Week No 41 2012

Tendring Topics........on line

‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat………’

            It might have been thought that we had seen and heard the last of Lord Hanningfield.   After almost a decade served as leader of Essex County Council he was discovered to have been fiddling his expenses as a member of the House of Lords, claiming expenses for overnight stays in London when actually he had been driven to his home in West Hanningfield by his Essex County Council funded car and driver!  On one occasion he claimed for an overnight stay in London when he was actually on a flight to India at County Council expense!  In 2011 he was found guilty of having stolen £13,379 by fraud and received the very lenient sentence of nine months in prison – the lowest sentence of any imposed as a result of the Parliamentary expenses scandal.  Alone of those convicted of fraud during that investigation, he showed no contrition and, while not contesting the facts, clearly considered himself to be innocent. ‘I did just the same as hundreds of other Peers’, he claimed.

            Extremely lucky in the length of his sentence he was even luckier in being discharged, for reasons beyond my understanding, after serving only nine weeks of it. In due course he again took his seat in the House of Lords (I know of no better reason for the urgency of reform of the ‘Upper House’!) where he now considered himself to be an authority on the penal system!

            But Nemesis awaited him.   It appears that the £13,379 for which he served his brief sentence was only a fraction of the sum that he had really stolen from the public purse. Further investigations had revealed that he may have helped himself to over £67,000 of taxpayers’ money.  Now Southwark Crown Court has given him the option of repaying a further £37,158 within the next six months or of going back to prison for a further 15 months.

            Lord Hanningfield’s lawyer Mr Mark Spragg is quoted as saying, ‘He’s appalled.  He’s not a wealthy man.  His only asset is his house.  He may have to sell it and have a council house’.  Mr Spragg is unduly optimistic on his client’s behalf.  He clearly does not keep up with the news.

            I have never seen Lord Hanningfield’s bungalow home in West Hanningfield but I would be extremely surprised if when sold it failed to realise many times the £37,158 that his lordship has to raise to stay out of gaol.   Even in the more relaxed days in which I was Clacton’s Housing Manager a homeless single man of 72 would have had pretty low priority as a council housing applicant. Today, thanks to the policies of the political party in which when in opposition Lord Hanningfield was a ‘shadow minister’, a single homeless man of 72 in possession (even after paying the money he owes!) of what all other housing applicants would consider to be a vast fortune, would have no chance whatsoever!

            Nor would the raising of that £37,158 necessarily see the end of Lord Hanningfield’s troubles.  So far, only his misuse of public funds as a member of the House of Lords has been brought into the cruel light of day.  His possible misuse of funds under his control in his capacity of Leader of Essex County Council is currently still under police investigation.  I think that other county councillors and, possibly, senior member of the County Council staff may also be awaiting the outcome of that investigation with some trepidation.   Surely those who knew or suspected that they were accepting hospitality provided by misappropriated funds would be in much the same position as receivers of stolen goods.

‘One Nation’ Britain!

            It was a brilliant slogan for Ed Miliband to adopt for his (if I may coin a phrase) ‘Even-Newer-Labour’.  Easily remembered, it recalls the national unity displayed in support of the recent Olympic Games, it outbids the government’s quite obviously false claim that ‘we’re all in this together’,  and since it is a phrase coined by Benjamin Disraeli founder of the modern Conservative Party, it makes a bid for the Conservative voter.

            It is worth remembering that Disraeli began his political career as a Radical, one of the ‘loony lefties’ of his day, and a supporter of the Chartists who, outrageously in the early 19^th Century, demanded among other things payment of MPs and universal voting rights for all adult males. He was a successful author. The two nations portrayed in his novel ‘Sybil’ or ‘The Two Nations’, published in 1845, were the nations of the rich and the poor.  He obviously had observed at first hand the appalling living conditions of the industrial poor in the early part of the 19^th century, and he described them in graphic detail.  His description is, in fact, remarkably similar to that in Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, also published in 1845, and written by Frederick Engels, joint founder with Karl Marx, of the Communist Party!

            By 1845 Disraeli had become a Conservative MP.  The political scene in Britain at that time was very different from that which prevailed throughout the twentieth century and that of today.   Core support for the Conservative Party came from the landed gentry and the aristocracy, their tenants and dependents.   Support for the Liberal Party came not from working people (they couldn’t vote so no-one bothered much about them!) but from the new-rich factory and shop owners whom Disraeli may have seen as responsible for the plight of the industrial poor.  It is possible that he had a romantic notion of the landed gentry and nobility freeing the urban poor from the clutch of the materialistic ‘worshippers of Mammon’ who owned England’s ‘dark, satanic mills’ and the slum-towns surrounding them.  As the years passed, Disraeli’s dream of ‘one nation’ seems to have faded.  The pursuit of imperial glory took its place.  He became a personal friend of Queen Victoria whom he persuaded to accept the grandiose title of Empress of India.

            Is Ed Miliband destined to revive the dream of One Nation?   It will take more than just stirring words and inspiring speeches to do so.  Britain’s poor today, thank God, do not live in the squalid poverty that they did nearly two centuries ago, but the gap between the nation of the poor and the nation of the wealthy is as wide as ever. It has in fact widened during the past twenty years, which include a decade of New Labour government.  Until he actively promotes and pursues practical measures to narrow that gap he has no more right to claim that the Labour Party  stands for One Nation than his opponents have to claim that ‘we’re all in this together’, and to speak for the whole nation of the population of the United Kingdom.

Some thoughts on Education

A fortnight ago I gave a qualified welcome in this blog to Education Secretary Gove’s idea of a Baccalaureate examination, closely resembling the ‘Matric’ exam I had taken in 1937, to replace the GCSE examinations that had, in many people’s eyes, become discredited.   I think perhaps that I should give a similarly cautious welcome to Ed Miliband’s suggested Technical Baccalaureate that would test candidates in their knowledge and experience of technical subjects.  I think that he had a quite separate examination in mind but it occurs to me that the scope of Mr Gove’s ‘academic’ Baccalaureate could be extended to include technical subjects.   Mathematics and English would remain compulsory subjects in the joint examination since it is really impossible to study seriously any other subject, academic or technical, without them.  They could perhaps be the only compulsory subjects, but to pass the examination candidates would need to secure a pass mark in them and in at least three other subjects.  Some technical fields are so wide that they might need to be divided into two or more sections, each one of which would count as a ‘subject’ for the examination.

