Tendring Topics……..on line
Some Revelations
I don’t think that many people would think of the London Evening Standard as being a rabble-raising red rag. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if I were told that our MP, Mr Carswell and other supporters of the Government read it regularly. If they do, they must sometimes get a nasty shock. A week or so ago, for instance, the Standard published some little-known facts about one of our great national institutions Boots the Chemists.
We all know Boots. It’s thoroughly reliable, as British as the Union Jack, and there’s a branch in every High Street – except, of course, in Clacton-on-Sea. We have two Boots branches within a couple of hundred yards of each other in Pier Avenue!
Where do you suppose Boots has its headquarters? In London, or perhaps in the Midlands near England’s geographical centre, so that it may better serve ‘middle England’. Didn’t I once read that Boots originated in Nottingham? The Evening Standard has revealed that Boots HQ isn’t in any one of those obvious places. Boots the Chemists was part of a merger a few years ago and is now the Boots Alliance. Its HQ is no longer in the United Kingdom but in the tiny Alpine town of Zug in Switzerland.
This isn’t because an astute marketing manager has discovered a powerful demand for paracetamol caplets, contraceptives or aftershave in the Swiss Cantons. When the Evening Standard reporter sought ‘The Boots Registered Office’ he found that it was tiny, poorly signed and not even permanently staffed. It isn’t there to sell pharmaceuticals or toilet necessities – its remote location is for no other reason than to avoid UK taxes. Corporation Tax is 15 percent in Switzerland and 25 percent in the UK!
Thus, our Treasury is losing all the tax that this very profitable ‘all British’ enterprise should be paying. What’s more, Boots now competes unfairly with the small group of independent pharmacists who cannot – or prefer not to – follow their example. In cash-strapped Britain, where ‘we’re all in this together, carrying the burden of the nation’s debt’, benefit cheats and ‘tax evaders’ are pursued with vigour. Tax avoiders, like Boots, are of course quite different. They’re commendably following normal business practice in the interests of their shareholders!
Another recent revelation of the Evening Standard relates to Scottish Power which, you may recall, led the recent huge increases in energy prices that affect us all.. Their head has recently doubled his salary to £1m a year. Oh – I was wrong when I wrote above that the increase in energy prices affects us all. It won’t affect the Directors of Scottish Power. The small print of their Annual Report reveals that they are entitled to £1,000 of the company’s services free of charge!
A Greek Tragedy
I don’t pretend to understand the mysteries of international finance. I learn from the tv news bulletins that the Greek Government will almost certainly accept a further round of economy cuts, increased taxation and privatisation in order to obtain financial help from the EU and the IMF. At the same time I see images of tens of thousands of ordinary Greeks making it clear that they will never accept further cuts.
They have, they say, already suffered a year of austerity at the end of which their country’s financial situation is no better but rather worse than before and the number of their unemployed has increased by almost half a million! We are, I think about to discover what happens when an invincible force meets an immoveable object!
Meanwhile a blog reader who sees the situation rather differently from our politicians and most of the news media, has been in touch.
In Greece and Portugal, he says, ‘foreign banks, mainly German and French, loaned ridiculously large sums of money to governments and individuals that, in a shrinking global economy, they cannot afford to repay. The ‘bail out money for Greece’ is a loan and not a gift. It is going straight to the banks, and the Greeks will have to continue paying for this for decades to come, through taxes, cuts to services and so on.
The same was true of Ireland where RBS and Lloyds loaned billions of pounds and the UK Government ‘generously’ loaned Ireland enough to avoid our own banks losing their money. In other words we are still indirectly subsidising the banks with sums of money that make the deficit reduction look like a sideshow.
And, as far as I can see, our Banks have resumed ‘business as usual’ with six figure salaries and enormous bonuses for their top management and a continuing reluctance to help up-and-coming enterprises that need their support.
I am reminded of G.K Chesterton’s poem ‘The Ballad of the Strange Ascetic’ about a Mr Higgins who, among other things:
Drives a weary quill,
To lend the poor that funny cash that makes them poorer still.
There must, I think, be quite a few members of the Higgins family involved in international finance.
‘When will they ever learn?
‘When will they ever learn’, was the refrain of a ‘protest song’ of the 1960s called 'Where have all the flowers gone?’ It was often heard at CND rallies and the like. To refresh my warm but fading memories of those distant days I have just been listening to Joan Baez (remember her?) singing it on U-tube!
It could well have been written as a warning to the eternally optimistic politicians of the current cntury. When, at the beginning of the new millennium, ‘the West’ began its campaign in Afghanistan in retaliation for ‘9/11’ and the Taliban’s support of Al Qaida, how many political and military experts would have imagined for one moment that ten years later there would still be thousands of NATO, mostly American and British, troops there fighting a guerrilla war there to which there seems to be no end? Do you remember the elation when ‘we’ captured Kabul? That was the beginning of the real war, not the end. We shall, no doubt, one day withdraw our troops after negotiating a face-saving deal between the corrupt and incompetent Afghan government that we have been supporting and the ‘moderate Taliban’. My guess is that within months the no-longer-moderate Taliban will be back in power enforcing its own bloodthirsty version of Sharia law on those of their fellow-countrymen and women who had been foolish enough to believe the west’s promises.
