’s a sudden crisis; a problem with the laptop, a leaky pipe or water storage tank, a blocked drain, an unexpected – and important – visitor. It is a crisis that can easily be solved with two or three hundred pounds but, alas, you’ve only just got enough money to last until payday, still a fortnight away.

An easy-to-arrange payday loan will see you through! £300? – no problem; it’ll added to your bank account within the hour. You’ll know how much interest you have to pay right away. It will seem quite a small sum though, expressed as an annual rate of interest, it could be very large indeed. Payday comes, you repay the £300 plus interest, and all is well.

Except, of course, that you had needed the whole of your month’s pay for the rent or the mortgage, the fuel bill and the food bill for that month – and you have just got rid of £300 plus a bit extra, of it. The solution? You could apply for another payday loan, perhaps from a different lender, - and another, and another! Of course, if you have a few hundred in a savings account, you can pay off your debt and that’s that. But if you had a few hundred in the bank you wouldn’t have needed to borrow in the first place. It seems that the only people who can safely apply for a payday loan are those who don’t really need one!

Learning that millions and millions of bail-out euros are being poured into the Greek economy while, at the same time, unemployment in Greece gets steadily worse, hundreds of thousands of Greeks are reduced to abject poverty, some scavenging restaurant kitchen waste to find thrown-out food to feed their families, made me realize that on a much bigger scale, Greece is in the same position as those domestic borrowers who need a little financial help just till payday.

Not a single euro of those millions of the bailout money extracted from the wallets, handbags and bank accounts of ordinary working people throughout Europe, goes to help the Greeks. Every single cent goes straight back to the French and German bankers who made the loans, and thence into the pockets of their shareholders. When Ireland had similar, though mercifully smaller, problems, British taxpayers made a very considerable contribution to bail out the Irish Republic. This was not out of friendship and fellow feeling for our Irish neighbours, but simply because it had been British banks that had made rash loans to Irish enterprises. It was British bankers and their shareholders, not the Irish, who benefited from our apparent benevolence.

Our contribution to these bank bailouts together with the cost of wars in Iraq and Afganistan and of our support for the revolution in Libya, make a very considerable contribution to the size of the budget deficit for which the Government prefers to blame their New Labour predecessors.

A puzzled viewer wrote to the BBC recently pointing out that when a ‘rogue trader’ speculated with money with which he had been entrusted and lost it, he was arrested and prosecuted and punished. However, when banks do much the same thing with money with which they have been entrusted – nobody is prosecuted and punished. Instead we have to bail them out!

Under-occupied Properties?


A few weeks ago I commented in this blog on the bright idea of regenerating Brooklands Estate, Jaywick by encouraging retired folk to move into the township’s properties, described as ‘rabbit hutches’ and quite unsuitable for families but fine for elderly retired singles or couples. I thought that it was a stupid and insulting suggestion, and said so.

Now a similar idea has surfaced and appears to have gained some credence. It has been noted that some such elderly couples and singles (often widows or widowers like me) selfishly continue to occupy three-bed-roomed properties after their children have grown up and left home, thus denying bedrooms to the needy. They should be encouraged (no-one has yet suggested compulsion!) to move into one-bed-roomed homes, quite adequate and much more appropriate to their needs.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that when grown-up offspring leave home they usually do so to get married (or these days, I suppose, to find a partner!) and start a family. Most of them from time to time come back, with their families, to visit Grandpa and Grandma. Are they really to be told on these occasions that as their ageing parents are now living in a one-bedroom flat (a kind of ‘pending file’ as they await the grim reaper!) they’ll have to find themselves an hotel or bed and breakfast accommodation when they visit for more than a day?


88 Dudley Road, Clacton. New Years's Day 1979


My wife and I certainly welcomed and accommodated our sons and families when they visited us for the weekend or longer. Nowadays, old and living alone, I can cope only with ‘day’ visitors. However the smaller former bedroom of my small – but three bedroomed – bungalow is now my ‘office’ where at a desk, surrounded by a printer, a scanner and book-cases, I am writing this blog.

The other ‘spare’ bedroom is now a store-room, used for the storage of items which – if I were still capable of climbing a ladder – would be up in the roof space. There is no inducement that would make me voluntarily leave the home in which I have lived for sixty-five years, in which five years ago my wife’s life came to an end, and in which I hope that my life too will end.

I suggest that before looking for unused bedrooms, those who are keen to remedy the housing shortage look for all the empty houses, the second and holiday homes unused or used only occasionally. In 1947, when I was undergoing my practical training as a Sanitary Inspector (nowadays they are Environmental Health Officers!) in Battersea, we would look out for empty houses and report them to the Council’s legal department with a view to commandeering them to solve an even worse housing situation than exists today.

That surely would be a possibility worth exploring. Empty houses are rather easier to spot than empty bedrooms!

Degrees of Wickedness


It was quite wrong to kill Colonel Gaddafi after his capture. That is unquestionable. However I don’t feel that his murder, carried out it seems by a young irregular soldier just after the heat of battle, was quite as wicked as:

The massacre, again by anti-Gaddafi militia, of 50 pro-Gaddafi fighters whose bodies were found in Sirte with their hands tied behind their back.

The deliberate killing rather than capture, of Osama Bin Laden. 

The computer assisted assassination, by unmanned ‘drone’ aircraft controlled from a base thousands of miles away, of individuals believed to be leaders of Al Q’aida.

There must have been sighs of relief in Whitehall when, thanks to Colonel Gaddafi’s murder, it was realized that there would now be no risk of the former Libyan leader making public exactly how much help his torturers and death squads had received from MI6 and its political masters in the days when Tony Blair and Gaddafi had been photographed warmly embracing each other.