I think that it is an idea worth considering.  I think too that we shouldn’t worry too much about children leaving school without any kind of exam certificate.  Prior to World War II the overwhelming majority of kids did just that – and some of them went on to become millionaires.  Many jobs do not demand paper qualifications.  Yet they may be jobs in which those that do them deservedly take pride, and that are more socially valuable than many more prestigious occupations.  If I were a potential employer I’d much prefer a note from a head teacher saying that the bearer was not a brilliant scholar but was hard working, conscientious and reliable, than that he had just about managed to scrape a pass mark in two or three GCSE subjects.  When everyone can gain some kind of educational certificate those certificates quickly lose their credibility.   As it says (or rather is sung) in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers , ‘When everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody!’

There is in any case a lot more to education than obtaining some sort of a qualification.  It would be nice to be able to think that all children leave school with something of the three ‘rs’ (reading, writing and arithmetic), something of the nature of science, and at least something of the world’s and their own country’s geography and colourful history. I believe that, for the most part, that was the position pre-World War II. It surely isn’t too much to ask for today, after at least eleven years full-time education

 The Dynamic (or should it be Disastrous?) Duo         

I sometimes wonder if our Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer (described by one of their supporters as ‘posh boys who don’t know the price of milk’) really inhabit the same world as I do. In rejecting the idea of a Mansion Tax, for instance, David Cameron says that he doesn’t feel that if someone has worked hard and saved to get the home he wants, he should be penalised for it.  For goodness sake! – nobody is thinking of extra taxes for the owner of a comfortable home with a double garage in a leafy suburb, or even of a ‘desirable residence with stabling and a half acre of land’ valued at about £500,000, of the kind that those participating in BBC tv’s Escape to the country’ usually find to be ‘not quite what we were looking for’.   The ‘mansions’ that proposers of this tax had in mind were those worth over £2 million – the sort of place, for instance, that might be occupied by the  chief executive of a large international corporation  who invited  prime ministers or other influential politicians to jolly Christmas Parties!

            Then there’s George Osborne warning us that, unless he can manage to squeeze a bit more out of the poor and disadvantaged we shall – for the first time in 200 years – have a situation in which children are worse off than their parents.  Now I fully accept that I was been better off in every way than my parents, and that my sons have been better off than me and have had opportunities that I never had.  I am very glad about that.  I cannot see though any way in which the next generation that includes my grandchildren, are anything but much worse off than their parents.  Their parents, if they aspired to university, had free tuition, and means-tested grants from their local authority on which to live while they studied for their degrees.   On completing their education they generally had no great difficulty finding suitable employment, they usually had no serious debts and were free to save up to get married and make a home.  By their time (unlike mine) it was usual for a wife to continue in work, at least until the first child of the marriage was born.  For some though, being a full-time wife, home-maker and mother was a possible and wholly acceptable option.

            The price of properties was still relatively low and there were plenty of houses to let at a reasonable rent (the noxious ‘right to buy’ legislation had yet to be enacted!)  Building Societies were eager to enrol house purchasers and were asking for deposits of no more than 10 or even 5 percent of the value of the property to credit-worthy applicants

How very different things are today!  Graduates leave university with a crippling debt that may hang over them for the whole of their working lives.  Young people, whether or not they have graduated, have the greatest difficulty in finding a job (both my grandsons, graduates with good honours degrees, went overseas – one to Europe and one to the Far East – to make their careers).   House prices have escalated, building societies and banks now demand enormous deposits before giving a mortgage, rents are also prohibitively high and only those who are abjectly poor can hope to get a short term tenancy (government policy demands that that’s all there are) of a council or housing association property.

As for marriage and the family (institutions that the government claims to value!) young wives nowadays are expected to be in full-time work up to the time that they give birth, and to start work again as soon as they can obtain all-day child care!    No wonder that few couples bother to marry, that we have an unprecedented number of teen-age pregnancies, an unprecedented number of abortions, and an unprecedented amount of youth crime, much of it violent.

How dare George Osborne claim that so far, each generation for the past 200 years has been better off than its predecessor!  For several years, thanks to policies that he has supported, Britain's young people have been worse off than their parents in virtually every possible way!

 I notice that he is going ‘to ask the wealthy to make a bigger contribution towards solving the nation’s problems. The rest of us don't get polite requests. We just get 'tax demands'! I wonder what he’ll do if they say NO!

             

           

Week No 40 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Patronising the Poor?

            Nick Clegg continues to insist that the wealthy must make a bigger contribution to the nation’s finances, though quite how he hopes to achieve this is far from clear.   There are financial incentives to encourage universities to accept more students from deprived backgrounds and schools are given similar incentives to provide extra educational help to children from deprived families.  There are free school meals for children who need them and free public services for those in receipt of means-tested benefit.  Meanwhile well-meaning politicians boast that they have removed the income tax burden from thousands of less-well-off families by raising the level at which this tax becomes liable.

            These measures are like treating acute pneumonia with a couple of aspirins!   Our aim should surely not be to make poverty more tolerable but to reduce and ultimately abolish it.   I do not believe that it is a good idea to remove those with low incomes from income tax liability.  This encourages the idea of the division of society into the tax payers, whom the taxman robs of the fruit of their labours, and the rest of the population who benefit from this, including of course the scroungers and benefit cheats of whom we read so much in the popular press.   It encourages folk like Mr Romney, Barak Obama’s opponent in the forthcoming Unites States Presidential Election to announce that he has no interest in the 47 percent of the American population who are not wealthy enough to be taxed.

            In this blog I have again and again stressed my conviction that income tax should be the principal source of government revenue and should be regarded as our annual subscription for membership of a very exclusive international club; British citizenship.  It should be a fixed proportion of the gross income of every adult British citizen without exception, from the very poorest to the very wealthiest.  The contribution of those surviving on job seekers’ allowance, disability living allowance, the state retirement pension, or the minimum wage would be very little, while that of the very wealthy would be a great deal. We would though all be contributing an equal proportion of our income to our country’s needs.  All of us, from the very lowest to the very highest, would have a stake in our country’s future prosperity.  Did not Jesus Christ point out that the widow who contributed her ‘mite’ to the Temple Treasury was making a bigger sacrifice than the wealthy – since they merely handed over part of their surplus wealth while  she gave all that she had? 

            The proportion of each adult’s income that would be needed to balance the nation’s books could be worked out every year.  If everybody contributed I’d be surprised if it would need to be higher than 20 percent.  This, I believe, would be sufficient to fund all necessary public services (a government sensible enough to adopt such a system would surely also have the sense to scrap those nuclear submarines!) and to pay generous allowances to those unable to work or unable to find work.

