Tendring Topics…..on line

Helping the Old and Disabled
Flatford Mill, once the home and birthplace of landscape painter John Constable, has been one of my favourite destinations for over seventy-five years! In my mid-teens I was an enthusiastic fresh-water angler. Usually I exercised my skills on the River Gipping, near to my Ipswich home. Occasionally though, taking a packed lunch from my mum, I would cycle along the London Road to East Bergholt and on to Flatford, to see what the Stour had to offer. The headmaster of the Northgate School, my Ipswich Secondary School, was strongly opposed to last minute swotting for exams. Accordingly he established a tradition that all candidates for the Matric (the national school leaving examination, usually taken at 16) cycled to Flatford for the day before the exams started (we were all cyclists in those days) and spent it on the river in hired skiffs.


In adult life, although I no longer fished, I found Flatford Mill as attractive as ever, and drove there on a number of occasions with friends and family, sometimes again hiring a skiff for a leisurely row up-river to Dedham. In recent years, I have had to rely on others to provide transport. Both my sons have driven me there on a number of occasions, reviving old memories.

Progressively limited mobility has meant that I can no longer stride over that wooden bridge and stroll along the river bank from which I had, years before, cast my fishing line. I can now do little more than walk, unsteadily and with the aid of a stick, from the disabled car park to the riverside restaurant for refreshment, and back to the car park again. On our most recent visit though we spotted, standing near to the restaurant, an electric mobility scooter with a notice announcing that its use was free, ‘enquire at the Bridge Cottage Shop’.

I have been using a mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) for years. My son enquired, and a friendly and helpful young lady showed me how the controls worked – not quite like mine but easy enough to use. She asked me a few questions, watched me do a short test drive (to make sure that I wasn’t going to drive straight into the river!) and entrusted me with the key!

The range of the mobility scooter is a little limited. The wooden bridge giving access to the Essex bank of the river is, for instance, out of bounds. However one can drive along the lane behind Bridge Cottage and the restaurant and shop, to Willy Lott’s Cottage and to Flatford Mill itself. Because maximum speed of the scooter is that of a comfortable walking pace, accompanying friends and relatives have no difficulty keeping up with it. The Mill has for some years accommodated a ‘field studies’ education centre where my then fifteen-year-old elder son once spent a week with a school party during his final years at Clacton County High School.

From the Mill it is possible to go on a pleasant circular route through the countryside, returning to the Mill and eventually to Bridge Cottage, where the mobility scooter is returned to its owners.

I think that, combined with the nearby car park for disabled drivers or their passengers, and the adjacent disabled toilet, it provides a valuable service for no-longer-agile visitors that deserves all the publicity it can get. Not many beauty spots and tourist destinations do as much.

Flatford Mill, viewed from the Essex bank of the Stour

‘Thanks be to God!’
On Tuesday of last week (12th October) when I posted the predecessor of this blog on the internet, the release of the thirty-three entombed Chilean miners was imminently expected. Originally it had been thought that the relief shaft through which they were to be lifted to freedom wouldn’t be completed till Christmas. Progress though, had been much better than expected. By 12th October (over two months ahead of schedule!), the relief shaft had reached the man-made cavern in which the miners were confined. A rescue capsule had been designed and manufactured and the liberation of the miners, one at a time, might possibly begin within hours. I had been delighted but had decided not to refer to it in my blog. There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip! I had seen too many unforeseen last-minute disasters!

I woke up soon after 4.00 a.m. on the 13th. It was long before I needed to get up but I knew from experience that there would be no more sleep for me. I wondered what was happening in Chile. There was bound to be something on BBC World News. I switched on my bedside radio to learn that the first trapped miner had already been brought to the surface. The second was on his way! And so it continued all day – a smooth, perfectly organised rescue operation. The target had been one rescue an hour, but this was exceeded. It took less than twenty-four hours for every one of those thirty-three miners to be snatched from what had seemed likely to be their grave.

I watched much of the rescue on tv. It was a wonderful to see the tearful joy on the freed miners’ faces, and on those of their parents, wives or girlfriends, and their little sons or daughters, as they were reunited after weeks of fear-filled separation. Some of the freed miners knelt on the ground and crossed themselves, thanking God for their deliverance. ‘How ridiculous to credit God with this rescue!’ must have thought the disciples of antifaith zealot Richard Dawkins. ‘It obviously owed everything to the skill and determination of we humans, and nothing whatsoever to the imaginary world of the supernatural!

Really? Then who, or what, was it that had persuaded those humans to devote hundreds of thousands of pounds, the experience and skills of an army of rescue workers, and weeks of potentially profitable time, to the rescue of just thirty-three poor Chilean miners? It certainly wasn’t fundamentalist Darwinism. Those miners had lost the possibility of contributing to the infinitely slow evolutionary process of perfecting the human gene – the sole ‘purpose’ of our existence. Put their loss down to experience and get on with living.

Nor was it the service of Mammon, the third millennium’s most popular god. Mammon’s three abiding virtues are Productivity, Profitability and Cost Effectiveness (and the greatest of these is Cost Effectiveness!) Never was there a less cost effective exercise than that of bringing those Chilean miners – thirty-three low value human resource units - to safety.

I suggest that it was what we Quakers describe as ‘the promptings of love and truth in our hearts’ (sometimes called ‘that of God’ or ‘the Inward Light of Christ’), God’s gift to every man, woman and child in the world. It was this that had inspired and urged on those untiring rescuers and those who had organised and funded their efforts. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me!’

Centuries ago, St Theresa had said, ‘In this world God has no hands but ours to do his bidding, no feet but ours to run his errands’

Of course the miners were right to thank God for his goodness. So should we all.

‘The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind’

That answer, provided by Bob Dylan in a famous ‘protest’ song of the early 1960s is certainly part of the answer to the solution of Britain’s energy problems. It could also help solve some of Tendring District’s economic and employment problems.

Tendring Council is bidding, against competition from Germany, the Netherlands and other parts of the UK, for Harwich to be developed as a ‘wind farm port’, building and maintaining the hundreds of wind farms already built, in the process of being built, or planned for the future along England’s east coast.

Council leader Neil Stock is reported as saying that the potential is enormous. ‘It’s a real opportunity for the town and would bring in skilled jobs to revitalise what is a struggling area…..we are talking hundreds of jobs and, with the boost to the economy, it would mean thousands’.

In Harwich’s favour would be the fact that it is already an internationally known port, and its central and easily accessible position convenient for the Continent, with a major wind farm offshore at Clacton, and positioned midway between the wind turbines off the Kent coast, and those off the coast of north-east England. It could be developed where a new container port had been proposed at Bathside Bay. Mr Stock said that the current economic climate meant that that container port couldn’t have been provided ‘for at least a generation’.

INTend, Tendring Council’s private enterprise regeneration agency, has been given the job of turning those ambitious hopes into reality – a brilliant opportunity to prove to its critics (including me!) that it really can earn its keep.

The Council’s bid has the backing of Harwich and North Essex MP Bernard Jenkins. Perhaps it is just as well that Harwich is no longer within the constituency of Richard Carswell – Clacton’s climate-change-denying MP. I fear that he might have been unable to show much enthusiasm for the development of an alternative source of energy.

Week 41.10 12th October 2010

Tendring Topics……..on Line

‘How will the Chancellor’s child benefit move hit you?’

This was the question posed by the daily Coastal Gazette to its readers on Tuesday 5th October, the day that Chancellor George Osborne broke it to the Conservative Party Conference that from 2013 higher rate taxpayers would not be eligible for Child Benefit. Predictably the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph saw it as yet another assault on ‘Middle England’. Local readers of the Coastal Gazette however seem to have taken the news much more philosophically.