Not even the million or so protesters who, throughout Europe, marched in protest against the illegal invasion of Iraq could have imagined that that war would drag on as it did with such an appalling death toll, and prove quite such a potent recruitment incentive for Al Qaida. Do you remember President George W. Bush standing on the bridge of an American aircraft carrier triumphantly announcing that the war had been won? On such occasions there is sardonic laughter in Heaven!
Now we have NATO action in Libya, led by the French and British. It was confidently predicted that the campaign would be over in weeks and would cost no more than tens of millions of pounds (in a time of national austerity that seemed plenty!). In fact, it isn’t over yet and has already cost us £250 million!
Western political leaders considering any form of military intervention should have the following facts of modern warfare thrust in front of them:
It’ll take much longer than their military advisers suggest.
It’ll cost much more than their economic and political advisers calculate.
Many more homes will be destroyed and many more men, woman and children will be killed or maimed than anyone expects.
They’ll be hated more than they think possible.
The final outcome will not be whatever it is that they are hoping for.
When will they ever learn?
Clacton’s International Conference
Hosting a two-day conference on the challenges facing coastal towns Europe-wide, with representatives from Turkey and Russia as well as from the Council of Europe, was certainly something of a coup for Tendring District Council. There is, I think, little doubt that the reason that Clacton was chosen as the conference’s venue was the publicity that had been recently given to the fact that Jaywick’s Brooklands and Grasslands estates are England’s most deprived area.
That being so, it does seem strange – not to say churlish – not to have included Jaywick councillors Nick Brown and Dan Casey among the ten Tendring Council delegates to the Conference, even though Council leader Neil Stock said in explanation, ‘It was not just about Jaywick but was far more wide-reaching’.
Perhaps even more surprising was that our MP, Mr Douglas Carsswell was invited and apparently played a considerable role in the proceedings. He is well-known for his Euro-scepticism and for his conviction that, if global warming is taking place it has nothing to do with human activity. It follows therefore that he believes that endeavours to find and exploit alternative renewable sources of energy are a waste of time, money and effort.
How odd therefore that he should attend a Conference seeking a European solution to a British problem, and one from which the only positive thought to emerge was that the wind farms proliferating round our coasts offer the Tendring District its best opportunities for future economic and employment development. Local press reports of Mr Carswell’s speech suggested that it consisted largely of hardly original waffle about finding inspiration in Peter Bruff, who developed Clacton-on-Sea in the 1870s. It amounted to urging us to pull up our socks, stand on our own two feet and adopt a ‘can do’ attitude.
Government Minister Bob Neill, who once lived in Manningtree, was similarly inspiring! He told the conference that local authorities were best placed to tackle their own issues. Putting power into the hands of local communities ‘was at the heart of the Government’s agenda’.
Is that so? Tell it to the residents of Northamptonshire where the determination of local communities expressed through parish councils, district councils and the county council not to have a land-fill nuclear waste site in their area, has recently been over-ruled by the ‘Nanny knows best dear’ central government!
Showing posts with label power to the people. Show all posts
Showing posts with label power to the people. Show all posts
28 June 2011
16 December 2010
Week 51.10 21 December 2010
Tendring Topics……..on Line
HAPPY CHRISTMAS!
There is a, possibly apocryphal, story of a young couple doing their Christmas shopping and looking at all the depictions of Santa Claus, Rudolph the reindeer, gnomes and fairies in the shop windows. The young woman spotted one shop window with a baby in a manger and shepherds and wise men in attendance. She called to her husband or (since they were a
thoroughly modern couple) her partner. ‘Look at this dear’, she said, ‘would you believe it! They’re even dragging religion into Christmas now!’
In an article in the Christmas number of the Radio Times Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes of the modern practice of describing Christmas as the Midwinter Festival and replacing traditional junior school Nativity Plays with winter morality plays having no religious theme. This is presumably because we now live in a multi-faith society and it is feared that a purely Christian festival might offend those of other religious faiths or of none. Dr Rowan Williams points out that many adherents of other faiths are happy to join with Christians in remembering and re-enacting the Nativity story. Muslims, in particular, accept the story of Jesus’ miraculous birth, while rejecting his crucifixion and resurrection. Dr Williams says that one of the best film versions of the Nativity that he has seen was made by an Iranian Muslim film company.
In any case, don’t the apostles of ‘political correctness’ who are so mindful for the feelings of those with other faiths, ever consider the possibility that Christians (still quite a substantial religious group in the UK!) could be offended by their festival having been taken over by secular materialism; what in an earlier age might have been described as the worship and service of Mammon?
Looking at the colourful illustrations of happy children in the pages of the daily Coastal Gazette and the Clacton Gazette during the week before Christmas, I was cheered and relieved to note that by far the greater number of end-of-term primary school Christmas dramas were straightforward old-fashioned Nativity Plays with a baby in a manger, a bashful Joseph and Mary, shepherds, wise men and angels. Long may they remain so!
I feel no need to conceal my Christian faith, shaky and full of doubt as it often is. I wish all blog readers a joyful Christmas and a peaceful and fulfilled New Year. May the God revealed to us in the manger of ‘a lowly cattle shed’ bless us all.
'In a lowly cattle shed'. The Christmas Crib at St. James' (Church of England) parish church, Clacton-on-Sea
‘Black is actually white'
Nobody is saying that – yet. But, when I hear some of the claims of the present government, I am expecting to hear it any day! There is, for instance, the claim that reducing unemployment pay helps the jobless – it gives them an extra incentive to look for a non-existent job!