            Don’t let us patronise the poor.   Let’s abolish them!

It’s just a word!

           As incidents go, it wasn't  a very important one, but Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell’s reaction when frustrated by the Police in Downing Street, certainly demonstrated that when the occasion arises, well-heeled patricians from society’s top drawer can be as bad tempered and foul-mouthed as the very toughest and roughest of plebs.   I thought that Mr Mitchell was at his most objectionable, not when he lost his temper (we all do that sometimes!) but when he made a half-hearted apology, implying that the long-suffering police were lying about the actual words that he had used.

 It all brought to my mind (as so many things do these days!) an incident that occurred, it must have been in 1932 or ’33, when I was eleven or twelve and we had Ron, a cousin of mine from Bethnal Green, staying with us in Ipswich during the school holiday.  Ron’s dad, my uncle, was a mounted policeman and the family lived in married quarters in Bethnal Green Police Station.  Ron was a few months younger than me.  We were good friends and we got into all sorts of trouble together.

Ron (on the right) and I

           

On one occasion I remember that something had upset him and he used one of the words that, from Mr Mitchell’s lips, have caused offence.  No – it wasn’t ‘plebs’. I doubt if Ron would have heard of that.  It was the other one and, just like Mr Mitchell, he used it ‘adjectively’.  It happened that he was at the time within the hearing of my normally easy-going mother – and I was totally astonished at her reaction.  That, she thundered, was a truly dreadful word that was used only by the very lowest of the low.   If she ever heard him say it again he’d be packed straight off to Bethnal Green and his mum and dad would be told why!  Goodness!  He certainly didn’t use it again, or at least not when my mum was around.

            This was in the early 1930s and I don’t recall often hearing that word again until I was in the army, nearly ten years later.  Even there it was used quite sparingly until I was a PoW when we really did have something to swear about.  I remember it particularly in Germany where we were working regularly both with German civilians, and with conscripted slave-workers from Russia, the Ukraine and other occupied countries.  They were fascinated by our bad language and our ready use of it, and would try with varying degrees of success to follow our bad example!  Perhaps, even as I type this, some very elderly Ivan or Natasha (well, I’m still around so why shouldn’t they be?) in St. Peterburg, or Odessa or Kiev, may have clumsily knocked over a glass of vodka and have used an expletive that, as they explain to their puzzled grandchildren, they learned from some Anglishky comrades way back in 1944!

            Here in England the use of that word is no longer limited to the lowest of the low’ as my mother had insisted it had been in 1932. You may well hear it if you walk behind any group of school children chatting to each other! It is to be found in the first line of a poem by a celebrated modern poet.  It was used very effectively in the acclaimed film The King’s Speech. It is used, as we now know, by ex-public-schoolboy cabinet ministers. It sometimes appears in the press and has lost much of its ability to shock. However, I am old fashioned enough to be able to declare confidently that you will never come across it in Tendring Topics…….on line! 

A Footnote

While I was writing the above I found myself thinking of my father.  He died suddenly of a coronary thrombosis in 1939 at the age of 57.  I was 18 and just in the army at the time.  My father had enlisted in the 17^th Lancers in 1901 when he was 18 and left the army as Regimental Sergeant-Major of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps in 1922 after having completed 21 years service.  At the time of his death he was employed as clerk, dispenser, veterinary nurse and general dogsbody to a local veterinary surgeon.

      As I wrote about the use of bad language by myself and others I realized, with some astonishment, that I had never at any time throughout my childhood and youth heard him swear or use any ‘bad language’. On reflection, I hope that as far as their childhood was concerned, my sons would say the same of me.  How about during the years since their childhood? .............. well they do read this blog, so I had better claim no more than that neither they, nor their mum, were ever either the cause or the  object of any verbal lapses that I may, very occasionally, have had!  

  

Above are pictures of my father - as a staff sergeant before his final promotion to Regimental Sergeant Major and, as I knew him best, a few years before his death.

A Promise Fulfilled (sort of!)

          When, earlier this year, Tendring District Council introduced its new refuse and recyclables collection scheme there was a storm of protest.  Apart from the fact that the new scheme demanded extra effort from householders, there were two main criticisms of the new system.

            One I wrote about in this blog a few weeks ago.  It was that with the new scheme only plastic bottles (milk bottles, cleaning fluid bottles and the like) were collected for recycling.  Plastic bags and wrapping and plastic food containers, that had been collected for recycling under the old regime, now had to be put into our black plastic bags for landfill.  That problem may be solved in a few years’ time when it is hoped that a new plastics sorting centre will be built in the south of the county.

The other criticism was that, presumably to save a few pounds, there were no lids provided for the red boxes intended for the reception of waste paper and cardboard for recycling.  We in Clacton may have the lowest rainfall in the UK but there are still occasions (particularly during this summer!) when the contents of the box could be reduced to a soggy mess.  We do have our fair share of ‘sea breezes’ and these are quite capable of scattering paper from the uncovered red boxes far and wide.

            The justification for this complaint was demonstrated on every breezy collection day, with paper litter bestrewing footpaths and nearby front gardens.  The council promised to do something about it.  And now they have, but in a way that explains my ‘sort of’ in the heading above.   They have obtained a supply of fitting plastic lids for the red paper-and-cardboard boxes but, presumably again to save themselves a few pounds, are not arranging for the refuse/salvage collectors to leave them with householders on their rounds.  The lids are available for householders to collect from centres in the district. We Clactonians can pick one up from the reception desk at Clacton Town Hall.

            That’s fine for car owner/drivers but what about the rest of us?  The lid will hardly go in a shopping basket and, although light enough in weight, isn’t the easiest thing to carry under one’s arm!  Were it not for my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) I would be housebound.  Would I be able somehow to load the lid onto it I wondered.   I asked an anonymous but helpful voice on the phone, ‘Has the council made provision for delivery of lids to the elderly and disabled?’   ‘Only to those who have already made arrangements for their refuse and salvage to be collected from outside their back door’, came the reply. That ruled me out! A kind neighbour puts my plastic sack and salvage boxes out every week.  I had friends whom I was sure would collect a lid for me if asked, but I don’t like taking advantage of their good nature unless absolutely compelled to do so.

            I drove my scooter to the Town Hall.  At the reception desk a very helpful young lady supplied me with a lid and even gave me a tip on how best to transport it (Clacton is a town of mobility scooters and I clearly wasn’t the first with the same problem!).  I got it home safely.