The higher rate of income tax comes into force on incomes of about £44,000 a year. I reckon that a substantial number of Gazette readers think in terms of a weekly wage rather than an annual salary. For them £44,000 a year is roughly £850 a week, not the sort of sum that many of them find in their wage packets on payday. Unsurprisingly they see the Chancellor’s decision as a sound one. Nina Hamilton, who lives not far from me in Old Road, is reported as saying, ‘People who are bringing in about a grand a week don’t really need the help in my opinion. Child allowance makes a big difference to people on lower incomes’. Amanda Snelling, a mother of one, from Great Clacton, made a similar point: ‘I’m all for these cuts for people earning upwards of £40K a year. If they’re on that money then what does a £20 a week benefit really mean to them anyway? It’s good news for the working classes who rely on that money’

Those who definitely will see the Chancellor’s proposals as unfair will be ‘Middle England’ mums whose husband’s income only just comes into that upper tax band and who feel that being at home for their growing children is more important than, for instance, owning a second car, living in a rather posher home or taking regular holidays in the Caribbean. Next door to them, in the leafy suburb in which they both live, may be a family with a total income of £60,000 a year – but it comes from a man and wife both working and earning £30,000 a year each. They will still get their child allowance because no one in the household is on the higher tax band! ‘Fair’, did I hear David Cameron say?

In my younger days, certainly in families from ‘Middle England’ and in many working class ones too, the wife made and maintained the home and looked after the children. The husband was, and was expected to be, the ‘breadwinner’. My mother never had a job other than home making once she was married. Neither did my wife. What a medieval idea that seems today! There was much less juvenile delinquency though in those days, many fewer schoolgirl pregnancies and many fewer teenage sufferers from alcoholism or sexually transmitted diseases.

One thing that has been made plain by those who protested indignantly at the Chancellor’s proposals, and those who thought that they were a good idea, was that everyone welcomes cuts in services and benefits – provided that they always affect other people. And that this is true of wealthy and poor alike! This will no doubt be confirmed when more details of ‘the cutbacks’ are known on 20th of this month. I really don’t envy the Chancellor in his task! He can’t possibly please everybody and he can’t possibly be fair unless he pleases nobody!

Some Cheerful News – for now!

There isn’t much good news about these days but it was nice to spot a small news item on an inside page of the Clacton Gazette announcing that the village of St Osyth has been listed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the best endowed by nature as a place to live. It has, says the report, low levels of air pollution and offers its residents ‘exhilarating sea walks’.

Its outstanding positive feature though is its low rainfall, at 20in or 513mm, the very lowest in Britain and (as I used proudly to claim when I was Tendring Council's Public Relations Officer) was comparable with that of the fringes of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert! If you prefer a nearer comparison, Britain’s wettest spot, Crib Goch in Snowdonia (an area where thousands go on holiday each year) has almost 90 times as much annual rainfall at 177in or 4500mm.

It isn’t quite so good of course for keen gardeners. I remember, in the distant days when I was one of their number, surveying my parched lawn and wilting runner beans after weeks of drought, and reflecting that there were snags about cultivating a garden just three miles from the centre of Britain’s driest location!

It won’t, of course, affect the weather but I reckon that if the present owner of St. Osyth Manor gets his way and doubles the total number of homes in the village, St Osyth will become a lot less desirable place in which to live. Perhaps though, as Britain’s population grows, expansion on those lines is inevitable. I won’t be around to see it, but I think it possible that before the end of this century the village community will have been swallowed up in Clacton and will have become one of the town’s more attractive suburbs. 'Oh brave new world!'

Chip off the old block?

It can be disconcerting to find traits in your offspring that are replicas of your own. It can, of course, also be extremely satisfying. I have been more than pleased that my two sons have both chosen socially useful careers motivated by job satisfaction rather than by financial gain, and that my three grandchildren have followed in their parents’ footsteps. I am pleased too that, although no longer ‘go-to-meeting’ Quakers, my sons pursue what I consider to be the Quaker values of honesty, plain speaking and concern for others. In that respect I fear that it was their mother rather than I who set the example.

A little while ago I confessed in this column that I was an opinionated old man and one who was not content to keep his opinions to himself. Pete, my elder son, is beginning to display similar symptoms. I tend to spread my opinions via this blog and in the correspondence columns of the press. He – more usefully perhaps – shares his with his member of parliament. I should perhaps mention that in many respects, the present Prime Minister would consider Pete to be an ideal role model. Made redundant from a very senior post in local government housing administration, he launched his own IT consultancy, gathering round himself a team of IT experts experienced in public administration, to solve the problems of local, police and other public authorities. HUB Solutions Ltd ( www.HUBSolutions.co.uk ) now has satisfied clients throughout England and Scotland and an office in Glasgow as well as in London. This doesn’t mean that, any more than I do, he supports all – or even many - of the policies of David Cameron and the coalition that he heads. Very shortly after the General Election he wrote to his local MP, Lib.Dem. Lynne Featherstone about the coalition’s axing of the school building and renovation programme and received a very rapid and positive reply. Now he has written again in the wake of policies announced at the Conservative Party Conference. Below, slightly abbreviated, is his letter.

Dear Lynne,

I wrote to you shortly after the General Election, in which I voted for you, concerned at the decision your Government has made to cut the entire School Building Programme. I appreciated your prompt reply. However, I feel that policy pronouncements of the last week require me to tell you that the latest decisions of your partners in the Coalition seem to me to move so far in the wrong direction, that it is difficult for me to understand how you can remain a party to such a regime.

I am sure that I am not alone in noticing, that while the Prime Minister says that the burden of cuts must be shared by all, in fact a particular sector of the community – those with children in their care – has been relentlessly singled out for sacrifice. This anti-child policy started with the immediate and apparently careless decision to cut the school building programme. Since it became apparent that this could not even be accurately listed, it could hardly have been carefully assessed.

The Chancellor, in his first speech to the House, announced a cap on Housing Benefit, knowing that it would mainly impact upon families with several children living in central London properties, who would, as a result, be forced to move out – possibly away from extended family and schools, which are so important to children. I am sure that you are aware that it is practically impossible for a Benefit claimant to start a private tenancy on a high rent, as very few landlords would allow that. Therefore, the arbitrary cap would mainly affect those who were working and suffered misfortune such as illness, separation or redundancy.

The Chancellor this week announced two further policies that deliberately and quite carelessly extend this strategy, placing an arbitrary cap on Benefits receivable, and removing entitlement of Child Benefit from households in which any member is paying the higher rate of tax.
I have yet to see any attempt to share the “national sacrifice” with single young people and childless couples, who often have a high disposable income much of which is spent on entirely unnecessary luxuries. Just as relevant, if we are genuinely concerned about people who should be more motivated to get a job, I haven’t seen anything to encourage single young people, neither in work nor in full time education, who are potentially highly mobile and who have very little justification for claiming benefits, to seek employment.

I believe that decisions such as these which focus on the most vulnerable in our society are not just a matter of political judgement – or misjudgement – but are quite immoral in their motivation, carelessly indifferent to the impact of their application, and nothing whatever to do with the financial crisis.

I admire the loyalty that Liberal Democrats have shown to the concept of a coalition in the national interest, but morality demands that loyalty must have its limits. It doesn’t look as if the Liberal Democrats were even consulted on any of the policy pronouncements I have listed and I would urge you to consider the threshold at which, from a Liberal Democrat point of view, the Coalition is no longer serving the National interest. I believe that you can compromise on judgement, but not on the issues of fundamental morality to which I have referred..

Yours sincerely

Peter Hall

It is all stuff that I would have been happy to have written myself, except that I hadn’t realized the effect that capping housing benefit would have on poorer households in central London. But there, I haven’t had experience of housing administration in central London. Pete has. I am glad too that he has drawn attention to the fact that well-off ‘singletons’ and the DINKY (Double Income, No Kids Yet) Brigade seem so far to be escaping the cuts that are threatening those with families.