Then there is the insistent claim that government is divesting itself of its powers and returning them to ‘the people’ and ‘to local communities’. I have been urging that for years! Ever since the end of World War II central government has been taking responsibility for running local services from the representatives of local people, their elected district councils and either controlling them directly itself or handing them over to giant private corporations. Was that to be reversed?
Not a bit of it. Central government is now taking over the control of the letting of socially provided housing accommodation from elected councils ‘Nanny knows best dear’. It is also taking control of schools away from local democratic control and handing it, with the cash that goes with it, over to head teachers. But ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ as those head teachers will discover if their syllabuses and teaching practices begin to stray too far from what central government (not local people) consider desirable.
Political control of Police Forces is to be taken away from existing Police Committees (whose members, though not directly elected, did at least represent local communities) and handed over to single, directly elected, Police Commissioners (no doubt on a fat-cat salary!) Similarly the government would like to transform local authorities, as they exist today, to be presided over by directly elected Mayors with executive powers. These measures may make for greater efficiency, but they certainly don’t ‘give power to the people’. They would mean that control of the police and of local administration would pass from representative committees to elected dictatorships. It is always easier to bribe or bully a single individual than the members of a committee!
Then there is the matter of university tuition fees, an issue that has provoked, and will continue to provoke, both strong peaceful protest, and angry and destructive riots. But ‘students don’t have to pay a penny up front’ the government insists plaintively. ‘Don’t they understand that no-one has to pay anything at all until his or her income exceeds £21,000 a year. Many students will never pay off their nominal debt. More, rather than less, students from poorer families will be attracted to University education’. Perhaps some, the irresponsible, will be attracted. It will be the more responsible less-than-wealthy who will be deterred. I know that my wife and I would never have encouraged a child of ours to incur a debt of perhaps £40,000 or £50,000 (what’s an odd £10,000 to the seriously wealthy!) hanging over his head for all his working life. The fact that he might never pay it off would have made the prospect additionally abhorrent rather than more attractive. It might have been thought that the current financial crisis would have made even members of the present government (few, if any, of whom have ever known financial hardship) appreciate the fear of debt felt by what used to be known as ‘the deserving poor’ – but apparently not!
But that’s not all. We all know, because top politicians have told us so often, that they’re very keen on keeping seriously and chronically ill patients in their own homes so that they don’t have to spend their last months or years in hospital or a care home. Could it be to facilitate this that the government is phasing out the disability living allowance that pays for carers and other necessities for the bedridden and housebound. This takes effect immediately for new applicants. For those at present in receipt of the allowance it will be phased out in 2015. Perhaps it is to give the disabled an added incentive ‘to rise, take up their beds, and walk’!
‘Black’ may not yet have been officially declared to be ‘white’ but it is certainly beginning to look distinctly ‘greyish’. And now, I learn, the government is trying to find means of measuring the happiness of the electorate! I was about to write that Britain today is looking more and more like George Orwell’s vision of 1984 – but not even George Orwell’s fertile imagination had hit on the idea of a Happiness Gauge!
A bit less seriously!
As Christmas is now just days away, it occurs to me that some readers – or younger members of their families – might be amused by a couple of light-hearted Christmassy pieces of verse that my wife Heather and I wrote many years ago to amuse our grandchildren. You can guess roughly how many years ago by the fact that all three of those grandchildren are now in their late twenties!
When Santa got stuck in a Chimney….
When Santa got stuck in a chimney
Long ago on a cold winter’s night;
You never heard such a commotion,
You never did see such a sight!
There was soot over mother’s best carpet –
There was soot on the furniture too –
And Santa Claus thought that his boots were on fire
The night he got stuck in a flue.
The reindeer pulled hard on their traces.
(You’d have thought he was stuck there with glue!)
Till at last, in a rush, with a huff and a puff,
Old Santa popped out of the flue.
He sent his red coat to the cleaners
And he said, as he scratched his grey head.
‘Next year I’ll wait till the family’s asleep
And creep in through a window instead!’
Good King Wenceslas
Good King Wenceslas is, as far as I know, the only Christmas carol with no reference to the Nativity. It is also not strictly a Christmas carol at all but a ballad for St. Stephen’s Day, better known to most of us as Boxing Day. It does though carry the strong Christian message of the responsibility of the wealthy and privileged towards the less fortunate.
When I was a small boy I quite thought that the King’s name was Wenslas and that he ‘last looked out’. I had a vision of an important looking man with a crown on his head and wearing a dressing gown who, before going to bed, opened the front door of his palace to put the cat out and leave a note for the milkman in the morning. When he did this on 26th December he spotted this poor old man grubbing through the snow looking for a few sticks of firewood!
Many years later, as a prisoner of war, I spent two Christmases in what had been King Wenceslas’ Kingdom of Bohemia. The snow there really was deep and crisp and even. Looking across snowfields toward distant forest and mountains it was easy to imagine the scene that King Wenceslas had surveyed on that Boxing Day night centuries earlier. Later, hitch-hiking my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia after the collapse of Nazi Germany in May 1945, I found my way to Prague where I celebrated with jubilant Czechs before moving on. In Wenceslas Square (Prague’s main square), there was the King himself, on his charger, dominating the scene. He, like me, had survived World War II!