            So – I now have my full quota of refuse and recyclables collection equipment, and hope, with the help of my friendly neighbour, to have my black plastic bag for landfill, my food waste container (never much in that!) and either my red paper-and-cardboard box, or my green plastic-bottles-and-metal-can box at the entrance to my driveway ready for collection early on every Tuesday morning.

Week No 39 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

‘What goes around, comes around!’

 Michael Gove’s idea of an English Baccalaureate having English, Maths and a Science as compulsory subjects, with assessment of pupils dependent upon an examination taken at the end of the years of secondary education, without ‘modules’ and without course-work being taken into consideration, has been condemned by some of its opponents as ‘going back to the ‘80s’.   I would have been inclined to say that it was going back fifty years earlier than that, to the 1930s and would have been inclined to add, ‘and is none the worse for that!’

            I can see little, if any, difference between Mr Gove’s proposals and the examination that I took in 1937 at the age of sixteen, before leaving school at the end of my secondary education   Our exam was not called a Baccalaureate (though I remember our French master telling us that that was the name of the equivalent exam taken by school leavers in France) but the London University General Schools’ Certificate examination.  To gain that certificate we had to study and pass an exam in at least five subjects which had to include English (grammar and literature), Mathematics (arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry) a Foreign Language and a Science.   I think that most of us took six subjects – the only Foreign Language taught at my school was French, and my other subjects were History, Geography and General Physics.  The last of these was reckoned to be the scientific ‘soft option’ as it was guaranteed to be about scientific principles only and to have no mathematical questions! 

The pass mark was 40 percent.  Those who achieved this mark in the four compulsory subjects plus one other, passed the exam and gained the certificate.  Failure in any one of those subjects meant failure in the whole exam.   Those who gained at least 50 percent marks in the compulsory subjects and one other subject, were awarded ‘Matriculation Exemption’.  Matriculation was the admission examination to London University.   We all aimed at ‘the Matric’ (and that’s what the exam was often called) and I was successful.  Very few of us though even considered the possibility of going to London or any other University.  In those days Universities were not for ‘the likes of us’ working class kids.

            Possession of that General Schools Certificate, especially with the added ‘Matric Exemption’ was the key to a ‘white collar’ job and perhaps the first step towards qualifying for a minor profession.  I would certainly not have been appointed to my first job as Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector (nowadays they’re called Environmental Health Officers) with Ipswich Council’s Public Health Department without it.  My school studies had been tilted away from the sciences, but my very creditable pass in ‘General Physics’ helped me secure that job and, many, many years later the basic knowledge of science that I had acquired at school certainly helped me to write half a dozen commercially successful books on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage!

            There are two myths (at least!) about Michael Gove’s proposals that need to be exploded.  The first was one that I heard put forward by a representative of the NUT on tv this (18^th September) morning.  This was that children, having had no previous experience of exams, would be suddenly faced with a vital life-changing one at the age of sixteen.   That simply wasn’t true in the ‘30s and doesn't have to be true today. At the end of every term at my secondary school we had written examinations taken under ‘exam conditions’ in every subject that we had studied. The results of these exams were included in an end-of-term report to our parents.  They also received a half-term report usually based on informal tests to which we had been subjected.  That surely was true ‘continuous assessment’ – and not just the teacher’s opinion.

            At the end of the term prior to taking the General Schools’ Certificate exam we had a ‘mock exam’, usually consisting of questions from previous General Schools’ exams.  From this, pupils, parents and teachers could get a good idea of the likely results in the real examination a couple of months later.

            The second myth is that children would swot away during the months, days, hours, before the final exam and would fill their heads with material that would disappear from their memories within days!

The Stour at Bridge Cottage, Flatford Mill, in the heart of the ‘Constable country’, where we exam candidates relaxed on the day before our exam ordeal began.  Under the wooden foot-bridge can be seen two of the skiffs that our school hired for the day. Bridge cottage once belonged to painter John Constable's father.         

That certainly didn’t happen in my school, the Northgate Secondary School for Boys in Ipswich.  Quite apart from the continuous assessment from end-of-term examinations, our Headmaster (Mr Alfred Morris) had a very strong dislike of ‘last minute swotting’.  He established a tradition that on the day before sitting for the first session of the General Schools’ Certificate exam all candidates would cycle (we all rode bicycles in those days!) from Ipswich to Flatford Mill where we would spend the day boating on the Stour, finally rowing up river to Dedham where we would enjoy a communal tea in one of the restaurants there.  We each took our own packed lunch but the school paid for the hire of the skiffs and for the tea!  Many of us took the exam next day with aching backs and blistered hands but, for all that, the results were usually pretty creditable.

A criticism of Michael Gove’s proposal is that there’s nothing in it for academic ‘low achievers’.   They, so it is said, are set up for failure.   Perhaps so – but if the exam were to be in carpentry or practical electrics, or in any other activity requiring manual dexterity I, and many others like me, would also be set up for failure.  At school my total uselessness at every outdoor game and sport (except swimming) also set me up for failure – and derision! Don’t blame education. Blame a social and economic system that generally rewards ‘white collar activities’ (particularly in the field of finance) much more generously than even the most highly skilled manual work.

I found my secondary education and its culminating examination of great value to me in later life.  My two sons, educated in the ‘60s in the days of ‘O’ levels found the same.  No regular reader of this blog is likely to accuse me of being an uncritical admirer of the present government.  The words mendacious incompetents spring to mind! Nor do I share Mr Gove's enthusiasm for 'academies' and 'free  schools' - free that is from local democratic control, but firmly under the thumb of central government. He who pays the piper calls the tune!'

 I do think though that there is merit in Michael Gove’s plans for secondary education, even if they are nearly eighty years old!   It is strange to find myself on the same side as the Mail, the Sun and the Telegraph rather than the Independent and the Guardian, but there it is.  I remember Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:  ‘This above all, to thine own self be true’. It is advice that I do try to follow.

Policing the Police!

          Overseeing the operation of Britain’s Police Forces at the present moment are Police Committees, thoroughly undemocratic bodies that appear to be answerable to no-one but themselves. They need to be reformed, and since Police Force boundaries generally coincide with those of a local authority (either county or borough council) an obvious solution might have been to hand over their functions to the appropriate local authority.   That however is not the path that the Government has chosen.   They intend to have each Police Force under the wing of a single directly elected Commissioner – to be elected by us on 15^th November of this year!