Looking at the bigger picture, it leaves me wondering whether financial measures affecting the great majority of us who are neither the seriously wealthy nor even residents in the very comfortable ‘Middle England’ of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, should be under the control of a Chancellor from a privileged background who has never experienced poverty or been in a situation where every penny (or even every fiver!) counts.

A Bungled ‘Rescue’

I can’t stop thinking about that Aid Worker, full of compassion for the Afghan people; kidnapped by those she was trying to help and then killed by our NATO allies in a bungled rescue attempt. The final indignity was surely the ever more detailed lies that were told about the manner of her death. (‘The embrace of death’, ‘Clutched to the bosom of a suicide bomber in the hour of rescue’) until, so it appears, photographic evidence suggested that she was killed by a fragmentation grenade hurled by one of her rescuers into the room in which she was held captive. Resolutely casting aside such thoughts as ‘trigger-happy Yanks’, there are two or three questions to which I would dearly like to know the answers.

The need for her rescue was said to have been urgent because she had been about to be transferred across the frontier into Pakistan. Isn’t the Pakistan government supposed to be our loyal ally who has recently fought a vastly expensive (both in resources and in human life) campaign clearing their border area of Taliban terrorists?

Why on earth were fragmentation grenades carried by troops engaged in a rescue mission? Stun grenades and stun guns, certainly – automatic rifles and hand guns, probably – the rescuers wouldn’t have known what armed resistance they might have encountered immediately before or after the rescue attempt. Tear gas or similar grenades, possibly. Surely not fragmentation grenades, deadly weapons used at relatively close range and guaranteed to kill or maim anyone, friend of foe, in their immediate vicinity!

Had it not been for that photographic evidence, we would still believe those lies about that aid worker’s death at the hands of her dastardly captors as the heroic rescuers drew near. How many other lies have we been told, I wonder, about this unwinnable war that is looking more like ‘Vietnam’ (except that then there were no British troops involved) as every day passes?

Week 40.10 5th October 2010

Tendring Topics………on line

North of the Border!

Although I was born in Tidworth, a small garrison town on Salisbury Plain not far from Stone Henge, and have lived for the past fifty-five years in north Essex (fifty-four of them in my present home in Clacton’s Dudley Road), I still think of myself as a ‘Suffolk man’. My parents moved to Suffolk when I was five. I went to school and to my first job in Suffolk and I served in a Suffolk Territorial Regiment in World War II. After the war I lived and worked in Suffolk from 1948 to 1955. My elder son was born in the county and when I become heated my accent becomes more and more that of a rural Suffolk ‘swede-basher’! Consequently I probably take a greater interest in what is going on across our northern border than most Tendring residents.

A few weeks ago I commented on the problems that Essex County Council was encountering in its attempt to save money on a huge scale by outsourcing all its IT services to a giant international corporation. Now I learn that Suffolk County Council is outdoing them. They are putting virtually all their services out to private tender. That really is a revolutionary move – and one that horrifies me. The chief remaining function of the Council will presumably consist of occasionally meeting to consider tenders for the running of schools and further education establishments, social services, highways including footpaths and street lighting, refuse disposal and recycling, consumer protection and so on, and on, and on! The council will, I suppose, still need to employ specialist staff to police all these functions and make sure that they are carried out efficiently – or will that be done by yet another private firm, or perhaps by ‘Big Society’ volunteers?

The idea is, of course, based on the assumption that money will be saved because private enterprise is always more efficient than the public service. It seems to have been conveniently forgotten that the current crisis was not created by any failings of the public sector but by the irresponsibility and greed of financial services – arguably the most prestigious (and certainly the best paid!) area of the private sector!

It is clear to me that private enterprise will only do those jobs more cheaply, thus simultaneously saving money for the tax payers and producing profits for its share-holders, by savage reductions in staff numbers and reducing vital services or cutting them out altogether.

When, in the local government reorganisation of the early 1970s the possibility of Tendring District and Colchester becoming part of Suffolk was under consideration, I was one of a small minority in the area who thought it would be a good idea. (Even I though had to admit it would be just a little odd to have Essex University in an adjoining county!)

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am far from being an uncritical admirer of Essex County Council. However, these moves north of the border now make me feel that by staying in Essex on that occasion we may well have had a lucky escape!

Clacton's Martello Tower

Clacton has, of course, more than one Martello Tower – but the best-known one is on the landward side of Marine Parade West, and in front of Clacton Hospital. It has had a somewhat chequered past but it now seems possible that it will have a brighter future. Tendring Council has just granted planning permission for the provision of a tearoom and a museum within the building, and a ‘petting zoo’ in the large dry moat, likely to be especially popular with young children. This enterprise, expected to be up and running for next spring, is the brain-child of Tower leaseholders Roger Ling and Rosalie Robinson in partnership with Paul Nash, owner of the aquarium on Clacton Pier. Early residents of the mini-zoo will be two alpacas, two pigmy goats and two rabbits.
Nobody except me (one of the penalties of outliving most of my contemporaries!) seems to remember that something very similar was attempted there in the past. It was while my younger grandson, now in his late twenties, was still at primary school. It must therefore have been twenty or more years ago. He, with his dad and elder brother, were staying with us on holiday – and the two boys decided to go and see the miniature zoo at the Martello Tower. They came back in some distress, complaining that the few animals that were there were badly housed and, they thought, badly neglected. Shortly after that the Martello Zoo closed.

There is little chance of the present venture meeting a similar fate. Paul Nash, who has a local record of success with the Pier’s aquarium, will care for the animals and be in charge of the petting zoo. He is reported as being delighted with the news that the scheme now has planning permission, ‘It’s fantastic news and has made me very happy. We will have a big opening, hopefully with a celebrity, and it should be a big day’.

My own most vivid memories of that Martello Tower go back to the late 1950s. When I was first appointed as a public health inspector by Clacton Urban District Council, the two existing inspectors, the council’s cleansing foreman, and I, were expected to be the part-time weather observers, each of us doing one week in four throughout the year. For this we were paid the princely sum of £20 a year, on top of our salaries. £20 was worth a good deal more then than it is now but was still a very small and very hard-earned bonus!

That Martello Tower was the Council’s Weather Station. A ‘Stevenson’s Screen’ housing wet and dry, and maximum and minimum thermometers, was installed within a low fence on the grassy slope between the tower and Marine Parade West – near the top and just to the left of the path in my photograph above. A rain gauge was provided on the miniature golf course that in those days existed between the Martello Tower and the Hospital. On the roof of the Tower was a sunshine recorder. This consisted of a glass sphere, 4 or 5 inches in diameter (rather like a fortune teller’s ‘crystal ball’) contained within a framework holding a specially treated strip of cardboard, marked out in hours and minutes. As the sun moved across the sky the glass sphere acted as a magnifying lens, concentrating the sun’s rays onto the card, the progress of a burn-mark on the card giving an accurate record of the hours and minutes of sunshine.

Every evening at 6.00 p.m., Christmas Day and other public holidays alike, the weather observer on duty had to cross the drawbridge, unlock the door to the tower, climb the internal stone steps to the roof (there was no coastguard station there in those days) and change that cardboard sunshine record. It was a pleasant enough job on a summer’s evening but in December or January, by the light of an electric torch, in a howling gale and with rain or snow blowing in the air, it was not a job for the frail, the imaginative or the claustrophobic. It was all too easy to imagine that the ghost of one of the Duke of Wellington's 'redcoats' was watching from the shadows, deciding whether or not this intruder was one of Napoleon’s spies, intent on mischief!

‘All is safely gathered in……

……….e’re the winter storms begin’, says the well-known harvest hymn and most Christian churches will have celebrated their harvest thanksgiving services during the past few weeks.

