Week 35 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

Our Brave New World

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

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

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

       

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

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

Depersonalisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sign of the times

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

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

                                                                                                  

Week 8 2013

Tendring Topics....on Line

'Horses for Courses' - but preferably not on the menu!

          The current scandal about horse meat having been substituted for beef in meat products on sale in a number of Britain’s supermarkets took me back in memory to the days, half a century ago, when I was employed as a Public Health Inspector and food inspector by the then Clacton Urban District Council.

                         Perhaps this photo isn't quite fair to Tesco. They were neither the first nor the worst.           

 Our main concern in the realm of food inspection was the prevention of food poisoning or food-borne infectious diseases.  We carried out post mortem inspections of food animals, particularly cattle and pigs, at local slaughter houses (a job highly likely to turn omnivores into vegetarians!) inspected food shops and their wares, and when considered necessary, took samples of food items intended for sale, for chemical or bacteriological examination.

            We also engaged in work which nowadays, I think, would be that of the Consumer Protection Officer.  We inspected food offered or intended for sale to make sure that it was what it was declared to be;  that customers were buying food ‘of the nature, quality or substance’ that the retailer claimed.  In the pre-war and immediate post-war years many foods were sold ‘loose’, not pre-packed as most are today and there was much more scope for an unscrupulous retailer to, for instance, water down milk, substitute margarine for butter, adulterate sugar or flour and make ‘pork’ sausages with minced beef and an excessive amount of breadcrumb filler.

            DNA was, of course, unheard of in those days and identification much more basic.  I think it would have been perfectly possible for processed horseflesh to have been substituted for beef.  However there was then little if any demand for mass produced processed meat.  Butchers made their own pork or beef sausages, brawn and other meat products to supply their own customers. I doubt if there was any widespread fraud on the scale that there appears to be today.

           

            In any event it was the retailers who were held to be responsible for the food they sold and for its labelling.   Retailers had to suffer any penalty when claims that they had made for the food they sold proved to be fraudulent.  This surely should be the position today. In the ‘60s and earlier this could occasionally result in a perceived injustice where a small retailer had been deceived by a smooth-tongued salesman. This isn’t the case today.  Those retailers involved in the horse meat scandal are giant supermarkets who could have, had they wished, taken regular samples of the products of their suppliers and had them analysed in commercial laboratory*.

            All of the above is, of course, assuming that the law today is much the same as it was back in the 1960s and before.  It is quite possible that sometime between Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron, it has been decided that the consumer protection laws to which I have referred have been scrapped as being ‘Fuddy-duddy red tape, probably dreamed up by some bureaucrat in Brussels, that stifles enterprise, initiative and profit-making’

*  It seemed for a while that the horsemeat scandal was going to provide yet another stick with which the Europhobes could strike Europe and the EU.  ‘It’s those depraved foreigners across the Channel who eat horse meat.  It’s all part of a plot hatched in Brussels.  Ban all imports of meat from the EU.  That’ll be tit for tat for when they banned our meat exports because of mad cow disease!’   It must have come as quite a blow when British slaughter-houses and meat processing plant became involved.

‘It’s not winning that’s important…..

          …….It’s taking part’.   That was once the British attitude to sport.  I remember, perhaps twenty years ago, reading an article in which the author wrote rather  scornfully of American and Soviet athletes who were interested only in winning medals and trophies – so unlike we Brits who ran, jumped, swam and engaged in competitive games for the pleasure of the activity itself, not in the hope of winning.   Edwardian poet Sir Henry Newbolt summed it up in a few lines of his poem Vitai Lampada:

And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat, 

Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, 

But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote 

"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

             All of that seems to have changed.  Britain’s athletes did very well indeed in last year’s London Olympics.  They gained international acclaim and a crop of medals – gold, silver and bronze in many, but not all, of the sporting competitions.  It might have been thought that for the next Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, extra effort and extra funding would have been put into those sports at which we had done rather less well, in an effort to encourage and perhaps raise the standard of those competitors.

            Not a bit of it – forget all that stuff about it being the taking part that is important.  Britain wants more gold medals. Extra official funding has gone to the sports at which we have done well, in the hope that next time our competitors will do just as well, or even better. Tough luck on the 'also rans'.  We’re backing known winners, not potential losers.  

