Week 35 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Family Friendly?

          I am sick of hearing top (and lower rank) politicians going on and on about supporting ‘the family’ and hoping thereby to get a few more votes at forthcoming elections. Politicians (of both main parties) carry the primary responsibility for the creation of a society that is thoroughly Family Unfriendly and unlikely to be anything else unless there is a revolutionary change in society’s outlook.

            I have probably written in this blog before (one of the characteristics of old age is a tendency to repeat oneself!) that I quite often feel like a time traveller, a ‘poor man’s Dr Who' perhaps.  I  am an early twentieth century man, born in 1921, who finds himself in the twenty-first century and (although I fully appreciate, and take every advantage of, the many benefits the present century offers)  still isn’t quite comfortable with some of the twenty-first century’s practices and attitudes.  This is never more so than when I contrast pre and post World War II attitudes towards marriage and bringing up children.

            The 1920s and ‘30s were not a poor-people-friendly time. My mum and dad were poor though that isn’t how they would have described themselves.  There were plenty poorer.  My dad was never unemployed and I was always adequately fed and clothed.  In fact, I was one of the privileged minority, who went to a secondary school and, unlike most of my contemporaries who were thrown onto the labour market at 14, I didn’t leave school till I was sixteen. Then, armed with my ‘matric’, I went straight to a ‘white collar job’.  It was a struggle though and my parents had to watch every penny.  They were proud of the fact that they never had to ‘ask for charity’ and never owed anyone anything.

            It was a family-friendly time though.  My dad went to work and earned enough, with his army pension just enough, to keep us in what I think the Prayer Book Catechism describes as, ‘that state of life into which it has pleased God to call us’.  My Mum stayed at home, kept the home clean and welcoming, cooked the meals and ‘made do and mended’ as all housewives were exhorted to do during World War II.  Before marriage she had been a cook in an Edwardian household and knew how to cook and how to pickle and preserve!    She was always at home with a welcoming smile and something on the table when my dad and I arrived home from work and school.  We were a small and a united family.

            In those days young men ‘courted’ their girl-friends and didn’t ‘ask for their hand in marriage’ (now there’s a couple of old-fashioned phrases you don’t hear nowadays!) until they were earning enough to support both of them.  Once married their roles were clear.  The husband was ‘the breadwinner’ and went out to work every day to earn sufficient to keep them both.  The young wife stayed at home, cooked the meals and – in due course – had children.  They were a family, and a great many of them were quite content with their lot.  My dad, who had been a Regimental Sergeant-Major in the army – and the senior non-commissioned officer in the small garrison town in which I was born was – I  think – disappointed with his lowly job as clerk, dispenser, veterinary nurse and general dogsbody in a local veterinary practice.  My mum had married my dad ‘for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health’ and was, I am pretty certain, content with her lot.  They were both very proud of me and hoped I would ‘better’ myself.  I suppose that I have, though I doubt very much if I’ve ever been any happier than they were.

            When I married in 1946, it never even occurred to either of us that my new wife – who had been secretary to the Managing Director of a large firm of printers – would continue to work.  I was the ‘bread winner’ and she was the ‘home maker.’  Throughout our sixty years of marriage I always managed, though it was sometimes a struggle, to ‘win enough bread’ to keep my wife and, in due course, our two sons in modest comfort though certainly never in luxury.  She was always at home, ready to listen to their stories of school and play, and prepared to give an experienced hand with their homework, when our sons came home from school. She was always ready, with a meal on the table, when I came home from work.  We lived and brought up our two sons in ‘family friendly’ times.

            I really think that ours was the last generation able to do so.  First of all came the idea that in order ‘to keep up with the Jones’s’ young wives should continue in work until the first baby arrived.  Then it became quite acceptable for a young wife to carry on working after children were born.  I think this dated from the time when – eager for custom – banks and building societies decided that they would loan money for home purchase on the basis of a multiple of the family’s total income, and not just the income of ‘the breadwinner’,. Proper arrangements were needed, of course, for child care.  This helped some working couples to ‘get their feet on the home ownership ladder’ but, since it increased the demand for home purchase without increasing the number of houses for sale, inevitably pushed up the price of houses. That was a trend which – with a pause during the period of recession – continues to this day.

The joy of motherhood.  My wife Heather, with our first-born son, in 1953.