Many more years passed and one Christmas, to entertain our grandchildren, my wife Heather and I composed a piece of verse that could have been a prelude to the events recorded in the carol. It was hardly fair on King Wenceslas who, I have little doubt, was a kind and generous man throughout his life. After a thousand years I hope he won’t mind. Here it is:
King Wenceslas hung his stocking up on 24th December.
‘Will Father Christmas call on me. I hope he will remember’.
He early went to bed that night, woke early in the morning;
Roused his pageboy with a shout, as the day was dawning.
‘At the bottom of my bed, there should be a present;
A new gold ring would be quite nice, or a fine fat pheasant!’
At the bottom of the bed, the pageboy found a letter:
Dear King, Be nicer to the poor and I’ll like you better.
It’s a rich man’s job to see beggars don’t go hungry.
If this warning you ignore, I’ll be very angry.
Tomorrow is St. Stephen’s Day. Please look out of doors.
Help the poor man you’ll see there.
Yours truly, Santa Claus
Not great poetry – but it amused the grandchildren!
Happy Christmas to all!
HAPPY CHRISTMAS!
There is a, possibly apocryphal, story of a young couple doing their Christmas shopping and looking at all the depictions of Santa Claus, Rudolph the reindeer, gnomes and fairies in the shop windows. The young woman spotted one shop window with a baby in a manger and shepherds and wise men in attendance. She called to her husband or (since they were a
thoroughly modern couple) her partner. ‘Look at this dear’, she said, ‘would you believe it! They’re even dragging religion into Christmas now!’
In an article in the Christmas number of the Radio Times Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes of the modern practice of describing Christmas as the Midwinter Festival and replacing traditional junior school Nativity Plays with winter morality plays having no religious theme. This is presumably because we now live in a multi-faith society and it is feared that a purely Christian festival might offend those of other religious faiths or of none. Dr Rowan Williams points out that many adherents of other faiths are happy to join with Christians in remembering and re-enacting the Nativity story. Muslims, in particular, accept the story of Jesus’ miraculous birth, while rejecting his crucifixion and resurrection. Dr Williams says that one of the best film versions of the Nativity that he has seen was made by an Iranian Muslim film company.
In any case, don’t the apostles of ‘political correctness’ who are so mindful for the feelings of those with other faiths, ever consider the possibility that Christians (still quite a substantial religious group in the UK!) could be offended by their festival having been taken over by secular materialism; what in an earlier age might have been described as the worship and service of Mammon?
Looking at the colourful illustrations of happy children in the pages of the daily Coastal Gazette and the Clacton Gazette during the week before Christmas, I was cheered and relieved to note that by far the greater number of end-of-term primary school Christmas dramas were straightforward old-fashioned Nativity Plays with a baby in a manger, a bashful Joseph and Mary, shepherds, wise men and angels. Long may they remain so!
I feel no need to conceal my Christian faith, shaky and full of doubt as it often is. I wish all blog readers a joyful Christmas and a peaceful and fulfilled New Year. May the God revealed to us in the manger of ‘a lowly cattle shed’ bless us all.
'In a lowly cattle shed'. The Christmas Crib at St. James' (Church of England) parish church, Clacton-on-Sea‘Black is actually white'
Nobody is saying that – yet. But, when I hear some of the claims of the present government, I am expecting to hear it any day! There is, for instance, the claim that reducing unemployment pay helps the jobless – it gives them an extra incentive to look for a non-existent job!
Then there is the insistent claim that government is divesting itself of its powers and returning them to ‘the people’ and ‘to local communities’. I have been urging that for years! Ever since the end of World War II central government has been taking responsibility for running local services from the representatives of local people, their elected district councils and either controlling them directly itself or handing them over to giant private corporations. Was that to be reversed?
Not a bit of it. Central government is now taking over the control of the letting of socially provided housing accommodation from elected councils ‘Nanny knows best dear’. It is also taking control of schools away from local democratic control and handing it, with the cash that goes with it, over to head teachers. But ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ as those head teachers will discover if their syllabuses and teaching practices begin to stray too far from what central government (not local people) consider desirable.
Political control of Police Forces is to be taken away from existing Police Committees (whose members, though not directly elected, did at least represent local communities) and handed over to single, directly elected, Police Commissioners (no doubt on a fat-cat salary!) Similarly the government would like to transform local authorities, as they exist today, to be presided over by directly elected Mayors with executive powers. These measures may make for greater efficiency, but they certainly don’t ‘give power to the people’. They would mean that control of the police and of local administration would pass from representative committees to elected dictatorships. It is always easier to bribe or bully a single individual than the members of a committee!
Then there is the matter of university tuition fees, an issue that has provoked, and will continue to provoke, both strong peaceful protest, and angry and destructive riots. But ‘students don’t have to pay a penny up front’ the government insists plaintively. ‘Don’t they understand that no-one has to pay anything at all until his or her income exceeds £21,000 a year. Many students will never pay off their nominal debt. More, rather than less, students from poorer families will be attracted to University education’. Perhaps some, the irresponsible, will be attracted. It will be the more responsible less-than-wealthy who will be deterred. I know that my wife and I would never have encouraged a child of ours to incur a debt of perhaps £40,000 or £50,000 (what’s an odd £10,000 to the seriously wealthy!) hanging over his head for all his working life. The fact that he might never pay it off would have made the prospect additionally abhorrent rather than more attractive. It might have been thought that the current financial crisis would have made even members of the present government (few, if any, of whom have ever known financial hardship) appreciate the fear of debt felt by what used to be known as ‘the deserving poor’ – but apparently not!