During my childhood when ‘going to church on Sunday’ was rather more usual than it is today, churches would be packed for the evening ‘Harvest Festival’ service even if on most other Sunday evenings there were plenty of empty pews. We sang the well-loved harvest hymns We plough the fields and scatter…, Come, ye faithful people, come….., All things bright and beautiful….. and, in prayer, we would thank God for his bounty. Keen gardeners among the congregation (my father among them) would have vied with each other to grow enormous potatoes, vegetable marrows and pumpkins, long and perfectly formed runner beans, succulent cabbages and cauliflower, rosy apples and other garden produce with which to adorn the church on that occasion. These offerings were subsequently all passed on to local children’s homes or to hospitals in the area where they were much appreciated.

It is a practice that continues today as these pictures taken in St. James' Parish Church in Clacton last Sunday (3rd October), the day of the church's Harvest festival, demonstrate.

It is surely a good thing for Christians to gather together once a year to thank God for the harvest – and to give some of our surplus to those who need it. We become so used to buying all our food from the nearest supermarket that we tend to forget that everything that we eat and drink comes ultimately from the soil. We have lost the certain knowledge of former years that when a harvest failed, hunger, hardship and death followed. Then, our forebears knew all too well how much reason they had to be thankful when the harvest had been a bountiful one.

In some parts of the world a failed harvest is as devastating today as it was to our forefathers. In today’s global economy widespread crop failure affects us all, even if only by worldwide higher prices. This year climatic change has brought drought and bush fires to the Russian steppe, aborting or destroying crops and compelling the Russian government to embargo grain exports to ensure that there was sufficient left to feed its own people.

That same inexorable climatic change, largely the result of humankind’s own activities (even if our MP thinks otherwise!) has brought about devastating floods in Pakistan, drowning crops over thousands of acres of farm land and resulting in widespread homelessness, sickness and death. It will take all our efforts for several years to help the victims and restore normality – and who can be sure that there will not be equally devastating floods again next year?

Meanwhile, a short distance from the devastated areas a man-made catastrophe rumbles on in neighbouring Afghanistan and threatens to spread beyond that country’s borders. Every week brings its toll of British and American casualties, and every week innocent civilians are killed as our forces strive to destroy an elusive and unidentifiable enemy.

If only all the money, the resources and the energy that is devoted to death and destruction there, could be redirected to the succour of suffering humanity! Just think of the difference that those helicopters, the military transport and the thousands of fit, young, able-bodied young men and women (not to mention the ingenuity and energy expended in making and planting ‘improvised explosive devices’ and creating ambushes!) could make if they were redirected to Pakistan and used to save lives instead of to take them, to rebuild homes instead of destroy them!

Then we really would begin to see the fulfilment of the prayer that, even in this secular society, is uttered daily by the many thousands of faithful Christians:

‘Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven’

Week 39.10 28th Sept. 2010

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Pope Benedict’s Visit

I thought that it was probably wise to withhold comment on the Pope’s official visit to Britain until he had safely returned to Rome. Had I dared to do so while he was still here, fate would probably have arranged some unexpected triumph or disaster!

I am very glad that his visit proved to be a great success and was marked neither by the apathy that had been prophesied by much of the press, nor by the widespread protest and outrage that had been joyfully anticipated by some of our proselytising enemies of religion. There were protestors it is true, but fewer than had been anticipated and with very diverse causes. Peter Tatchell and his disciples haven’t really all that much in common with Rev. Ian Paisley and his, nor have campaigners for women priests, abortion-on-demand enthusiasts, and victims of the appalling child abuse scandal, a great deal of common ground.

I wasn’t impressed with the argument that none of the cost of the Pope’s visit should have been met out of taxation. Remember the much greater cost of the State Visit of the King of Saudi Arabia with his enormous entourage. He is arguably the ruler of the least liberal country in the world and the one with the least respect or regard for human rights? I did resent having to help pay for his luxurious welcome.

At a meeting of ‘the big three’ during World War II when Churchill, or possibly Roosevelt, spoke of the importance of keeping the Pope ‘on side’, Stalin is said to have asked sarcastically, ‘And how many army divisions does the Pope command?’ Today, I suppose the equivalent question would be, ‘How many oil wells does the Pope control – and how many jet fighters is he prepared to buy?’

The child abuse scandal did cast a shadow over the visit. I wouldn’t wish to enter into historical or theological controversy but I do feel that the Roman Catholic rule of clerical celibacy has a lot to answer for, and not a great deal to justify its continuation. The Gospels tell us that St. Peter, the ‘rock’ on which the Universal Church of Christ was built, was a married man. A celibate priesthood was not insisted upon during the first thousand years of the Church’s history, and it is known that that some of Pope Benedict’s late-medieval predecessors, although unmarried, were hardly role models of celibacy.

Much was heard from commentators about the fact that the Pope was welcomed in Westminster Hall, where Sir Thomas More (St. Thomas More to Roman Catholics) had been condemned to be beheaded for obeying his conscience in defiance of King Henry VIII. Thomas More was by no means the only victim of 16th century intolerance. It would have been a nice gesture of reconciliation had Pope Benedict made a short pilgrimage to Oxford to spend a few minutes in silence before the Martyrs Memorial. There he could have remembered Archbishop Cranmer, Bishops Latimer and Ridley and many others who were burnt to death (a far more agonising death than beheading) for obeying their consciences in defiance of King Henry’s daughter, the staunchly Roman Catholic Queen Mary.

It would have been a salutary reminder to us all that while a conviction that God is on our side can inspire us to great heights of heroism and self-sacrifice, it can also lead us to inflict unspeakable cruelties on our fellow men and women, unless we give primacy to Jesus Christ’s golden rule ‘Treat other people exactly as you would wish them to treat you!’ Those who kill, mutilate or torture their fellow men and women never have God on their side. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it (good or bad) unto even the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me!’ said Jesus and, in teaching us to pray to ‘Our Father in Heaven….’, he acknowledged all of us to be his brethren.

Two views on ‘the deficit'

I welcomed Nick Clegg’s recent affirmation of the Coalition Government’s determination to end income tax evasion (which is illegal) and curb income tax avoidance (which sadly isn’t). These activities result in an annual loss to the exchequer of millions of pounds. They are, said Mr Clegg, as bad as benefit fraud. It could be argued that they are much worse, because serious income tax avoiders certainly don’t need the money that they avoid paying. Many are very wealthy individuals who imagine that, because of their wealth, they should be immune from nuisances like the tax demands that burden lesser folk.

Why should they help to pay for the NHS? They can have the pick of the very best surgeons if they need one. Education? They send their kids to posh private (probably called ‘public’!) schools. Police? They have their own security, and their hired guards aren’t hampered by the pettifogging rules that obstruct official police forces.

Anyway, they hire the very best lawyers and accountants to make sure that their tax avoidance is both effective and absolutely legal. Nick Clegg claimed, and I have no doubt he is right, that making sure that multi-millionaires pay minimal, if any, tax has become a lucrative industry. It certainly gives a new slant on the concept of living on immoral earnings!

I wish the government all success with its endeavours, but I’m not holding my breath. The tax avoiders can hire the very best lawyers and accountants. Can a government determined to cut public services afford to hire even better ones?

Needless to say the views of the Confederation of British Industry (“the bosses’ TUC”) are very different from Nick Clegg’s. They have their eyes on ‘benefits’. Not, of course, that they want to abolish them. Perish the thought! They do feel though that some benefits, Child Allowances and the pensioners’ Winter Fuel Allowance for instance, should be means tested so that funds can be diverted to the really needy. I hadn’t heard really needy enunciated quite so unctuously since the departure of Mrs Thatcher from the political scene!