         
 Imperceptibly  (I think it gathered momentum during the years of Thatcher rule  in the 1980s) it became not only acceptable – but expected – that young mothers should get back to work ‘to help create wealth’ as soon as possible after the birth of a baby.  It has become increasingly difficult for a family to survive on one income alone.  How can family life hope to flourish when parents both come home weary from a day’s work and see their children, if they’re at home when the parents return, only for a few hours in each evening?  This system, I believe, is responsible not only for the break-up of family life, but for gang culture, juvenile crime and anti-social behaviour, and teenage pregnancies.

            No, I’m not suggesting that we should return to the ways of the 1930s where women were regarded as inferior to men and virtually barred from some professions. I believe that women can excel in any job or profession that demands something more than brute force and blind obedience.  We will soon have women bishops.  One day I hope we’ll have a woman Archbishop of Canterbury! Women are uniquely child-bearers though and I believe that many, though by no means all, women do find home making and bringing up children a thoroughly satisfying and fulfilling career. They too are helping to make Britain a better country in which to live. This should be recognised and made financially possible.  Only policies that work toward this end can properly be described as ‘family friendly’.

The Shadow of a Doubt?

          A recent email from a blog reader says that the activities of IS (Islamic State terrorists) in Iraq must surely present problems to Quakers like myself who look for a non-violent solution to every difficult situation and believe that no-one is one hundred percent evil.

            I wouldn’t pretend that it doesn’t.  Central to my, admittedly sometimes shaky, Quaker faith is the conviction that we all, every man, woman and child in the world, rich and poor alike and whatever our race, colour or creed, have a divine spark (early Quakers called it the ‘inward light of Christ’) within us.  St. John refers to it in the first chapter of his gospel as ‘the true light’ that enlightens everyone who comes into the world.  It shines in the darkness of the world and the darkness cannot overwhelm it.  It is the instinct that urges us to compassion, friendship, generosity, and forgiveness, and away from hatred, violence, greed and vengeance.

            During my long life, in the army and as a civilian; as a prisoner of war and as a free man, I have become acquainted with folk of every religion and none, and of every nationality – Germans, Italians, Russians, Serbs, Arabs, Turks, Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis, black and white Africans and North and South Americans.  Not all of them I would particularly like to meet again – but neither did any of them persuade me that the Quaker conviction that every one of them had ‘that of God’ within them was false.

            I have only met members of IS on a tv screen and that was quite near enough. War is defiling.  Every nation at war, at some time or another, performs acts that are clearly, I can’t think of a better word, ‘sinful’.  We could, no doubt, all list the ‘crimes against humanity’ of the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese and Japanese – but how about the blanket bombing of German cities, full of civilians, towards the end of World War II by the British and Americans?  What about the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima by the Americans with British approval and support – and, after seeing the devastation wrought by that atom bomb, dropping another such bomb on Nagasaki? Those who have committed these crimes against humanity know full well they have done so and either deny their guilt or try to justify it.  ‘Our blanket bombing of Germany and the two atom bombs on Japan hastened the war’s end and may have saved untold numbers of lives’.  They may have!

            Members of IS though are unique among war criminals.  They not only commit unspeakable atrocities but glory in having done so – posting pictures of themselves on the internet with the broken bodies and severed heads of their victims.  And they claim that their actions will earn them God's approval.. I can think of nothing more likely to provoke God's wrath! They are surely uniquely evil - and among them are believed to be some 500 young men born, brought up and educated in the UK!

            I like to think that the inward light of God does still smoulder deep within the hearts of these evil men – and can somehow be rekindled.  Meanwhile their activities must be halted, and their victims protected and helped back to normal life. I can't bring myself to criticise those who resort to  violent means to achieve this, but I have observed that such violent means rarely, if ever, achieve their objectives.  I applaud those who bring humanitarian aid to the victims and I give as generously as I can to those who do this work.  Otherwise, and at my age, all I can do is to pray.  And, who knows?  Perhaps that is the most effective thing I could do.

           

Week 27 2012 3rd July 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘Education, Education, Education’

            The above three words were an indication of the important priorities of one of Tony Blair’s governments.  I remember that, on an official visit to Moscow, he even managed to introduce this slogan into a Russian tv programme.  However the educational standard of a great many school leavers of recent years suggest that not many people took those three words very seriously.

            A regular blog reader who is founder and managing director of a small but flourishing business (the kind of business man that David Cameron, George Osborne and their colleagues hold up to us as a shining example) is unimpressed with the educational ‘progress’ of the past forty years.   Commenting on my recent blog about the Education Secretary’s suggestions for the future direction of primary education, and his more recent proposal that the GCSE school leaving exams should be abolished and the more-demanding ‘O’ Level GCE exams restored, he says that although he isn’t an admirer of Mr Gove, the Education Secretary, he does think that it would be a good thing if all the ‘advances in education’ that have been made since the 1960s (when he was at school!) could be reversed.