But that’s not all. We all know, because top politicians have told us so often, that they’re very keen on keeping seriously and chronically ill patients in their own homes so that they don’t have to spend their last months or years in hospital or a care home. Could it be to facilitate this that the government is phasing out the disability living allowance that pays for carers and other necessities for the bedridden and housebound. This takes effect immediately for new applicants. For those at present in receipt of the allowance it will be phased out in 2015. Perhaps it is to give the disabled an added incentive ‘to rise, take up their beds, and walk’!
‘Black’ may not yet have been officially declared to be ‘white’ but it is certainly beginning to look distinctly ‘greyish’. And now, I learn, the government is trying to find means of measuring the happiness of the electorate! I was about to write that Britain today is looking more and more like George Orwell’s vision of 1984 – but not even George Orwell’s fertile imagination had hit on the idea of a Happiness Gauge!
A bit less seriously!
As Christmas is now just days away, it occurs to me that some readers – or younger members of their families – might be amused by a couple of light-hearted Christmassy pieces of verse that my wife Heather and I wrote many years ago to amuse our grandchildren. You can guess roughly how many years ago by the fact that all three of those grandchildren are now in their late twenties!
When Santa got stuck in a Chimney….
When Santa got stuck in a chimney
Long ago on a cold winter’s night;
You never heard such a commotion,
You never did see such a sight!
There was soot over mother’s best carpet –
There was soot on the furniture too –
And Santa Claus thought that his boots were on fire
The night he got stuck in a flue.
The reindeer pulled hard on their traces.
(You’d have thought he was stuck there with glue!)
Till at last, in a rush, with a huff and a puff,
Old Santa popped out of the flue.
He sent his red coat to the cleaners
And he said, as he scratched his grey head.
‘Next year I’ll wait till the family’s asleep
And creep in through a window instead!’
Good King Wenceslas
Good King Wenceslas is, as far as I know, the only Christmas carol with no reference to the Nativity. It is also not strictly a Christmas carol at all but a ballad for St. Stephen’s Day, better known to most of us as Boxing Day. It does though carry the strong Christian message of the responsibility of the wealthy and privileged towards the less fortunate.
When I was a small boy I quite thought that the King’s name was Wenslas and that he ‘last looked out’. I had a vision of an important looking man with a crown on his head and wearing a dressing gown who, before going to bed, opened the front door of his palace to put the cat out and leave a note for the milkman in the morning. When he did this on 26th December he spotted this poor old man grubbing through the snow looking for a few sticks of firewood!
Many years later, as a prisoner of war, I spent two Christmases in what had been King Wenceslas’ Kingdom of Bohemia. The snow there really was deep and crisp and even. Looking across snowfields toward distant forest and mountains it was easy to imagine the scene that King Wenceslas had surveyed on that Boxing Day night centuries earlier. Later, hitch-hiking my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia after the collapse of Nazi Germany in May 1945, I found my way to Prague where I celebrated with jubilant Czechs before moving on. In Wenceslas Square (Prague’s main square), there was the King himself, on his charger, dominating the scene. He, like me, had survived World War II!
Many more years passed and one Christmas, to entertain our grandchildren, my wife Heather and I composed a piece of verse that could have been a prelude to the events recorded in the carol. It was hardly fair on King Wenceslas who, I have little doubt, was a kind and generous man throughout his life. After a thousand years I hope he won’t mind. Here it is:
King Wenceslas hung his stocking up on 24th December.
‘Will Father Christmas call on me. I hope he will remember’.
He early went to bed that night, woke early in the morning;
Roused his pageboy with a shout, as the day was dawning.
‘At the bottom of my bed, there should be a present;
A new gold ring would be quite nice, or a fine fat pheasant!’
At the bottom of the bed, the pageboy found a letter:
Dear King, Be nicer to the poor and I’ll like you better.
It’s a rich man’s job to see beggars don’t go hungry.
If this warning you ignore, I’ll be very angry.
Tomorrow is St. Stephen’s Day. Please look out of doors.
Help the poor man you’ll see there.
Yours truly, Santa Claus
Not great poetry – but it amused the grandchildren!
Happy Christmas to all!
12 August 2010
Week 33.10 17 August 2010
Tendring Topics……..on line
A ‘Big Society………'
……..or just another Confidence Trick? I am referring to our Prime Minister, David Cameron’s idea of a major redistribution of power from its present base in central and local government, to ‘the community’. When I first heard of it I had an eerie feeling of déja vu. Somewhere, at some time, I had heard it all before.
Then it came to me. During the ‘50s and ‘60s I had encountered some extraordinarily nice people who had assured me that an earthly paradise would only be achieved when the state ‘had withered away’ and society was organised in small self-sufficient communities, each managing its own affairs. These friends of mine tended to be bearded, bespectacled and sandal-wearing. The males usually wore corduroy trousers, jeans not yet having achieved their popularity, and the females, flowing and colourful print dresses. They were strict vegetarians, readers of The Guardian and the New Statesman (both of which they criticised for being too pro-establishment) and they described themselves as Tolstoyan Anarchists.
Charming and friendly as they were, they were surely not the kind of people whose ideas – even half a century later – would be likely to inspire a leader of the Conservative Party.
