Week 48 30th Nov. 2010

Tendring Topics………on Line

Council Housing – once upon a time!

A job that I thoroughly enjoyed during my long local government career was that of Housing Manager. It was a position that I held in rural Suffolk and later in Clacton-on-Sea. Both Clacton Urban District Council and Gipping Rural District Council (just north of Ipswich) owned and controlled nearly a thousand council properties. I helped the Council with tenants’ selection, oversaw the general management of the housing estates including their maintenance, and tried to keep rent arrears down to a reasonable level. In Clacton, though not in Gipping, rent collection, the only regular direct contact with the tenants, was my direct responsibility

It was a satisfying role. I came to know personally all the housing applicants and a great many of the tenants. I went very thoroughly into the circumstances of every housing applicant so that his or her circumstances could be reported to the Council’s Tenants Selection Committee. Were they overcrowded? Were they compelled to live with in-laws? And what sort of relationship was there between them? Were the premises that they were living in at present damp, or otherwise unfit for habitation or, in the case of a sick or disabled applicant, unsuitable for that particular person? Did they have roots in the area where the houses were becoming available (particularly important in rural communities)? How long had they been trying to get more suitable accommodation?

Neither Clacton nor Gipping had a ‘points system’ of allocation. Had they had such a system it would have made life easier for me – but both Councils felt that no points system could adequately measure housing need. One question that I never asked applicants, and I am glad that I was never required to, was their income. Both Councils allocated houses on the basis of need for housing, neither wealth nor poverty being considered. Obviously it was those on the lower incomes who were most likely to be in need of accommodation – but not exclusively so. The son or daughter of a middle class family might be thoroughly miserable as a result of having to live with their spouse in an in-laws home, and might have a job with a great future – but still be unable to purchase a home, and unable to find anywhere private to let.


Both authorities for which I worked had modest, but steady, annual house building programmes. There were also ‘casual vacancies’ as tenants died, moved away or bought their own homes. This meant that, at least during my period of office both in Gipping and Clacton no-one and no family was ever left completely homeless, nor did we ever have to resort to bed-and-breakfast accommodation to prevent this.

Councils could attract key staff for themselves or for newly establishing enterprises by offering them council accommodation until they were in a position to buy a home in the area. My wife and I lived for a year in a Council House in Thorpe le Soken, and our younger son was born there. We then lived briefly in a Council House in The Chase, Holland-on-Sea before buying the bungalow in Dudley Road, Clacton, where I am typing these words today. There was no question of Council House provision being a ‘social service’, only available to the really needy. There was no stigma – or at least Heather and I never felt one, in being a ‘council tenant’.

39 Byng Crescent, Thorpe-le-Soken. The Council House in which Heather and I lived for a year and in which our younger son Andy was born.

The Council, and I as their agent, encouraged tenants to be proud of their homes. Tenants who wished to carry out, often quite expensive, structural alterations were usually permitted – even encouraged - to do so. We liked them to cultivate and to be proud of their gardens, front and rear. In the Gipping Rural District there was an annual Council house gardens competition which concluded with the Chairman of the Council and the Judges visiting each group of Council Houses and, at a subsequent ceremony, presenting the tenant with the best garden, and the runner up, with prizes. A number of other tenants would receive honourable mentions – all of which would be reported, with pictures, in the local press.

The result was that our Council houses, and our Council estates were a source of pride. A couple of years after I had progressed from being Clacton’s last Housing Manager to Tendring Council’s first Public Relations Officer, I escorted an American visitor, studying British local administration, round the Clacton’s Percy King Estate. He was deeply impressed. ‘Public Housing’ in the USA was not a bit like that, he assured me.

A Post-Shakespearean Sonnet!

It may be thought that I have painted rather too idyllic a picture of Council Houses and Council House Management in the pre-1980s. There were tenants who defaulted on their rent, had quarrels with their neighbours, had late-night parties, lit smoky garden bonfires or otherwise behaved in an antisocial way. There were, no doubt, some local government officials who were cold-hearted, unbending bureaucrats. I hope that I was not among them

Myself as Housing Manager in 1972. I have to concede that I do look like a smooth-tongued bureaucrat as the lady who inspired my sonnet suggested – rather more forcibly!

Certainly, after every meeting of the Council’s Tenants Selection Committee there were bitterly disappointed people with whom I had to deal. An overheard snatch of conversation after just such a difficult interview inspired me to compose a sonnet that I thought might, forty years on, interest blog readers. It represents my first and only attempt at real poetry (as distinct from doggerel to entertain the grandchildren) and it did, many years ago, earn me an ‘honourable mention’ in a regional amateur poetry competition.

After the Interview

‘No, nothing doing yet, “A thousand on the list”,
He says, “Come back in early May”.
Our application “missed
The last committee”. It’s “coming up next time”.
I answered all his questions; gave him proof
We paid the rent, and still had got to quit.
The smooth-tongued sod! He’s never lacked a roof
Over his head! I stripped our marriage bare,
Told him we fight; how Craig and Tracy yell.
Told him about the dampness on the stair,
And in the bedroom. It was wasted breath.
I’d like to see all Council men in Hell!

And that blonde bimbo with her bawling brat,
That lives above the pub – she’s got a flat!’