            IT seems that we’re just as obsessed with medals and trophies as ‘those Yanks’ or ‘those Ruskies’

 ‘Making the Sick Sicker!’

          This was the headline under which, a fortnight ago, I wrote in this blog about the activities of Atos  the private firm who were assessing the work potential of those who were claiming Disability Living Allowance – and the way in which false assessments were making genuinely disabled people ill and even resulting in suicides. Here’s what I wrote:

Private Eye reports that:  ‘Plans include withdrawing benefit if an assessor decides that a claimant’s ability to work could be improved by aids, such as guide dogs, walking sticks or prosthetic limbs – whether or not the claimant has access to them or can use them. Atos assessors already have the power to carry out an ‘imaginary wheelchair test’ by which they decide that a person could work if they used a wheelchair – even if they do not have one.  Under the changes, due to take place without public debate, people will also lose benefit if the assessor decides that adjustments could be made for them in the workplace – whether or not those changes have been made.’

          Way back in the 1950s, when I first began freelance writing, I was told that a picture can often make a point more tellingly than a thousand words. I have often wished that I had the sketching skills to illustrate the thoughts that I have expressed in words. A Quaker friend of mine has demonstrated the truth of that with a cartoon copied from another Facebook page.   Here it is. It makes its point much more effectively than my words could hope to and was well worth passing on. Many thanks!

When did it happen!

            I was listening to a discussion on the tv.  The government had decided to make child-care services more easily available by increasing the maximum number of under-fives with whom a carer  is permitted to cope.  It would be OK, a government spokesperson insisted, because they would have to be better qualified child-carers.  They would, for instance, be required have good GCSEs in English and Maths.

            Well, I can see that a child carer ought not to be illiterate – even if it is only so as to be able to read the instructions on any equipment that is used or on any medication that may have to be dispensed.  And the carer ought obviously to be capable of counting all of his or her charges, to make sure none is missing.  I don’t really see though how literacy and numeracy would make the carer better able to deal with a four year old bully, three year old tantrums or a two-year old showing symptoms that could be – just could be – those of meningitis.

            And then it struck me how totally unreal (and how sinister!) this discussion would have sounded during at least the first thirty years of my life.  Then it had been taken for granted that the best person to care for a young child was his or her mother. Professionally trained Health Visitors visited and advised young mums on bringing up  their children safely and in what was then considered to be the best practice.  Not even George Orwell in his 1984 had anticipated children being cared for by anyone other than their mothers during the first few years of their lives.

            There were professional child-carers of course.  They worked in orphanages and children’s homes where unfortunate children who had no parents, or whose parents were incapable of caring for them, were brought up.   We all pitied such children and put our hands in our pockets to give them what support we could.

In those days responsible young men didn’t get married and have children (in that order of course!)  until their income was sufficient to support a wife and family.  Before giving their consent Victorian and Edwardian fathers are said to have asked prospective sons-in-law, ‘Are you in a position to support my daughter in the manner to which she has become accustomed?’ My future father-in-law certainly didn’t put it like that (nor would he have had a final veto!) but I am sure that he and my future wife's mother did give some thought to my ‘prospects’ before they gave us their blessing.

            Nowadays – although everyone is much better off than we were then – it is taken for granted that a couple can’t hope to live together in comfort, never mind have children, on just one income.  Both must be in full-time work and must share the tasks of home-making.  There will inevitably need to be provision for maternity leave but the young mother is expected to get back to the office desk, or the supermarket check-out or whatever, the moment  child care can be arranged.

            The results are plain to see – casual promiscuous sex, broken marriages and other relationships, under-age mums, an increasing number of abortions, juvenile crime.  The future seemed so full of hope and promise in those first few years after World War II.  Where and when did it all go so wrong? 

Week 17 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Tendring District’s Recycling Scheme.

          I thought that I was being fairly critical of Tendring District’s changed recyclables collection scheme in last week’s blog.  It seemed clear to me that, had sufficient thought been given to the matter, they would surely never have provided unlidded red boxes for the reception of paper and cardboard.  I also felt that the amount of food waste from old people like me, living alone, would hardly be worth the trouble and expense of collection.