           These Commissioners, says the government’s official web site, will aim to cut crime and deliver an effective and efficient police service within the force area. They will do this by:

·                            holding the chief constable to account for the delivery of the force

·                            setting and updating a police and crime plan

·                            setting the force budget and precept

·                            regularly engaging with the public and communities

·                            appointing, and where necessary dismissing, the chief constable

It will not be for the PCC to tell the professionals how to do their job - the legislation continues to protect the operational independence of the police by making it clear that the chief constables retain direction and control of the forces officers and staff. The operations of the police will not be politicised; who is arrested and how investigations work will not become political decisions.

            Do you fancy the job?  There’s no mention of the salary on the web site but I reckon it’ll be well worth having!  You’re not eligible if you have ever been convicted of an imprisonable offence, if you are a civil servant or are employed by a local authority in the Police Authority area (for Tendring District residents that means within the county of Essex).  Otherwise the field is open  to any registered voter in that area except that you’ll need to find another 100 registered voters to nominate you and you’ll have to hand over a deposit of £5,000 that will be forfeited if you don’t attract at least 5% of the votes cast.   Candidates may be independent or the nominees of a political party.

            There are currently six prospective candidates for our Essex area, three male and two female, three the nominees of political parties – Conservative, Labour and English Democrat, and three Independents.   Nominations cannot be made before 8^th October or after 19^th October.

            I shall undoubtedly vote, though I’ll need to know a lot more about each candidate before deciding to whom my vote will go. It is unlikely that it will be for one of the party nominees.  I would have preferred the Commissioner to have been advised by a directly elected committee but, since this isn’t going to happen, I shall want him or her to be truly independent; without, for instance, being subject to this kind of pressure: ‘Of course it’s your decision to make, no question about it, but - if you hope to retain Party support when it comes to re-election - you’ll………….

            This November election has a feature that some may find surprising.  You remember that referendum we had last year that firmly rejected the idea of listing parliamentary candidates in order of preference, in favour of ‘one man, one vote’ and ‘first past the winning post wins’?   Well, voting for our Police and Crime Commissioner won’t be on a ‘first past the post’ basis. We are to be invited to indicate our first and second choices, the second choice to be taken into account if the winner doesn’t get an overall majority; much the same, in fact, as the system for which I voted in that referendum but that was decisively rejected by a comfortable majority!

Tendring Topics......on Line

‘Securicor’ to G4S

            In the distant days of the late 1940s, World War II was an all-too-recent memory. My wife and I had married in 1946 and  had not yet started our family. Tony Blair was unborn and New Labour undreamt of.  In politics Left was Left and Right was Right, and Kingsley Martin was Editor of The New Statesman, the leading journal of the ‘intellectual left’.  I was one of its avid readers, on one occasion winning first prize (I think it was all of £5!) in the weekly literary competition.  It was a proud moment.

            The content of one article that I read in the NS at that time has stuck in my memory.  It warned of the danger of private armies growing, competing with, and possibly supplanting, the country’s armed forces and police forces,  ‘Securicor’ was mentioned, a firm of which, at that time, I had never heard.

            I wonder what the author of that article would have said had anyone told him that some sixty years later, Securicor (then providing uniformed protection for cash transfers from banks and similar security operations) would have evolved into G4S an enormous international organisation with its base in Britain but its tentacles world-wide.

              Most people in Britain today probably know of G4S only as the private security firm that signally failed to fulfil a £300 million contact with the government (that actually means with us, the tax payers!) to provide security cover for the London Olympics. They admitted their inability to honour their promises when it was too late to set things right except by dragging soldiers, on leave and war-weary from Afghanistan, and police officers from off their beats, to take their place.   They then had the nerve to demand a £57 million  management fee!

            That is what everybody knows.  What I have learned quite recently, largely from an article by Clare Sambrook in the Friend, a Quaker weekly journal (though I have since confirmed the accuracy of its content on the internet), is that G4S is an international organisation based in the UK now employing 657,000 people in 125 countries!

 ‘Company employees protect oil, gas and mining companies all over the world.   They have served the Israeli prisons service and businesses in the Occupied Territories. For G4S the Arab Spring’s popular uprisings seemed more about business opportunity than democracy.  Last year their executives told shareholders that civil unrest had sparked a rising demand for private security services. In Egypt and Bahrain G4S gained visibility among government heads of security and built the brand.  In Saudi Arabia the company’s support for the regime during popular protests earned local staff, by royal decree, a two-month bonus’.

Clare Sambrook writes that here in the UK, where G4S is based, the company is a leading beneficiary of outsourcing – the transfer of government functions and service provision to the private sector.  Its success is helped by an ability to nurture cosy relationships with ministers and civil servants.  In this year alone G4S will receive more than £1 billion in long-term contracts with the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Work and Pensions and local Police Authorities!

In Britain G4S activities include building and managing prisons, running children’s homes, monitoring tagged offenders, training magistrates and reclassifying benefits claimants.  Lincolnshire is the scene of one of G4S’ most comprehensive outsourcing triumphs.  In that county, they are managing custody suites for the police, dealing with both routine and emergency phone calls and are in charge of firearms licensing and court protection.  They have been commissioned to build and run Britain’s first for-profit police station and they stamp their corporate logo on police staff uniforms!

Simon Reed, vice-chairman of the Police Federation says of ‘out-sourcing’ what I have said over and over again in this blog:  The bottom line is that the priority for private companies will always be shareholders and profit margins.   That is why we have voiced real concerns about the future negative impact of public safety if the government’s drive to privatise mass swathes of policing comes into fruition………..it is very clear that these private contracts are built upon an expectation that the public sector will step in to pick up the pieces if private industry fails to deliver.

When that prophetic New Statesman journalist in the late 1940s warned about Securicor and similar organisations ultimately rivalling and coming into conflict with the police he could hardly have imagined that nearly seventy years later Securicor’s successor would be slowly taking over not only the police but large amounts of Britain’s other vital public services.  Nor that they would be doing so with the connivance of a government blinded by its obsession that private enterprise is always better than public service – a proposition that has been demonstrated time and time again to be untrue.

The Olympic Legacy

          The United Kingdom’s summer of almost unbelievable sporting success is over.  It began with the winning by a British cyclist (for the first time ever) of the Tour de France!   Hot on its heels came the Olympics, which began with an opening ceremony that was acclaimed world-wide, and continued with day after day of successful and extremely watchable, athletic and sporting events from which Great Britain harvested an unprecedented crop of medals.  Although we came third in the ‘medals table’, if we take populations of the leading countries into consideration, we were ahead of both the USA and China!