What the CBI and the top politicians, of all parties, overlook is that there is already in force a Means Testing mechanism that assesses everybody’s income and extracts contributions in accordance with ability to pay. It is called Income Tax. It needs only to be progressively and properly graded to ensure that it demands a fair proportion of everyone’s wealth, and tightened up so as to eliminate both tax evasion and tax avoidance. Then it would claw-back unneeded universal benefit, eliminate the need for any other means testing, and ensure that we all shared fairly the burden of closing the deficit.

Beach alert as Sunshine Coast is named skin cancer hotspot

Now there’s a headline calculated to create panic in hundreds of homes! Families who spent a happy holiday here this year will be searching their backs and arms for unaccustomed moles or warts. Those who were thinking of spending a holiday in Clacton (or Brightlingsea, Walton, Frinton or Dovercourt) next year will be having second thoughts. As for us natives, we’ll be seeking urgent appointments with our doctors!

The headline was in the Coastal Daily Gazette on Monday of last week (20th Sept.) and it could hardly have given a more inaccurate impression. Mind you, another accompanying scare headline AREA IN WORST 20 FOR MALIGNANT MELANOMA (yes, it was in black capital letters!) if carefully read, suggested that the situation might not be quite as desperate as had been suggested.

‘In the worst 20?' Well, since Malignant Melanoma is usually caused by over-exposure of unprotected skin to sunshine, it would have been astonishing if East Anglia’s seaside areas had not been more prone to the condition than, for instance, London, Birmingham or Manchester – though almost certainly less prone than Spain’s Costa del Sol or the south of France, where so many Brits. head for their holidays.

In fact we are 18th – only just within the worst 20, wherein are also to be found such famous holiday towns and areas as Bournemouth, the South Devon coast and the Isle of Wight. This means that there are seventeen British holiday areas more dangerous than we are. They must surely include almost every other holiday resort in southern and eastern England.

Our incidence of malignant melanoma is higher than the national average but remember that that average is brought down by inland towns in the Midlands and North-West, better known for their high rainfall than their hours of sunshine. It is also true, and is included in the small print of the Gazette’s news story, that mortality from Melanoma in our area is below the national average thanks to early detection and good treatment.

I reckon that that Gazette headline would have been at least as accurate had it read, Essex Sunshine Coast is well down danger list for skin cancer – and local victims have better than average chance of recovery! But there, good news doesn’t make good headlines!

Tendring Careline speaks for itself on www.tendringcareline.co.uk !

It is now nine months since I signed on as one of the many clients of Tendring Careline, the telephone SOS service available throughout our district, principally to enable old and/or disabled folk like me to get instant help in an emergency. At that time I had recently had a fall. It had been out of doors and my son and daughter-in-law were with me at the time. Consequently I suffered nothing worse than a black eye and broken glasses.

It made me realize though how much worse the situation could have been had I been alone and at home. I might very well have been unable to get onto my feet again without help – and no help would have been available. I am very fortunate in having concerned and caring neighbours, but it would have been many hours before they, or anyone else, realized that anything was amiss.

At about that time Essex County Council (never backward when it comes to self-congratulation!) were publicising what they claimed was their telephonic home-care alarm system, with a ‘special offer’ of a free service for twelve months for new clients over eighty. They could have had me in mind! I contacted County Hall Chelmsford and was a little surprised when a very friendly and helpful lady turned up in a Tendring Council van. It appeared that this ‘new’ County Council service was the tried-and-tested Tendring Careline run by the district council. I remembered having written about it in Tendring Topics ‘in print’ in the Coastal Express when it was first launched in the 1980s. It was now vastly expanded and with thousands, rather than just a few hundred, clients.

The last nine months have been fairly uneventful for me. I haven’t needed the Careline service. I have though, as requested when the system was installed, remembered to press the red button on that gadget round my neck (had I preferred it could have been on a bracelet round my wrist) once a month, to hear a cheery voice asking if I am OK – and to know that the system is working properly. Meanwhile, as I approach my ninetieth birthday, I am conscious of becoming frailer, less steady on my feet and more and more grateful for the Careline safety net. When my ‘get one free’ period ends in the New Year, I shall gladly pay my £16.80 a month (I think I’ll be VAT exempt) for continued protection and reassurance.

Now Tendring Careline has its own web site ( www.tendringcareline.co.uk ). On it you’ll find everything you need to know about the local careline service, including the answer to questions that it might not even have occurred to you to ask! I was very pleased to note that under ‘Testimonials’ there is a very long extract from the blog that I posted onto this website when I first had the Careline installed. Today, I wouldn’t change a word of it!

If either you, or friends or relatives, are old, living alone and vulnerable, do click on that website and find out what Tendring Careline has to offer. Sign on with Tendring Careline and you’ll sleep more easily for knowing that, whatever happens, there’s a friendly voice on hand offering practical help and reassurance.

Week 38.10 21st Sept. 2010

Tendring Topics……on line

An Outbreak of Truth – and Common Sense!

Yes, there does seem to have been a worrying outbreak of truth and common sense recently. There is no cause for alarm though. It is probably just a mild attack that won’t spread and from which we can hope for a complete recovery.

Here are a few of the more distressing symptoms: The Governor of the Bank of England, addressing the members of the Trades Union Congress (whom The Sun could have told him were ‘a bunch of loony lefties’) confessed that the current financial crisis was not, as had previously been thought, all the fault of the previous government; nor even that of work-shy receivers of benefit and public services. The causes were the greed and incompetence of ‘the financial sector’, bankers like himself. The members of the TUC were, he went on to say, ‘right to be angry’. Fortunately he refrained from suggesting ways in which those who were responsible for the crisis might be made to pay their share of the cost of its remedy, thus easing the burden of those who were innocent. That would have suggested that his condition was terminal!

Nor was the Bank of England’s Governor alone in showing worrying symptoms. The East Anglian Daily Times, is a very good and reliable regional newspaper. I always enjoy reading it and have recently greatly appreciated its ‘readers letters page’. Its core readership consists of comfortably off residents of small towns and rural communities in Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex. It would, I think, be fair to describe its political position as ‘centrist’ though with a tendency to veer to the right. It has certainly never before, to my knowledge, strayed to the left of that centre line.

Yet below is an extract from a leading article on Tuesday 14th September, below a less-than-snappy headline Greed is not good:

‘Some people appear oblivious to reality and devoid of common sense. Many FTSE 100 firms have cut costs because of the recession – a euphemism that invariably means staff have been axed. Yet executive bonuses are close to pre-financial crisis levels. Average bonuses for directors equated with 100 percent of salary. That displays no sign of empathy with those less fortunate…………

…………It is an affront to their fellow men when those who enjoy comfortable lives abuse their positions. Let’s hope that, one day, they realize it and act rather less selfishly.

. Not exactly a rabble-rousing call to ‘Raise the red flag and man the barricades!’ but, for the East Anglian Daily Times, a worrying lurch to the Left.

So much for Truth; how about Common Sense?

Well, if Honesty is the Best Policy (though it is rather sad if that is the only reason for adopting it!) it follows that the pursuit of Truth must be Common Sense. What I actually had in mind though was that the question of whether or how we should replace Britain’s Trident independent nuclear deterrent may possibly be left until after the next General Election*. To renew it would cost billions of pounds at a time when we are told we must save every penny. I hope that, by the time of the next election a comfortable majority of voters will have realized that Trident isn’t independent (can you imagine it being used, or even used as a threat, without the approval of the USA?) and it hasn’t yet deterred anybody.

It didn’t deter Turkey from invading Cyprus, Israel from invading Lebanon, Georgia from invading South Ossetia, and Russia responding by invading Georgia. It didn’t deter the USA and its allies from invading Grenada, Argentina from invading the Falklands, or Iraq from invading Kuwait. Its use against a non-nuclear state is unthinkable and its use against a nuclear one would result in Mutually Assured Destruction. How appropriate that the acronym for such a policy is MAD!