They hadn’t. His ideas are far less radical. Come to think of it, I can’t recall there being any reduction in the power of central government included in them – rather the reverse in fact. He is quite keen on parents and teachers running their own schools free of local government control. He proposes that if a local authority raises Council Tax above a central government dictated benchmark there could be a local referendum, the result of which would be binding on the council. He would like to see the ‘cabinet style’ administration that has been imposed on local government, replaced by the virtual dictatorship of a directly elected Mayor. Similarly, he would like to see the admittedly shadowy Police Authorities replaced by directly elected Commissioners, also elected dictators, to whom Chief Constables would be subordinate. Is that, power to the people? Hardly.
The public are also invited to let the Government know their ideas on savings and cuts that could be made. However there is no question of us having a referendum on the increase in VAT or on the value of the Trident nuclear deterrent. The idea that the system of income tax should be reviewed, with a penny or two immediately added to the standard rate, is a subject, like sex, religion and politics, that simply ‘isn’t discussed’ in polite society.
More use should be made of free volunteer labour, says Mr Cameron. Everyone has ideas about how such volunteers could best be used, invariably ways which do not affect the person making the suggestion. A number have had the idea that volunteer labour could be used to keep flower beds in parks and public gardens neat and tidy. I’d be surprised if any of those making this suggestion are council gardeners or members of their families. Nor, I think, would nurses and paramedics welcome Red Cross or St. John’s Ambulance volunteers supplementing or supplanting them in hospital wards or on NHS ambulances. What would be the reaction of postal workers to boy scouts voluntarily delivering the mail?
I rather warmed to the idea, suggested by a tv viewer, that David Cameron might like to set an example. He has, so the viewer said, ample private means (I have no idea whether or not that is the case) and could resign from his job as Prime Minister – and then take it up again as a volunteer. He would, of course, retain the perks; two comfortably furnished and staffed homes, free VIP travel and goodness knows how many free official dinners and lunches!
Think of the valuable spin-off. Every time workers – even those on the minimum wage – asked for a pay rise, they could be told, ‘Stop moaning. You’re already getting more than the Prime Minister!’
A correspondent to the East Anglian Daily Times summed up 'The Big Society' very succinctly:
'As I understand it, the aim of the big society is to get the work currently done professionally by workers in the public sector, transferred to the 'voluntary sector'. In other words, Davnick Cleggeron is asking me to volunteer in order to put one of my neighbours out of work'.
A ‘Big Society………'
……..or just another Confidence Trick? I am referring to our Prime Minister, David Cameron’s idea of a major redistribution of power from its present base in central and local government, to ‘the community’. When I first heard of it I had an eerie feeling of déja vu. Somewhere, at some time, I had heard it all before.
Then it came to me. During the ‘50s and ‘60s I had encountered some extraordinarily nice people who had assured me that an earthly paradise would only be achieved when the state ‘had withered away’ and society was organised in small self-sufficient communities, each managing its own affairs. These friends of mine tended to be bearded, bespectacled and sandal-wearing. The males usually wore corduroy trousers, jeans not yet having achieved their popularity, and the females, flowing and colourful print dresses. They were strict vegetarians, readers of The Guardian and the New Statesman (both of which they criticised for being too pro-establishment) and they described themselves as Tolstoyan Anarchists.
Charming and friendly as they were, they were surely not the kind of people whose ideas – even half a century later – would be likely to inspire a leader of the Conservative Party.
They hadn’t. His ideas are far less radical. Come to think of it, I can’t recall there being any reduction in the power of central government included in them – rather the reverse in fact. He is quite keen on parents and teachers running their own schools free of local government control. He proposes that if a local authority raises Council Tax above a central government dictated benchmark there could be a local referendum, the result of which would be binding on the council. He would like to see the ‘cabinet style’ administration that has been imposed on local government, replaced by the virtual dictatorship of a directly elected Mayor. Similarly, he would like to see the admittedly shadowy Police Authorities replaced by directly elected Commissioners, also elected dictators, to whom Chief Constables would be subordinate. Is that, power to the people? Hardly.
The public are also invited to let the Government know their ideas on savings and cuts that could be made. However there is no question of us having a referendum on the increase in VAT or on the value of the Trident nuclear deterrent. The idea that the system of income tax should be reviewed, with a penny or two immediately added to the standard rate, is a subject, like sex, religion and politics, that simply ‘isn’t discussed’ in polite society.
More use should be made of free volunteer labour, says Mr Cameron. Everyone has ideas about how such volunteers could best be used, invariably ways which do not affect the person making the suggestion. A number have had the idea that volunteer labour could be used to keep flower beds in parks and public gardens neat and tidy. I’d be surprised if any of those making this suggestion are council gardeners or members of their families. Nor, I think, would nurses and paramedics welcome Red Cross or St. John’s Ambulance volunteers supplementing or supplanting them in hospital wards or on NHS ambulances. What would be the reaction of postal workers to boy scouts voluntarily delivering the mail?
I rather warmed to the idea, suggested by a tv viewer, that David Cameron might like to set an example. He has, so the viewer said, ample private means (I have no idea whether or not that is the case) and could resign from his job as Prime Minister – and then take it up again as a volunteer. He would, of course, retain the perks; two comfortably furnished and staffed homes, free VIP travel and goodness knows how many free official dinners and lunches!
Think of the valuable spin-off. Every time workers – even those on the minimum wage – asked for a pay rise, they could be told, ‘Stop moaning. You’re already getting more than the Prime Minister!’