I thought that the scheme could be improved at minimal trouble and expense simply by swapping the purposes of the two collection boxes and using the green box, with lid, for paper and cardboard and the red box which has no lid, for plastic bottles and food cans of all kinds.

Compared with ‘letters to the editor’ in the current Clacton Gazette, and comments on the Gazette’s website last week, my blog amounted to virtually unstinted praise!  I hadn’t realized, for instance, that for larger families, neither the red nor the green box is sufficiently large to hold a fortnight’s recycled items.  In the past we have been able to put any excess into a white plastic bag, place it on top of the green box, and it would be taken away with the box’s contents.  That isn’t allowed under the new scheme. Anything in such a bag will simply go into landfill.

Also now going into landfill are the plastics that once were collected for recycling but are to be collected no longer for that purpose; plastic bags of all kinds, and pots used for containing yoghurt, cream and spreads, for example.

 A number of correspondents had realized, as I had, that paper left in an open red box would blow out and litter the streets.   An official Council spokesman said that to provide a lid for each red box  would have cost £1 a lid, and that householders could use the lids from the green boxes (they can’t, they don’t fit!) or place the waste food container on top of the paper and cardboard.  If waste paper does blow about the streets, ‘it will be cleaned up’.

 Among the many letters published in the Clacton Gazette is, inevitably I suppose, one from a reader who sees the malign hand of ‘Brussels’ behind the Council’s scheme.  S.H.Wells of Holland-on-Sea writes

‘I have a suspicion that Tendring Council’s revised waste collection measures have less to do with “helping the environment” than with the EU landfill tax.

After all, a major percentage of the world is covered by water and the theory that man has anything to do with the changing cycles of the climate has never been proven.

But the tax is very real.  It varies from country to country but in the UK since 2010, it has been 51 Euros per tonne – currently about £42.

 

 If that is the idea, then a majority of Gazette readers think it is doomed to failure.  Two thirds of those polled believe that there will be more, rather than less, refuse destined for landfill as a result of the new scheme!

I am glad that I am not still Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer.  Putting a ‘positive spin’ on the current situation would be well beyond my capabilities!    I reckon too, that the members of the ruling majority group on the Council are glad that, unlike in Colchester, none of their number has to seek re-election early next month!

A spokesman for the Council says that the scheme will be kept under review and the views of residents taken into account.  I think that that means they’ll keep their heads down and hope the scheme will be working properly and to everyone’s satisfaction, by the time of the next Council election.   I wouldn’t bet on it!

Oh for the days when decisions like major changes to a recycling collection system that was at least working, would have been thoroughly debated in an appropriate committee, before being debated again by the full Council – rather than being decided by a tiny Politburo and presented to the Council as something which all members of the ruling party are expected to support!  In those days the whole plan would have been discussed in the press and by the public before a final decision was taken and a new system was imposed on the public.

‘You can’t have your cake…..and eat it!’

            This seems to be yet another piece of folk wisdom of which the Government is blissfully unaware.   They are very concerned about truancy from school.  In my childhood, certainly in the ‘aspiring working class’ circles in which I moved, truancy was a very rare phenomenon.  None of us dared to take a day off school unless we could be sure of being able to take with us the next day a note from mum or dad explaining that on the previous day we had been too ill to attend.

            If, due to mumps, chicken pox or some other childhood ailment we were absent for two days or more, the school would expect a parental letter of explanation to arrive promptly by post (very, very few of us were ‘on the phone’ in those days).  Parents and children alike dreaded a visit from ‘the School Board Man’ that would follow any unexplained absence. The fact that the actual extent of this official’s powers were unknown added to the fear of his visit, as did the fact that his visit would be noted and regarded as a mark of shame by all the neighbours.  ‘Them at no 27 – them that’s so ‘igh and mighty; I know for a fact that they ‘ad a visit from the School Board Man yest’y afternoon. What d’ya think of that?’

            Nowadays we are all aware that the Education Welfare Officer (the successor to the School Board Man) has very limited powers and that when he called he would very likely find no-one at home. What’s more no-one would care. Parents and children are no longer terrified of an official visitor – nor are nosy neighbours interested.   Truancy flourishes.