The armed forces, like every other field of human activity, have to face cuts. Considering all that members of the present government have said about their predecessors starving troops in Afghanistan of necessary equipment, they can hardly look in that direction for savings. It has been suggested that the building of two new aircraft carriers might be cancelled. I hope not – not because to do so would deprive an impoverished area of Scotland of much-needed jobs – but because the giant craft are pieces of ‘defence equipment’ the use of which is not limited to the killing of our fellow men and women.

Aircraft carriers, and the aircraft they carry can be, and have been, used for the relief of man-made and natural humanitarian disasters. They can carry vast quantities of badly needed relief and reconstruction supplies and can be used to evacuate threatened civilian populations. They are the very last items of war equipment that should be considered for sacrifice.

*This now seems to be in doubt. An official spokesman says that it has already been decided ‘in principle’ to renew the Trident programme. Others seem less certain. We’ll just have to wait and see.

A real cause for concern

I have just watched on tv the ‘distribution’ of desperately needed food to a starving community in flood stricken Pakistan. I have put ‘distribution’ in quotes because it was, in fact, a riot demonstrating a practical application of Darwin’s theory of the ‘survival of the fittest’ . Those who were fittest and strongest grabbed the food that they and their families needed. The weakest went hungry – and are destined to become even weaker! Long before the truck was emptied, the driver for his own safety and that of his helpers, drove away – with the truck still full of food-grabbing rioters!

It was an incident that underlines the need for ‘the West’ to do much, much more, not only to provide more help for Pakistan but to ensure that aid is distributed fairly and competently. The situation is dangerous, not just for the people of Pakistan but for all of us. How long do you suppose it will take Taliban fanatics to persuade a starving population that all their troubles, the deluge and its aftermath, are God’s punishment for their government’s support of the infidel British and Americans? The remedy, they will urge, is in their own hands!

Don’t forget that Pakistan is a country that has nuclear weapons and, thanks to unstinting military aid from the west, the means to use them. I reckon that the fact that both India and Pakistan and, not too far away, Israel, actually possess nuclear weapons is something that should be giving us many more sleepless nights than the fear that Iran may, just possibly, be trying to acquire them!

It seems but yesterday………

And, in reality, it wasn’t very long ago, that Clacton’s Pier Avenue had its layout altered, its pavements widened and re-laid, and was provided with new vandal-resistant street furniture. There was also the famous or infamous town centre water feature, about which I wrote – over-optimistically it seems! – last week.

I think that we Clactonians have now accustomed ourselves to the new town centre. As a mobility scooter user (and there are nowadays quite a few of us!) I very much appreciate the wide, smooth-surfaced, footpaths.

Work in progress in Pier Avenue (Sept. 2010)

Now though, believe it or not, they’re at it again! Tendring District and Essex County Councils are spending £325,000 narrowing the seaward section of Pier Avenue to a single lane, widening footpaths, improving street lights and CCTV, and planting trees.

Admirable, perhaps – but aren’t we supposed to be at the very beginning of a financial crisis in which we have all been warned to expect cuts in or the abandonment of essential public services, never mind new projects that are, at best, of dubious benefit.

If the two councils really have over a quarter of a million pounds ‘in the kitty’ that simply must be spent on Clacton’s highways, I would have thought a better objective for their prodigality would have been the repair of the broken, uneven and dangerous-to-pedestrians footpaths in many parts of the town.


Right - footpath in Clacton's Anchor Road (Sept. 2010)

Twice the Prime Minister’s pay packet!

Once again we find the Prime Minister’s salary used as a benchmark for wealth. Joanna Killian, Essex County Council’s Chief Executive, is said to have a salary of £285,000 a year, almost double his! Ms Killian, who has held the post with the County Council since 2006, was also appointed Chief Executive to Brentwood Borough Council a year later. That £285,000 must be the salary for both jobs. She surely can't be drawing another six figure salary from Brentwood!

It seems too that she is a firm believer in ‘no expense spared’. In 2009 she used a council credit card to pay for a staff member, who had been struck down with food poisoning at an office event, to take a room at Claridges Hotel in Mayfair. She also spent £270 on champagne for two officials from Kent County Council who had helped with an Essex project and £55 (just small change really!) on flowers for another colleague.

I am not all that interested in comparing her salary with that of the Prime Minister. He does, after all, enjoy other worthwhile perks. I wonder how it compares with other professionally qualified colleagues at County Hall. They all, I am sure, do difficult and important jobs serving the public. They couldn’t do her job – but then I’d be very surprised if she could do theirs. One of the reasons why there is such an enormous gap between the highest and the lowest paid employees of the council is the practice of paying staff percentage pay increases. This enables top earners to claim, ‘I had just the same pay increase as my secretary and my PA’, while pocketing thousands of pounds more. With every national percentage pay increase the gap between the highest and the lowest widens. As I have pointed out before in this blog, five percent of not-very-much is very little. Even one percent of a six-figure salary can be a considerable sum.

One thing that I find really extraordinary is that Ms Killian should simultaneously be chief executive of Essex County Council and of Brentwood Borough Council. When I was appointed Clacton’s Housing Manager and again when I became Tendring Council’s PRO (both infinitely less important and infinitely less well paid than a CEO!) it was stressed that I should devote all my time to my work and could not take any other paid employment. I had to get the Council’s permission to pursue my freelance writing, which was by that time earning me a few hundred pounds a year. They agreed when I explained that my writing was a hobby and that, unlike most hobbies that cost money to pursue, mine actually made a little money. They would certainly never have agreed to my taking on a part-time job with another authority!

Quite apart from the principle involved there must surely have sometimes been a conflict of interest. In my experience County Councils and their constituent District and borough Councils don’t always agree.

Mind you, I had been astonished – a few weeks ago - when I learned that the wife of the County Council’s Head of Communications (now on leave of absence) was a senior officer in the same department (she has now resigned). Essex County Council is clearly a law unto itself in these matters!

Week No. 37.10 14th Sept. 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

Prophetic Topics?

Hardly; the fact that likely future events mentioned in this blog often actually occur a week or so later, doesn’t mean that I have the gift of second sight. It is simply that the probable result of some political actions is blindingly obvious to anyone endowed with common sense, devoid of party dogma and immune to the headlines of the popular press.

I wrote, some time ago, that since much of the private sector depends upon the public sector for its work, savage cuts in the public sector were likely to affect private firms before their public authority customers. And so it has. Recently I learned that 5,000 small private firms, contractors of services to local authorities, were already in financial difficulties. The private and public sectors were, I said, like conjoined twins – whatever, good or bad, is done to one of them will inevitably affect the other.

That was just small contractors. Now we learn that the division of the giant building maintenance organisation Connaught, that deals with the upkeep of social housing countrywide, is in financial trouble with thousands of job losses. That is just the immediate result of the cuts. The other, and less easily remedied, effect will be neglected repair and regular maintenance and the descent of social housing into irredeemable slums.

On a recent tv news programme the presenter asked randomly selected members of the public if they would prefer the government to try to reduce ‘the deficit’ by cutting benefits, or services. Most, no doubt inspired by press headlines about ‘benefit cheats’, unhesitatingly replied ‘benefits’ – until they were reminded that ‘benefits’ included child allowances, rent and tax rebates, retirement pensions, free tv licences, bus passes, winter fuel allowance and so on. Many of those interviewed imagined that ‘benefits’ just meant large sums of money paid to ‘other people’ the majority whom were layabouts and/or cheats.

A very great many people (I am among them) are in receipt of some kind of benefit. It can’t be too strongly stressed that, just as the vast majority of young people are not violent drunken hooligans, and the vast majority of Muslims have no sympathy whatsoever with terrorists, the vast majority of people in receipt of benefit are not cheats.

What should have been asked was, would you prefer the government to reduce the deficit by cutting benefits and services to the public, or by modest increases in direct taxes such as income tax, inheritance tax and capital gains tax?