            He had recently seen an ‘O’ level examination maths exam paper from the 1960s and had had an opportunity to compare it with a GCSE paper set last year.  The 1960s questions were as challenging (simultaneous equations and the like) as he remembered them but those set last year were trivial in the extreme.   Here are a couple of them ‘Write this number in words – 1,234’ and ‘A worker was paid £5.20 per hour, he did four hours work. What should he be paid?’

            And that was for an exam at the end of five years of secondary education.  One would really expect an intelligent eleven year old to answer them correctly!  If I had found those maths questions on my maths school leaving examination in 1937 I’d have been quite sure that they were ‘trick questions’ and would have wasted valuable exam time trying to work out the catch!

            No wonder, says my correspondent, that a 40 percent pass rate has risen to 60 percent (I’m only surprised that it isn’t even higher!) and that bright children regularly get as many as ten Grade 1 passes and make a mockery of the whole system!

            Nor, he says, is it only in maths that children are unchallenged. He is an IT consultant and creator and supplier of specialised software. He says, ‘I have had enormous pressure to include a spell checker in our database system. This is because young people today make no effort to spell correctly.  They just type any old thing and expect to see red lines under the errors!  We have also been asked to ‘convert’ automatically names and addresses entered to capitalised first letters because staff aren’t used to doing that any more (well, you wouldn’t when you text, would you?). I notice that whenever they enter a new address they do it all in lower case!

            Nowadays, so my correspondent claims, it is possible to get right through University without ever even learning to speak properly!  Such young people are at a huge disadvantage in the world of business and are left totally without self-confidence in any professional or representational situation.

Hitting the Target

          When I was a little boy of eight or nine I joined what we then called ‘the Wolf Cubs’.   They were the junior branch of the Scout Movement and are nowadays, I think, called Cub Scouts.  The ‘Wolf Cubs’ were based on Kipling’s Jungle Book, passages from which were often read at our Meetings.  Each group was called ‘a pack’ (I was in the 11^th Ipswich, St. Thomas’ Church pack) and it was led by Akela, in our case a very earnest and enthusiastic lady called Miss Eva Hack, in her early thirties, wearing a scout uniform with a khaki skirt.  Ladies didn’t wear slacks, and were even less likely to wear shorts, in those days.

            At the beginning of each meeting Akela would call out ‘Pack! Pack! Pack! To which we would shout ‘Pack!’ and gather in a circle, with her in the middle, for a ‘grand howl’.   We would then, as I remember it, recite the Cub Promise:  ‘I promise to do my best; to do my duty to God and the King, and to try to do someone a good turn every day’. Akela would then solemnly say ‘Dyb, Dyb, Dyb’. We would reply ‘We’ll Dob, Dob, Dob, Akela!’ and leap into the air.  The grand howl was over and the meeting could begin!

            Akela’s thrice repeated Dyb was an acronym of Do Your Best and our, also thrice repeated, reply was assuring her that we would Do Our Best!

Ernest Hall the Wolf Cub. Circa  1929/’30  

It really was good advice and it is advice that, throughout my life, I have tried hard to follow.  I haven’t always succeeded and my best hasn’t always been a very good best but, on the whole, if I have thought that something was worth doing, then I’ve really put my heart and soul into it.  This blog, for instance, I usually complete several days before publication on the web.  Then I read it through again and again, altering a word here and a phrase there until I feel that the grammar and syntax are as good as I can get them.

            Similarly when I was Tendring Council’s PRO or, earlier, Clacton’s Housing Manager I really put everything I had into the job.  I rarely took my full holiday entitlement, and certainly never watched the clock or took the odd day off with an imaginary malady.

            Joy and satisfaction in one’s job isn’t required these days.  It’s no good getting too interested in it and attached to it anyway.  We’re constantly being told that there’s no such thing as a ‘job for life’.  The work force has to be flexible.  You may be made redundant tomorrow and have to train for some quite different occupation to meet the demands of ‘the Market’.

            Nowadays it is assumed that nobody works for job satisfaction – money is everybody’s principal, if not sole, motivation.   To spur us on and make sure that we keep our noses to the grindstone we are given, usually by ‘human resources management’ experts, ‘targets’ that we are expected to meet. Salesmen have a fixed target of successful sales.  A receptionist at a busy office might be expected to deal efficiently with a certain number of visitors per hour; Casualties brought into a hospital accident and emergencies department shouldn’t have to wait more than, say an hour, for attention and should be discharged or passed on to another hospital department within three hours.  Social Workers are expected to deal with a fixed number of cases every week.  Schools are expected to get a given number of good GCSE passes.