         

          Someone at Whitehall had a brilliant idea.   Stop the child allowance of persistent truants at source!   That’ll bring the parents to heel.  That’ll make those neglectful and non-caring mums and dads make sure that their kids go to school every day.

            However, the same Whitehall geniuses expect us all, singles, mums and dads and childless couples, to be in productive work. They overlook the fact that for many there is no productive, or even unproductive, work for them to do.  They also overlook the fact that where both a husband and a wife, or a single parent, are expected to be at work at 8.30 or even 9.00 it is impossible for or them to be certain that their child or children actually go to school.  They may make sure that they’re up, dressed, breakfasted and ready, but there is no way they can be sure that those children go through the school gates. 

             

            Similarly there’s no way that working parents, returning home at about 6.00 pm can control what their kids are up to between leaving school a couple of hours earlier and their arrival on the scene.  No wonder we have truancy.  No wonder we have street gangs and juvenile crime.  No wonder we have teenage pregnancies – ‘Let’s go upstairs to my bedroom.  Mum and dad won’t be home for at least another hour!’

            It seems to me that modern society has stark choices about its future direction.

Carry on in the way that has become popular since the avaricious eighties – husband and wife both hard at work (when they can get it!) to maintain mortgage payments or HP debt, children coming home from school to an empty house, growing youth crime, teenage pregnancies, juvenile drug and alcohol abuse, and a violent gang culture.    The alternative is  revert to pre-1980 (pre-Mrs Thatcher) values, recognising that growing children need a parent to be present when they set off for school and when they come home in the afternoon; and appreciating that bringing up a child or children in a  loving caring and comfortable home is a satisfying, fulfilling and socially-valuable career. Building Societies and banks should revert to the practice of relating the size of their loan to the income of just one of the couple seeking to buy a property, instead of the sum of the incomes of the both.  

            We would need to recognise that home ownership need not be everybody’s goal and that there is no shame in living in a rented home, even if it is Council or Housing Association owned.  Social housing should be for those who need it – not just for those who can’t possibly afford anything else.

            That way, I’m afraid, we would have fewer aspiring home owners and fewer thrusting young entrepreneurs. We would probably lose a few potentially brilliant female scientists, lawyers, doctors and (dare I say it?) priests – though it could be the house-husband as easily as the housewife, who elects to stay at home and bring up the children.   On the plus side we would have fewer unsustainable debts, fewer mortgage defaulters, fewer broken homes, less youth crime, fewer teenage pregnancies, less antisocial behaviour and fewer schoolboy and schoolgirl truants destined to become illiterate, innumerate and antisocial adults!

             Punishing the Charities

            The Chancellor of the Exchequer has, so he says, been shocked to discover what most of us have known or, at least suspected, for years; that many of the seriously wealthy contrive to pay less in taxation than we less affluent mortals!  Having made this ground-breaking discovery; how extraordinary that he should take measures that are more likely to impoverish a number of worthy charities than to cause serious inconvenience to the wealthy.

            It couldn’t, I suppose, be a deliberate ploy to persuade us that if we attempt to make the rich pay their fair share into the nation’s exchequer it is the poor who will suffer?

            I could see how the state would lose revenue as a result of large donations to charity but I have to confess that I couldn’t see what the generous donor would gain from his or her action – except perhaps a few ‘brownie points’ to present at the Pearly Gates when the time comes.

            Paul Vallely, writing in last week’s Church Times enlightened me.  ‘If a basic-rate taxpayer gives £1 to charity, the state gives 25p in Gift Aid to that charity. But if a higher-rate tax payer gives £1, the state gives 25p to the charity, but another 15p or 25p to the wealthy donor in extra tax relief.  So top philanthropists don’t just get a knighthood, or dinner with the Prime Minister, or an art gallery named after them. They also get money back’.  He also points out that some charities to which we taxpayers are thus compelled to give that Gift Aid are not ones that most of us would think of as being desperate for a few extra quid – Eton College for instance!

            Paul Vallely suggests that before targeting charitable giving, the Chancellor might try cracking down on some of the  other scams – off-shore accounts, turning income to capital gains, setting up companies to rent their own homes from themselves – by means of which the wealthy avoid paying tax like the rest of us!