A vey special Paralympian.  Unable to use his legs from birth, David Weir MBE, has won a total of six gold medals at the Paralympics of 2008 and 2012 and has also won the London Marathon on six occasions! This was surely a triumph of courage and determination over adversity that is an example to us all. David Weir won for Great Britain the very last gold medal for the very last event of the 2012 Olympics

           

The Paralympics that followed were, in their own way, even more successful.  They too had a universally acclaimed opening ceremony.   They were, I believe, watched much more widely than ever before and the spectators’ seats in the Olympics Park and at the other venues were full day after day.  It was perhaps unfortunate that they were available for viewers only on Channel 4 television, where viewers had to endure regular ‘commercial breaks’ for adverts!   Those on the spot cheered with enthusiasm athletes who ran, jumped, swam, rode or manoeuvred their wheelchairs, with disabilities that would have anchored most of the rest of us to our armchairs, if not our beds.

            And then, when it was all over, there was that wonderful ‘Victory Parade’ through the streets of central London before a million cheering spectators.  Among that multitude were my elder son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene who found a vantage point in Trafalgar Square from which they managed to get ‘close-ups’ of some of the athletes we had been cheering on during the games.

            Even that wasn’t quite the end.   As a postprandial treat after a very satisfying meal, we had Andy Murray, who had already achieved a gold medal in the games, win the American Open Tennis Championship – the first Brit to have done so since I was a schoolboy (and that was a long time ago!)   What a wonderful few weeks – even the weather cheered up and smiled on the athletes!  

And after the Games were over?   The example of the athletes and of all those who had striven to make them a success (in particular perhaps the thousands of volunteers who, without hope of either financial reward or Olympic glory, had welcomed visitors, directed, helped and supported them) was supposed to instil us with patriotism, an enthusiasm for personal participation in sports and games, and a new respect for and appreciation of our disabled fellow-citizens.

I think that it has inspired a sense of national pride that revelled in the prowess of our own athletes, but honoured and applauded too the successes of those from other lands.  It was wonderful to see those thousands of red, white and blue flags displayed by Brits of all skin colours and ethnic origin.  They demonstrated that our national flag is not, as it has sometimes seemed in the past, the exclusive property of the White Anglo-Saxon far right!  Perhaps an enthusiasm to follow those Olympians’ example will emerge in due course, but I have seen little evidence of increased respect and understanding of the disabled.  I was shocked to read a headline on one national newspaper announcing that there had actually been an increase in the number of ‘hate crime’ attacks on disabled people.

The government isn’t setting a very good example. They want to encourage public participation in outdoor sports and games – yet all over the country government cuts are doing the reverse.  Cash-strapped local authorities are closing public swimming pools and fitness centres and removing tennis courts from municipal parks and recreation grounds. In Colchester OTT (Opportunities through Technology) is a thoroughly worth-while charity that through the use of technology, helps disabled people to lead independent lives and to find work.   The Gazette records that, ‘as well as finding equipment suitable for each individual’s disability such as specially designed keyboards or computer programmes that read text for blind people, the charity’s technical team have also developed new kit to meet users’ varying physical needs’. All this threatens to end before Christmas unless OTT can find funding to replace the grant of £25,000 a year that has been withdrawn as a result of government cuts.

Then, of course, the government is ending the Disability Living Allowance that enables many disabled people to survive.  Existing recipients of this allowance will be re-assessed (by a foreign corporation to whom the task has been ‘outsourced’!) and may or may not become entitled to a new PIP (Personal Independence Payment).  Small wonder that when Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne had the temerity to visit the Paralympics he was greeted with boos and derision!   

As my son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene followed the Olympics from start to finish and supplied the photographic illustrations to this blog, perhaps Pete should have the last word:

                It occurred to me that we have witnessed talented MPs /ex MPs from both sides of the Commons working together to put on a really excellent show for the whole world, and now we come back to earth and have to witness incompetent amateurs fighting it out for the right to wreck the Economy. I would put Seb Coe and Tessa Jowell in charge of the economy rather than have them bother with the “Legacy”!

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Welcome Northumberlandia!

          Where seams of coal – or other valuable natural material – are close to the earth’s surface, opencast mining provides an inexpensive and relatively safe way of extracting it.  It does leave a ruined landscape though – an enormous hole in the ground and tons and tons of rock, clay and soil ‘spoil’.   There are various ways of dealing with this problem.   Who, for instance, would guess that the delightful lake, venue of every kind of water sport that, on a recent visit, I could see from my bedroom window in the Haus am See Hotel in Olbersdorf in eastern Germany, was once an opencast lignite (‘brown coal’) mine?

            Rather nearer home American landscape architect Charles Jencks has found an even more imaginative way of dealing with the aftermath of opencast mining in Northumberland.  From 1.5 million tons of rock and clay spoil from a local mine he has created the enormous reclining figure of a woman (Northumberlandia!) as the centrepiece of an attractive country park.   The figure is 1,300 ft. long and 112 ft. high at its highest point. The recumbent figure is encircled by carefully planned and sited footpaths. 

She is naked but not, I think, in a way that will cause offence.  She is surely much more attractive than the male figures cut into the chalk hills of the southern shires. Northumberlandia  certainly complements that other iconic local figure, the well-loved Angel of the North.  I am not at all sure, mind you, that this newly arrived curvaceous and very earthy lady is an appropriate companion for an angel.  Perhaps it is just as well that they are a few miles apart and strictly immobile!     Last week, she was officially declared ‘open to the public' by the Princess Royal.  I hope that she, and the country park of which she is the central feature, will attract many visitors.

            My only criticism is of her name.  Northumberlandia surely is a bit of a mouthful for northerners and southerners alike.  I have no doubt that local people will soon think of an appropriate and less long-winded title.  My own suggestion would be Geordina, as a tribute to the nickname by which her fellow northern English are happy to be known?

Some Modern Myths

          A disillusioned blog reader has written to me expressing his disgust at the fact that the then Housing and Local Government Minister Grant Shapps had said in the course of a newspaper interview that Social Housing should be renamed Tax Funded Housing.   He hoped presumably to arouse the resentment of other tax payers. My correspondent points out that Mr Shapps is himself a Tax Funded Minister and that he and all his parliamentary colleagues are tax funded MPs!   Perhaps we should be grateful that the former Minister for Housing and Local Government has been ‘promoted’ (is his new job really more important?) to that of joint Chairman of the Conservative Party.