A correspondent to the East Anglian Daily Times summed up 'The Big Society' very succinctly:
'As I understand it, the aim of the big society is to get the work currently done professionally by workers in the public sector, transferred to the 'voluntary sector'. In other words, Davnick Cleggeron is asking me to volunteer in order to put one of my neighbours out of work'.
No member of the present government, or of any possible future government, can remember the 1930s. I can. Then democratically elected representatives of local communities ran services as diverse as gas, electricity and water supply, hospitals and maternity homes, domiciliary health care, schools and further education institutions, public transport, sewers and sewage treatment, highways, parks and gardens and housing estates; most of the services in fact, that make the difference between civilisation and barbarism. Through their representatives elected to county, borough and district councils, the ‘communities’ provided and controlled all those services. In those days, when local government was truly local and had a considerable measure of independence, there was no apathy at the time of the elections.
The post-war Labour Government, no doubt with the best of intentions, entrusted most of those service to giant nationalised corporations. Their Conservative successors, also well intentioned, privatised them, passing them for the most part to giant, often international, private enterprises similar to the nationalised ones they had replaced. Meanwhile local government was reorganised, drastically cutting down the number of authorities, and eliminating the local from local democracy. Subsequent measures, politicising Councils and investing them with all the worst features of parliamentary government, have all but removed the democracy!
There is, I fear, no turning back. Despite Mr Cameron’s good intentions, I can see no possibility of our recovering the community control of essential local services that once we had.
By the riverside
It must have been in the spring of 1944 that a friendly (yes, it really was friendly) football match was arranged between a team of we British prisoners of war at a working camp in the little German town of Zittau, and one of German soldiers from a nearby Wehrmacht barracks. I have always been totally useless at ball games, so I was one of the spectators, sharing the touchline with some of my fellow prisoners and off-duty German soldiers, both groups good-naturedly cheering our sides on. The match was, of course, arranged strictly unofficially. No doubt our respective governments would have preferred us to be trying to kill each other.
We lost 2 –1, which was hardly surprising as there were only 30 of us (including me!) from which to choose a team, while there were several hundred at the barracks. It was by no means a shameful defeat, as our opponents freely acknowledged.
The match was not played on a proper pitch but in a meadow beside the River Mandau, that flows from the nearby mountains through Zittau to join the rather larger River Neisse and thence to the great river Oder. There were no proper goal posts or line markings. The Mandau in Zittau was quite small but fast flowing. One of our worries during the football match was that the ball might be accidentally kicked into the stream and be carried away before it could be retrieved. During the past four years I have visited Zittau three times and have on a number of occasions crossed the Mandau. The river was unchanged but I was never quite sure where the meadow was on which that match had been played.
.JPG)
These memories were brought back vividly last week when one of my current friends in Zittau, the scholarly Dr Volker Dudeck, emailed to me these pictures of the raging, flooded Mandau, as it had been a few days earlier. Zittau, and of course the mountains where the Mandau and the Neisse rise, had had several days of heavy and continuous rain on an unprecedented scale. The town is near the confluence of the two rivers, and is also at the point where the frontiers of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic coincide. There has been serious flooding in all three countries. Dr Dudeck, in his latest email, tells me that the floodwaters are now subsiding, no doubt creating havoc further down the river. The local damage is being assessed. In Zittau and the three-countries area, thousands have been made homeless and there have been 10 fatalities. Nothing, of course, compared with the scale of the flood disaster in Pakistan – but to the bereaved it is little consolation to know that you are one of just ten, rather than tens of thousands.
.JPG)
The floods in Europe (including those in Cumbria earlier in the year), in China and on the Indian subcontinent, and the unprecedented drought, heat and bush fires in Russia are, I have little doubt, all the result of the accelerating world-wide climate change that the recent international conference in Copenhagen failed miserably to address. Dr. Dudeck writes to me sadly that,n ‘It is nature taking revenge for the sins of mankind’. Perhaps I should let him know that our recently re-elected MP is convinced that, if climate change is taking place, it is a purely natural phenomenon and not mankind’s fault. Trying to do anything about it is a waste of time and money.
It might cheer him up – but on the other hand I suppose that it might not!
Clacton’s Station Buffet
Since the sad loss of my wife four years ago I have made a number of trips to and from London by rail, making use of the discounted fares available to pensioners. They have been the first and last stages of my visits to Zittau, to Brussels to visit my grandson there, and of visits to my sons and daughters-in-law who live in the London area.
I usually arrived back in Clacton at about noon. Before finding a taxi to take me home I would pop into the Station Buffet that for many years had welcomed and served hungry, thirsty and weary travellers arriving in Clacton, and those waiting at the station for trains to arrive and depart.
It provided me with a welcome break for a drink, and a leisurely sandwich or light meal before returning to face the washing, the emails and the junk mail that I knew would be awaiting me. Refreshed, I would find my taxi, knowing that whatever else greeted me as I opened my front door, at least I wouldn’t need to make myself a mid-day meal.
The post-war Labour Government, no doubt with the best of intentions, entrusted most of those service to giant nationalised corporations. Their Conservative successors, also well intentioned, privatised them, passing them for the most part to giant, often international, private enterprises similar to the nationalised ones they had replaced. Meanwhile local government was reorganised, drastically cutting down the number of authorities, and eliminating the local from local democracy. Subsequent measures, politicising Councils and investing them with all the worst features of parliamentary government, have all but removed the democracy!