Cutting services, reducing benefits and increasing indirect taxes like VAT and excise duties on such items as tobacco, alcohol and petrol, disproportionately penalise the poor. Income tax rises would affect a wide swathe of society from some with relatively low incomes (they would certainly affect me!) to the seriously wealthy. They would claw back some of the ‘benefits’ from those who didn’t need them and – by their very nature – they are only demanded from those who are able to pay them.

Funny thing, the idea of an extra penny in the pound on the standard rate of income tax, which would reduce no one to penury but would raise a great deal of money, appears not even to have been considered.

I would find it easier to accept all this stuff from the present Chancellor about belt tightening, what the country can and cannot afford, and how we all shall have to suffer, if I could only forget that, just a year or two ago he and Lord Mandelson (then a Labour Government Minister) were together enjoying the hospitality of a multi-millionaire on his luxury yacht. I wonder how much discomfort, never mind suffering, their then host will have to suffer?

Clacton’s Water Feature is back

Recently I expressed my regret at the fact that Clacton’s much criticised and crisis-ridden water feature seemed to have been turned off forever. It had had a short ‘normal’ life during which it had brightened up the town centre. On warm days adventurous children had plunged through its jets to the entertainment of passers by. Sadly though, it appeared that by doing so they were risking their health and safety. The feature didn’t have an adequate water purification plant. Goodness knows what dire pollution may not have been introduced into the ever-circulating water by stray cats, dogs and passing seagulls!


Last summer it made a brief appearance behind a steel fence, intended to protect those of the younger generation from their own bravado. It was anything but an asset to the town centre. Amid universal derision the fence was removed and the jets switched off. This year the Council brought cutting-edge electronic wizardry to its aid. There was no fence. The water feature was switched on - but if any one, adult or child, approached too close to the jets, they faded and died. Sadly, some of the younger generation discovered a blind spot in the defences and a way through the metaphorical minefield. Once again they endangered their health by venturing through the jets. The feature was again switched off. This time I feared, for good.

I’m glad to say that, by means beyond my understanding, the blind spot no longer exists. The path through the minefield has been successfully blocked. The jets of the water feature have been restored. Unless there has been another catastrophe since I took this photo (on 9th Sept.), they are happily jetting away now!
Power to the People!

Last week in this blog I commented on what seemed to me to be two totally outrageous ideas suggested by the Policy Exchange ‘think tank’ to alleviate Britain’s housing crisis. They involved bribing members of rural communities to vote against their own instincts in proposed referenda on whether or not development should take place in their villages; and seizing the thousands of homes provided and run by Housing Associations, using their rent to build more houses for sale.

I said that although I understood Policy Exchange to be an organisation close to the government, I felt sure that both David Cameron and Nick Clegg had more common sense and integrity than to think seriously about adopting either of these (currently criminal!) ideas. Now……..I am beginning to wonder.

Policy Exchange’s report has evidently reached Whitehall. This morning on tv I heard a government spokesman explain that among the problems afflicting would-be developers were long delays in the current planning procedures. They would prepare and submit their plans for housing estates, supermarkets and so on. The district or borough council concerned would consider these plans. They might be passed, passed subject to conditions, or rejected. If they were rejected or it was considered that the conditions were unreasonable, the Developer could appeal – Central Government would become involved and the procedure might drag on for months.

This, as the spokesman said, was clearly unsatisfactory. It might have thought that a government devoted to ‘giving power to local communities’ would decide that, to speed up the process, there should be no appeal for most proposed developments. The decision of the democratically elected district council, taken in consultation with the parish or town council where there was one, should be final. I say most proposed developments because if it were a universal rule, there would be no refuse disposal plant, no sewage works, no penal institutions and no provision for ‘travellers’ anywhere. These are developments that most of us agree are essential but none of us want in our backyards!

That was not the solution favoured by the government spokesman. He suggested that decisions should be passed to local communities and decided by a public referendum, adding that it might be possible to provide ‘inducements’ for the local community to accept the development! His words could have, and possibly did, come straight from the Policy Exchange report.

As it happens just such a development as the government spokesman had in mind is being considered within the Tendring District at this moment.

The owners of St Osyth Priory, a historic stately home in a picturesque and historic village had, to the villagers’ consternation, proposed the building of 200 homes on their land. They were to be part of a scheme needed to raise millions of pounds to restore the Estate. Even more recently that number has been doubled, increasing the number of proposed new houses to 400 This, say the villagers, would increase the number of homes in the village by 50 percent, totally altering the community’s character!

I was particularly interested in this proposed development because in 1974, in the immediate wake of the local government reorganisation of that year, Mr Colin Bellows, the then-new Tendring District Council’s Engineer and Surveyor and I, as Public Relations Officer had visited every town and parish council in the district to familiarise their members with the responsibilities of those local councils under the new Act of Parliament.

I spoke about the newly formed District Council, serving the whole of the Tendring Peninsula, and its relationship with parish and town councils. Mr Bellows explained the new planning laws. These for the first time gave such councils the power to examine and comment on the plans of any proposed new development in their area, before the Tendring Council, as Planning Authority, made its decision.

It was thirty-five years ago and there is only one of those meetings that remains in my memory. It was in the village hall in St. Osyth. An elderly parish councillor had stood up and expressed his regret that we had wasted our time coming to see them. ‘St. Osyth’, he said, ‘already has all the development that is needed and the parish council is opposed to any more whatsoever’.

It seems that that old gentleman’s spirit lives on today. An unofficial poll of local residents taken by the Save our St. Osyth Group after the earlier proposal to build just 200 new homes, revealed that 90 percent of villagers objected to the scheme. Now that the proposed number of homes has been doubled, I would expect there to be even more objectors.

I reckon that it would take a pretty hefty inducement to make that lot change their minds!

The Paradox of Life

The September issue of the Southern East Anglian Area Quakers’ newsletter contains quotations from ‘The Mahabharata’ on life’s paradoxes. Reality, the quotations insist, is composed of opposites. To assert the one is to assert its opposite as well.

Here are a few examples: The paradox of having is that the more one has the greater is one’s discontent. There is a paradox of limits – one becomes aware of one’s limits only by transgressing them; there is no known way by which one can know one’s own limits in advance and The paradox of the self is that without the other, the self would be inconceivable.

These made me remember some paradoxical thoughts on happiness that have developed in my mind over what is now a very long life.

Those who spend their lives seeking their own happiness are destined never to find it.

We realize how happy we have been only when we are happy no longer.

It is our happiest memories that are most likely to bring us to tears

Week 36.10 7th Sept. 2010

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Policy Options!

Probably you have never heard of ‘Policy Exchange’. They’re one of those mysterious ‘think tanks’ that spend their time considering Government future policy. When the Prime Minister or any other member of the Cabinet comes up as, often they do, with ‘a brilliant new idea’ to solve this that or the other national problem the chances are that the idea will have originated in one such ‘think tank’. I am told that Policy Exchange is very influential and close to the present coalition government.

I hope that I’m wrong about that, because to solve the national housing problem to which I referred a few weeks ago, they have come up with two of the most outrageous ideas that I have ever heard. Should these ideas ever became official policy I would expect the collapse of the government to follow. If Nick Clegg and his Lib.Dem. colleagues were prepared to endorse them, they could surely say farewell to any remaining shred of credibility.

Britain, so Policy Exchange rightly claims, needs many more affordable homes to house those who need them and to help bring down the prices of existing housing stock. They don’t, of course, suggest the repeal of 'right to buy' legislation and the encouragement of local authorities to build homes for letting. They believe that local authority reluctance to give planning permission for new homes in their areas is a major cause of the problem.