            The idea that folk in social housing are uniquely supported out of taxation is just one of the modern myths that divide our society.  There is, for instance, a general belief that those in Social Housing are work-shy drop-outs living off the State.  I know from my own experience (and am assured that the situation hasn’t changed materially in that respect) that most tenants either do have a job that pays only the minimum wage or little more, or are pensioners with no capital and no occupational pension.

            There is a similar myth that housing benefit, helping tenants in the private sector, is just for the unemployed.   In fact, a great many claimants are hard working people whose salary is just too low to pay an exorbitant rent, or folk who have retired after having been a shop assistant or something similar all their lives, and who are now surviving on a state pension.

            Finally there is the particularly noxious belief encouraged by the government that all public service workers (including doctors, nurses and ancillary health workers and therapists, fire fighters, teachers, the police and so on) are ‘a drain on the economy, funded by the‘productive’ part of society the ‘private` sector. This, of course includes moneylenders, those involved with the betting ‘industry’, proprietors and employees of escort agencies and massage parlours, beauty and make-up artists.

            My correspondent speculates on how different the world would look if we were all rewarded in accordance with the contribution that we make to society.  Heading the list would be those who produce the food that we eat, the buildings that we live and work in and the clothes that we wear - agricultural workers, builders and factory workers making items that everybody needs. Somewhere in the middle would be those who provide the services that those essential workers and all the rest of us need (most of today’s public services).  Right at the very end would come the makers and vendors of luxury goods, of  designer clothing and of junk food and drinks, together with money lenders, gamblers and those who currently make a fortune by moving money from one account to another - just about a total reversal of the present position in fact!

             That certainly would be the day - and I had thought that some of my ideas were pretty utopian!

This year?..........next year?........sometime?.............    

            When the Tendring District Council introduced its controversial refuse collection/recycling scheme earlier this year there was a storm of angry protest from local householders.   One of the more justified complaints was that in at least one respect, less material was being recycled under the new scheme than had been under the old one.

Those of us who had co-operated with the council’s recycling efforts (there has always been a substantial minority who didn’t!) had put out our green boxes every week with paper and cardboard waste, metal cans of all descriptions and most plastics – including, for instance, plastic bags, yoghurt and margarine containers and other plastic food containers, as well as plastic milk bottles and other plastic bottles used for cleaning fluids and so on, together with our black plastic bag filed with unrecyclable refuse for landfil..   

With the new system was introduced we were all issued with a red box into which we put our waste paper and cardboard to be collected on alternate weeks.  The existing green box was to be used for plastic milk bottles and other plastic bottles only, and was to be put out for collection on the other alternate weeks.  The weekly collection of our non-recyclable rubbish continued under the new system, but we were asked also to put out every week a new locked-lid container with waste food.   Plastic bags and plastic containers other than bottles, which had previously been collected for recycling, now had to go into the black plastic bags for landfill.   These plastic items comprised a considerable proportion of many householders’ refuse.  Failure to collect them for recycling seemed to nullify the whole purpose of the new scheme.

Enquirers at the Council’s offices were told that the Council was aware of this problem and intended to solve it.  In the future there would be a comprehensive collection of plastics.  No date was ever given or suggested but enquirers undoubtedly hoped that this would take place within months, rather than years.

We now know that it won’t!   Tendring Council’s hopes of expanding the present system rest on a new recycling sorting centre to be opened in Basildon.   It will, says the Clacton Gazette recover recyclable materials such as metal, plastic and glass. Work on the new sorting centre hasn’t yet started, but the County Council hopes that it will start sometime in 2013 and will be completed by 2015, still three years away!   It isn’t even quite certain yet that the centre will be started or that, if it is ever in action, it will take plastics not covered by the present scheme.  Tendring’s ‘Cabinet Member for the Environment’, Councillor Nick Turner, is reported as saying, ‘We don’t know the fine details yet, but as far as we are led to believe, we will be able to collect more plastics’.  Oh yes, and the final paragraph of the Gazette’s report tells us that the sorting centre site 'is currently waiting for planning permission!’  This year?...........next year?.........sometime?........never?

‘Lies, damned lies – and statistics!’

In tv interviews I have heard economics expert after economic expert express surprise at the fact that although Britain’s economy is undoubtedly in a double dip recession with no signs of an early recovery, unemployment figures haven’t been rising as one would have expected.  They have either remained static or have fallen slightly.

A study by Sheffield Hallam University led by Professor Steve Fothergill and welcomed by Tendring Council leader Neil Stock suggests that the reason could be that the state of our economy is established by an independent body and is beyond dispute, while the unemployment statistics are based on data selected by the government.   The study finds that unemployment in seaside towns in the south of England is much worse than official figures suggest.  In our own Tendring District of north-east Essex, for example, the government figure for unemployment is 4.2 percent.  The study suggests that the true figure is 9.6 percent, more than twice as high as the official figure, with almost one in ten people out of work.

One explanation of the discrepancy is that since the 1980s successive governments have hidden the real unemployment figures by moving unemployed people onto sickness and incapacity benefit. Now this process is being reversed but there is still a long way to go.  Another factor is the number of unemployed people disqualified from claiming Job Seekers Allowance because they have savings or because they have a partner who is working.

I certainly remember in the 1980s a friend of mine, in his early sixties, who was told that he could draw his retirement pension early if he undertook not to look for work.  Sixty-five year old Peter Bloomfield of Enfield, interviewed by a Gazette reporter, confirmed that this practice of the Thatcher years continued into the Blair governments of the 1990s.  ‘When I was unemployed in the 1990s, they put me onto incapacity benefit, even though I was only unemployed.  I was told that because of my age I wouldn’t find work’.

In conclusion Professor Fothergill makes a point that I have made over and over again in this blog.  ‘Our figures cast serious doubt on the likely impact of  government initiatives such as the Work Programme and Universal Credit, which are founded on the assumption that unemployment can be brought down simply by encouraging the unemployed to look for work.  There has to be jobs for people to go to.

           

           

            

Week 36 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

‘Underneath the Street Lamp…….’

          Last week in this blog I wrote of how a recent photograph of a Red Cross Parcel had brought back memories of my life long ago.  These were reinforced a few days later by a tv interview with Vera Lynne, several years older than me but still very active and living quite near those ‘white cliffs of Dover’ over which her metaphorical bluebirds can now fly freely! No-one, ex-service or civilian, who lived through World War II can ever forget her melodious voice on the radio assuring us all that ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day’ and that some day we and our girl-friends would again be, ‘Arm in arm together, just like we used to be.  Arm in arm with you sweetheart meant all the world to me’.