            The target can be used as a threat.  ‘The government is making it easier to sack unprofitable workers and if you can’t reach the target I’ll have to look for others who can’.  It can also discourage staff from working beyond the target.  ‘If we do that they’ll simply raise the target – and then we’ll be in dead trouble when we’re really busy’.

            At the other end of the income scale, managers regularly reach and pass targets that they themselves may have set, thereby ‘earning’ enormous bonuses on top of their already inflated salaries;  bribes to persuade them to ‘do their best’, something that was once taken for granted.

            Hit that target!   That’s today’s message – and never mind how many corners you have to cut, how many dodgy deals you may need to strike and how much human tragedy you may cause (that’s just ‘collateral damage’) on the way.

            I reckon that if there were wolfcub packs today as there were in the 1930s Akela would no longer urge her flock to DYB! DYB! DYB! and expect to be answered, ‘We’ll DOB! DOB! DOB!’ but RYT! RYT! RYT! (reach your target, reach your target, reach your target) and be answered,  ‘We’ll ROT, ROT, ROT’ ( We’ll Reach our target, Reach our target, Reach our target).

            How very appropriate!

 Integrity in 'the City'? - Don't Bank on it!

          Last week I commented on the revelation of incompetence that inconvenienced – at the very least – thousands of bank customers.

           

This week there have been much more serious revelations;  of banking dishonesty, directly affecting Barclays (I reckon that the bank’s 17^th century Quaker founders must be turning in their graves!) but suspected of involving other national banks as well.   There are demands for a public enquiry on the lines of the Leveson Enquiry into press misconduct, and demands for criminal prosecution.  The response, so far, of Barclays Chief Executive that he won’t be accepting his usual few-million pounds bonus demonstrates how little he understands the scale of public anger*.

            What we are seeing is evidence of widespread dishonesty and corruption in  ‘the City’, a field of commercial activity that has been regarded, by politicians at least, with awe and respect.  This is where self-made billionaires are engaged in activities that ordinary mortals can’t hope to understand but upon which, so we have been told, the UK’s prosperity depends.  Its most favoured denizens aren’t just ‘millionaires’ in the sense that their assets are worth in excess of a million pounds. Their annual incomes are in excess of a million – and, of course, that’s before they collect their annual million-pounds-plus bonuses!

  Because ‘it might harm the city’ David Cameron has distanced us from our mainland European partners and vetoed legislation that might narrow the gap between rich and poor.  The denizens of ‘the City’ were among the principal beneficiaries of George Osborne’s ill-fated Budget.  One provision in that Budget that has remained unscathed is the iniquitous reduction in the upper rate of income tax, affecting only those with an income in excess of £150,000 pounds a year!

One thinks of the Conservative Party as being the natural champions of ‘The City’ and, of course, its finances are as reliant on ‘City’ donations as the Labour Party is dependent on those of Trade Unions.  However, as Conservative spokesmen have not been slow to point out, New Labour was no less blind to the machinations of high finance.  A New Labour Government helped to free the Financial Sector from some of the tiresome regulations that were hampering its activities.

I have remarked before in this blog that, just as Ramsey MacDonald betrayed Labour’s principles because he allowed himself to become dazzled by Duchesses Tony Blair and his colleagues were blinded by billionaires!

Not everyone was blind though.  The supporters of the Occupy Movement who protested on the steps of St Paul’s (remember the Mail’s scathing comments about them) – and in Wall Street, New York; the Red Square, Moscow and a score of other world-wide venues, may not have known quite what it was that they wanted. They did know exactly what they didn’t want though – an immoral and unfair economic system manipulated by a handful of self-serving greedy and powerful people, which penalises the poor, the disadvantaged and the disabled, and pours wealth into the laps of the already wealthy.  May the Occupy Movement’s cause prosper!

*Late News (2nd July 2012)  Yesterday Bob Diamond, Barclays Chief Executive, informed his colleagues that he would be leading the Bank's reconstruction, made necessary by the current scandal.    Today - under pressure - he has resigned his post.  Those worried in case he'll become another of those 'benefit scroungers' the rest of us have to support, can be reassured.  I have just heard on Radio 4 that he'll probably get a golden handshake of between £20 and £30 million!  That'll be a relief to Daily Mail readers.