Their report suggests that the power to grant or refuse planning permission for the building of new housing estates should be withdrawn from the local authorities. Instead, it should be decided by referendum of the community where the development will take place – a simple majority of the vote deciding yes or no. Those with knowledge of these matters may find this an astonishing suggestion. Experience suggests that village communities are much more likely to refuse planning permission for new housing estates in their area, than a borough or district council whose members have to consider the interests of the entire district.

Policy Exchange has a brilliant idea though. They believe that such local resistance could be overcome by the offer of cash incentives to local people by the developer. ‘If a village decided to increase in size from 2,000 to 3,000 households there could easily be a £10,000 cash payment to every householder in the village!’

Alex Morton, the former civil servant who prepared the ‘Policy Exchange’ report, says that such payments shouldn’t be regarded as bribes – the money might perhaps be used to provide a park or similar amenity. Yes, I suppose that it might – and pigs might fly! Who needs a park in a rural village? If villagers are to be persuaded to vote against their natural instincts, they’ll each want their own bribe, cash-in-hand, at the close of poll!

I wonder if Mr Morton has considered the possibility of leaving matters as they are and bribing the existing councillors instead. That, I think might well prove more cost effective and wouldn’t be all that much more outrageous! Yes, I know it would be illegal as things stand. It would though, be a government-backed scheme – and hasn’t the government promised to sweep away pettifogging regulations that impede progress?

But that’s only the half of it!

Modestly, Policy Exchange doesn’t suggest that that one ‘big idea’ would solve all Britain’s Housing problems. They have another one – surely a real clincher!

Such houses as Councils still have left in their ownership should not, when they become available for letting, go to those in greatest need. They, for some reason, are not considered to be quite so needy, or perhaps not so deserving, as others. Any such tenancies should, first of all go to the severely disabled. That sounds fine – except that the severely disabled housing applicants whom, as Housing Manager, I have rehoused (I wonder if Mr Morton has ever actually met any?) wouldn’t consider it much of a privilege to have first call on the tenancy of a third storey flat, or a house with an upstairs bathroom!

When the severely disabled have been satisfactorily disposed of, tenancies should be allocated to those housing applicants who have been waiting the longest or who have the greatest local connections (I hope he means 'associations' and not 'influence'). There’s no mention of the local authorities that actually own these properties, having any say in this allocation. Perhaps, as part of the ‘power to the people’ that David Cameron is so keen on, all Council owned housing would, in the future, be controlled directly by central government.

Policy Exchange clearly thinks so because they also suggest that all Housing Association stock should be handed to the government and could then be sold off to tenants who wanted to buy. New houses would be built by issuing bonds to be repaid out of rent. This would enable 100,000 extra homes to be built and the Treasury would make £2.64 billion a year from house sales.

(Just imagine the, quite justifiable, outrage there would have been if it had been suggested that a Labour government might seize all privately owned tenanted homes – and use their rent to build new Council houses! ‘Neo-Stalinist snatch of our homes’ would have been among the more moderate headlines in the popular Press)

The present financial crisis was triggered by the folly and cupidity of leading bankers, first in the USA and later in the UK and elsewhere. There is a certain irony in the fact that among the victims of the proposed act of highway robbery would be the Peabody Housing Trust, which currently provides homes for some 50,000 Londoners. The Trust was founded in 1862 by George Peabody, an American Merchant Banker who settled in England and whose philanthropy, particularly in the field of public housing, earned him a burial in St. Paul’s Cathedral. I hope that the Cathedral’s foundations are sound, because he’ll be turning in his grave!

No, it hasn’t happened yet, and probably won’t happen. Surely Messrs Cameron and Clegg have sufficient sense - and integrity - not to pursue that course.. It is worrying though, to know that this is the kind of poisonous drivel that is being dripped into their ears!

A New (mini) Supermarket

I was sorry to see the closure and demolition of The Black Bull in Clacton’s St Osyth Road. It was my ‘local’. I had watched it being built, I had had an occasional meal there, either alone or with a companion or companions (at one time they did a very good lunch, with an adequate menu and very competitive prices). Occasionally too, I had strolled down there in the evening for a nightcap and a friendly chat. Such conversations had sometimes been the genesis of items in Tendring Topics (in print!) that I wrote for the Coastal Express for twenty-three years.

I would have thought that, with competent management and some professional publicity, it could have continued to serve the neighbourhood in which I live for many years.

However, it was not to be. I watched its conversion into a Tesco Express mini-supermarket without enthusiasm – though I had to concede that it seemed that an imaginative and attractive conversion was in progress, and the builders were certainly getting on with the job.

Well, as those who live in my neck of the woods know, it is now open. I paid my first visit there last week and must say, a little reluctantly perhaps, that I think it is going to be an asset to the neighbourhood. It is bright and welcoming, well-laid out inside and, considering its size, carries a very wide range of stock. Not, of course, such a wide range as Morrisons where I expect I shall continue to do my main shopping – but very useful for a quick foray, perhaps after normal closing hours or for items forgotten on the shopping list!

It has a ‘self-service’ check-out that I found a little daunting. However, a friendly assistant operated it for me and promised that, if I dropped in when they were a bit less busy, he would introduce me to its mysteries.

It is not far from my home and well within what was once my ‘walking distance’. Now though, I am glad to be able to park my mobility scooter (I like to think of it as 'tethering my iron horse') immediately outside its entrance. And, of course, it is ‘open all hours’. Not quite all – but 6.00 am till 11.00 p.m. should meet most people’s needs!

‘No new thing under the sun’

A few weeks ago the Government’s Housing Minister suggested, as his own brilliant new ideas, facilitating exchanges of tenancy between council tenants in different parts of the country and encouraging – or forcing – tenants to move into less roomy accommodation when their families grew up and left home. These measures, he thought, would reduce ‘waiting lists’ for council tenancies and generally help the housing situation.

I pointed out in this blog that in Clacton, and no doubt elsewhere, both those policies were pursued in the 1970s, though without either the element of compulsion, or the extra layer of bureaucracy involved in setting up a national exchange agency. My personal experience was, of course, BC (before computers) and thoroughly out of date. My idea of advertising a desire to exchange was limited to the local press and cards in tobacconist’s windows. Now, I am told, there has for some time been a web site with no other purpose. I didn’t know that. Nor, it seems, did the Housing Minister.

Staff of Public Libraries feel particularly vulnerable to Government cuts. Most of them have experienced a marked reduction in public use in recent years. Moreover they mainly serve leisure and cultural interests. We haven’t yet quite reached the state of mind of the late Air-Marshal Hermann Göring ‘When I hear the word “culture” I reach for my revolver’, but in the brave new economic world of the 21st century, activities that aren’t ‘wealth creative’ can hardly expect generous government support. And, of course, those that are, don’t need it!

We have a Culture Minister (in George Orwell’s 1984, there was probably a Minister of Freedom!) but I suspect that Ed Vaisey’s main job is to find ‘efficiency savings’ that will reduce spending on matters as non-creative as leisure and as ephemeral as culture. Recently I understand, he has been explaining how money can be saved by improving online library services. He has also been extolling ‘the scope for savings in reducing the number of library authorities through voluntary alliances’.

It might have been imagined that he had been inspired by just such a voluntary alliance as What’s in London Libraries? (WiLL) which had been running since 2003 in the London area. Using WiLL, readers were able to search, on line, the catalogues of all 33 London Boroughs' Public Library Services. Having located the book or books they wanted to borrow, they could do so through the inter-library loan service, thus saving both time and money.

If WiLL was Mr Vaizey’s inspiration it can be so no longer. The web site is no longer available. Queries to London Libraries, the body set up to create and run WiLL produce the following message: ‘Due to financial constraints WiLL has now been discontinued. To access individual authorities’ library catalogues please visit their respective websites’. Who, one wonders, imposed the financial restraints?

So much for encouraging voluntary alliances and on line services!