            I was reminded of another song of World War II that is not primarily associated with Vera Lynne (though she did sing an English paraphrase of it to its by-then-familiar tune)  It is the one song that became popular with the rank and file of the opposing armies.  Originally a German song, loved by the Afrikakorps and broadcast over the German forces radio in occupied Belgrade, it was first ‘captured’ by the British 8^th Army in the North African desert.  I understand that it was equally popular on the Eastern Front and that there was a Russian as well as an English version!

            It was Lili Marlene (the Germans spell her surname Marleen) derived from a poem entitled The Song of the Lonely Sentry’ written  in World War I, about a young woman who stood under the street-light by the gate of the barracks, waiting for her boy-friend to emerge. It did not have a happy ending. Her boy-friend, a young soldier, kissed her ‘beloved mouth’ in his dreams and vowed that when the cold mist of death overtook him he would return to that street-light ‘Wie einst Lili Marleen, Wie einst Lili Marleen’ (‘where once was Lili Marlene, where once was Lili Marlene’).

            It was a universal theme among soldiers of every nation on active service.  We all knew that some of us would never go home to our wives or girlfriends.  Out of my own artillery regiment of some 700 to 800 men, mostly volunteers still in their early twenties, 100 never returned. Needless to say it was not a message that the Nazi authorities wanted spread.  Goebbels tried to ban the song but General Irwin Rommel commander of the Deutsch Afrikakorps, then a popular hero, liked it and his will prevailed.   Its singer though, Lale Andersen, Vera Lynne’s German opposite number, was regarded with suspicion and forbidden to sing her most popular song on the radio.  She remained out of the limelight for the latter part of World War II.

            Browsing the internet with the aid of Google I was astonished to come across a statue of Lili Marlene, standing beneath a street lamp, on the German North Sea Island of Langegoog (according to Google it means ‘Long Island’ in the Platt Deutsch dialect).    It is, in fact, a memorial to singer Lale Andersen who lived for several years on the island and, after her death in Vienna in the 1970’s, was buried there.

            It is a fine and appropriate memorial but I have to say that the  attractive young woman sculpted there isn’t my idea of Lili Marlene.  My wartime memories of both England and Germany suggest that, at that time, no young woman of either country would have dreamed of wearing trousers, particularly on a date. 

Heather Gilbert aged 19, my ‘Lili Marlene’! A photo taken while I was overseas, and posted to me while I was a PoW in Germany.  Note the Royal Artillery Badge brooch which clearly says ‘my boyfriend is a gunner – hands off!’

I have two mental images of the Lili who waited under the streetlamp.  The first is of a young girl still in her teens wearing her best dress, perhaps a little faded after three years of war. Her trusting blue eyes anxiously scan the uniformed figures emerging from the barrack gate for a young man whom she hadn’t known for long but whose life she feels she is destined to share.  Yes, I am thinking of my own girlfriend as she was at that time. I believe that we all, British and German alike, saw something of our own girlfriends in that patiently waiting Lili Marlene!    

The other Lili of my imagination is older – in her early thirties perhaps; quite sure of herself and possibly wearing a well-cut raincoat over a tweed skirt, together with a beret, or perhaps a cap, at a jaunty angle.  She would have a friendly smile for everyone, with a surreptitious wink for one or two favoured ones, and a warm embrace for her evening’s escort.   She is perhaps the more likely Lili Marlene of the two.

            The sculpture is of a charming young lady – quite possibly engaged to an ambitious young lieutenant and destined (though not in those trousers) to grace the officers’ mess, delighting the colonel with her respectful smile and impeccable manners.   I don’t really think though that she would have evoked romantic daydreams in rank-and-file soldiers such as I was.

            She is clearly the sculptor’s vision of Lili Marlene - but she isn’t mine!

Nick Clegg – Champion of the poor?

          That is how he would undoubtedly like to see himself and that is how, before the general election, thousands of misled voters were persuaded to see him.  I was one of them!

            Now he has caused a flutter in the coalition dove-cote by making the suggestion that, on a purely temporary basis, the rich might perhaps be persuaded to make a rather larger contribution to the national economy than they do at present.  This suggestion, timid and half-hearted as it is, comes strangely from a politician who a few months ago raised not a discordant voice when the Chancellor of the Exchequer decided to reduce the tax liability of the very wealthy by lowering the top rate of income tax.

            Even this latest very modest suggestion has provoked a wholly predictable response from Chancellor George Osborne.   We mustn’t try to make the wealthy pay their fair share of the nation’s debt because if we do so they might up sticks and depart elsewhere, taking their wealth with them.   Does he really suggest that wealthy folk have so little patriotism and love of their country that they would desert it for a few extra millions?

I have an abiding memory of hundreds of young British men who, in 1939, voluntarily abandoned their careers for a paltry two shillings (10p) a day, and offered their very lives to their country when it was in peril. I can’t believe that seventy-three years later a substantial number of wealthy Brits would abandon their homeland when it is in economic peril rather than surrender to it a fair proportion of that wealth.  And is it not almost equally incredible that also-wealthy top politicians should consider that behaviour to be perfectly reasonable?  Surely great wealth can’t have quite such a corrupting influence.

Sir Walter Scott asked incredulously. Breathes there a man with soul so dead that to himself he hath not said, ‘This is my own, my native land?’   Today it appears that we could assure him; Well yes, there are quite a few of them.  They have all got a few millions safely tucked away offshore – and they are prepared to live anywhere in the world in order to hang on to every penny of them. Sir Walter concludes in his poem that, if there are any such wretches, they are destined to go to their graves 'unwept, unhonoured and unsung’.  I doubt if that thought bothers them much.

If it is indeed true, then ought not David Cameron and George Osborne be thinking of ways of stemming that defection, instead of simply shrugging their shoulders and regarding it as inevitable?  Is it right for instance, that those who have deserted their country to preserve their wealth, should continue to hold British passports, have the right to vote in our elections, and to enjoy the very considerable privileges of British citizenship?

 Once again I suggest that the main source of our national income should be a ‘citizenship subscription’, of say 20 percent of gross income, levied on every British citizen from the poorest of the poor to the wealthiest of the wealthy!  Then we will value and honour our citizenship and only then will the UK become a true ‘commonwealth’ and politicians be able to claim with truth that ‘we’re all in this together’.