There is, I fear, no turning back. Despite Mr Cameron’s good intentions, I can see no possibility of our recovering the community control of essential local services that once we had.
By the riverside
It must have been in the spring of 1944 that a friendly (yes, it really was friendly) football match was arranged between a team of we British prisoners of war at a working camp in the little German town of Zittau, and one of German soldiers from a nearby Wehrmacht barracks. I have always been totally useless at ball games, so I was one of the spectators, sharing the touchline with some of my fellow prisoners and off-duty German soldiers, both groups good-naturedly cheering our sides on. The match was, of course, arranged strictly unofficially. No doubt our respective governments would have preferred us to be trying to kill each other.
We lost 2 –1, which was hardly surprising as there were only 30 of us (including me!) from which to choose a team, while there were several hundred at the barracks. It was by no means a shameful defeat, as our opponents freely acknowledged.
The match was not played on a proper pitch but in a meadow beside the River Mandau, that flows from the nearby mountains through Zittau to join the rather larger River Neisse and thence to the great river Oder. There were no proper goal posts or line markings. The Mandau in Zittau was quite small but fast flowing. One of our worries during the football match was that the ball might be accidentally kicked into the stream and be carried away before it could be retrieved. During the past four years I have visited Zittau three times and have on a number of occasions crossed the Mandau. The river was unchanged but I was never quite sure where the meadow was on which that match had been played.
.JPG)
These memories were brought back vividly last week when one of my current friends in Zittau, the scholarly Dr Volker Dudeck, emailed to me these pictures of the raging, flooded Mandau, as it had been a few days earlier. Zittau, and of course the mountains where the Mandau and the Neisse rise, had had several days of heavy and continuous rain on an unprecedented scale. The town is near the confluence of the two rivers, and is also at the point where the frontiers of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic coincide. There has been serious flooding in all three countries. Dr Dudeck, in his latest email, tells me that the floodwaters are now subsiding, no doubt creating havoc further down the river. The local damage is being assessed. In Zittau and the three-countries area, thousands have been made homeless and there have been 10 fatalities. Nothing, of course, compared with the scale of the flood disaster in Pakistan – but to the bereaved it is little consolation to know that you are one of just ten, rather than tens of thousands.
.JPG)
The floods in Europe (including those in Cumbria earlier in the year), in China and on the Indian subcontinent, and the unprecedented drought, heat and bush fires in Russia are, I have little doubt, all the result of the accelerating world-wide climate change that the recent international conference in Copenhagen failed miserably to address. Dr. Dudeck writes to me sadly that,n ‘It is nature taking revenge for the sins of mankind’. Perhaps I should let him know that our recently re-elected MP is convinced that, if climate change is taking place, it is a purely natural phenomenon and not mankind’s fault. Trying to do anything about it is a waste of time and money.
It might cheer him up – but on the other hand I suppose that it might not!
Clacton’s Station Buffet
Since the sad loss of my wife four years ago I have made a number of trips to and from London by rail, making use of the discounted fares available to pensioners. They have been the first and last stages of my visits to Zittau, to Brussels to visit my grandson there, and of visits to my sons and daughters-in-law who live in the London area.
I usually arrived back in Clacton at about noon. Before finding a taxi to take me home I would pop into the Station Buffet that for many years had welcomed and served hungry, thirsty and weary travellers arriving in Clacton, and those waiting at the station for trains to arrive and depart.
It provided me with a welcome break for a drink, and a leisurely sandwich or light meal before returning to face the washing, the emails and the junk mail that I knew would be awaiting me. Refreshed, I would find my taxi, knowing that whatever else greeted me as I opened my front door, at least I wouldn’t need to make myself a mid-day meal.
It is a little doubtful if I shall be making such journeys in the future. I am beginning to find travel by rail (not so much the travel itself as the hassle before and after!) too much for me
Clacton Station Buffet – now closed
Even if I am unlikely to want to use that Station Buffet again, I am sorry to see that it is closed and that there are so far no signs of its re-opening. Vacant, it’s an ugly ‘missing tooth’ on Clacton Station and I am sure that a great many people must miss the service that, for many decades, it has rendered the travelling public.
Tendring Council claim to be eager to help aspiring local entrepreneurs. They are also eager to promote Clacton-on-Sea’s image as a friendly and welcoming holiday, residential or business destination. Somewhere ‘out there’, there must be a young and ambitious would-be restaurateur, lacking only the funds – or perhaps the self-confidence – to bring new ideas and energy to bear on again making Clacton’s Station Buffet the welcoming venue that once it was.
The Council should co-operate with Network Rail, the station’s owners, to find that young entrepreneur, and offer encouragement and practical help to harness that energy and bring those ideas into fruition..
Tendring Council claim to be eager to help aspiring local entrepreneurs. They are also eager to promote Clacton-on-Sea’s image as a friendly and welcoming holiday, residential or business destination. Somewhere ‘out there’, there must be a young and ambitious would-be restaurateur, lacking only the funds – or perhaps the self-confidence – to bring new ideas and energy to bear on again making Clacton’s Station Buffet the welcoming venue that once it was.
The Council should co-operate with Network Rail, the station’s owners, to find that young entrepreneur, and offer encouragement and practical help to harness that energy and bring those ideas into fruition..
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