There was a ‘happy ending’. I am sure that the lady’s opinion of me changed a little two months later, when I was able to offer her husband, her two children (whose names, incidentally, were not Craig and Tracy) and herself, the tenancy of a new three bed-roomed council house.

The Future – Rubbish homes for Rubbish People?

All the above was between forty and sixty years ago. While I was in their employ, both Gipping Rural District Council and Clacton Urban District Council had Conservative majorities, though in those days no councillor was ever expected to follow blindly a ‘party line’ contrary to his or her conscience or common sense. Neither council ever agreed to sell any of their council houses either to their occupiers or to anyone else – although both were asked to do so on a number of occasions.

They both believed that their housing stock was a sacred trust passed on to them by their far-sighted predecessors who were determined that, in their district at least, the aim would always be to have no-one homeless, overcrowded or badly housed – and that there would always been a home, in their local community, for those growing up there. They were determined to expand that legacy and pass it on to their successors.

Right to buy ended all that! In this blog I have already denounced, probably ad nauseum, this 1980s legislation that compelled local authorities to sell off their houses at bargain basement prices - the chicanery of the government that introduced it, (‘buying votes with other people’s money) the cowardice and myopia of the New Labour Government that failed to repeal it.

It is really impossible though to exaggerate its malign effects, some of which have only become evident in recent years. Few, for instance, could have realized at the time of its passing the way in which it would help destroy village communities that had existed for generations. Their council houses were sold on – as second homes or as weekend residences for businessmen and women commuting to the nearest city daily. At the same time, Right to Buy was playing a part in the house price inflation that put new homes beyond the means of ordinary villagers. It also, of course, played a part in the nation-wide borrowing spree that culminated in the financial crisis we are currently struggling to overcome.

The best council houses have long since been sold off to ‘the best’ – or at least the better off – tenants, many of whom have since sold them on at a comfortable profit. There are, as had been eminently predictable – long waiting lists for Council and Housing Association property that show no sign of shortening. The present government’s solution will complete the destruction of ‘social housing’ begun by its predecessors. Council (and presumably Housing Association?) tenancies will, in the future, be of two years duration only. At the end of that period tenants will have their incomes assessed and, if they are deemed to be high enough to permit them to buy or to rent privately, they will be expected to do so. Social housing in the future is to be for the very poor only!

Can you imagine any situation less likely to encourage tenants to cultivate their gardens, decorate their rooms or to take a pride in their homes? All Council Estates will become unredeemable slums. In less than half a century we will have progressed from properties and estates of which local communities could be proud, through second class homes for second class tenants, to rubbish homes for those perceived as rubbish people! There’s progress for you!


We Brits are a rum owd lot!

Only a week, or was it two weeks, ago I was suggesting that our Prime Minister should take a little more care in choosing his advisers. One of them, needless to say someone whom Lady Thatcher would have unhesitating accepted as being ‘one of us’, had announced that despite all the much-publicised cut-backs, most people (I suppose he meant most of the people who really mattered) ‘had never had it so good’.

He resigned his honorary position but I don’t suppose for a moment that he has changed his opinion. Now we have another protégé of the Prime Minister – one destined, on his recommendation, for the House of Lords – assuring us that the exclusion of those paying the higher rate of income tax from child benefit would simply prevent ‘Middle England’ ‘from breeding’, while all those terrible oiks on unemployment benefit would continue to breed like rabbits!

We Brits really are a run owd lot! Wealthy people have to be bribed with millions of pounds to persuade them to give of their best. Poor people have to be threatened with the loss of the little that they have, to persuade them to work at all. Now, it seems, the loss of a few quid threatens the reproductive capacity of the very-comfortably-off!

Week 47.10 23rd Nov. 2010

Tendring Topics……….on Line

Back to the Wild West?

I have always had quite a warm feeling for the Coalition’s Justice Minister, Ken Clarke. I don’t care for his connection with the tobacco industry. Nor do I share his enthusiasm for Formula One motor racing. He does though seem more human than the average politician and (now that smoking has been banned on all railway trains!) I can imagine that he might be a congenial accidental companion on a long rail journey!

I admired his public opposition to the invasion of Iraq against the policy of his own party and that of the government, and his consistently pro-European attitude that lost him the leadership of the Conservative Party and infuriates such Europhobes as our own MP. I agreed too with his contention that short prison sentences are more likely to lead to relapses into crime shortly after release than to the reformation of the criminal.

I even found it in me to feel sorry for him as he broke the news that the government, rather than defend protracted civil law suits, was paying thousands of pounds in compensation to prisoners and ex-prisoners who alleged that they had been tortured with British connivance. Clearly he had had nothing to do with the interrogations at which the alleged torture had taken place and I doubt very much if he had made the decision to pay out generous compensation.

His arbitrary cutting of legal aid though, was surely a step to far. Find ways of eliminating frivolous law suits by all means. Limit the fees of barristers and reduce the salaries of judges. Reduce the time wasting involved in any legal action. But to make British justice inaccessible to the poor and underprivileged, the very people who most need its protection, is surely inexcusable.

Think particularly of the position of vulnerable spouses and innocent children where marriages or partnerships have broken up and child custody is involved. Those who cannot afford the services of a barrister (a very large proportion of those concerned!) will be denied the judgement and protection of the law. I foresee an increase in cases of domestic violence, of child abuse, of child abduction and kidnapping – perhaps of children being transported, against their will and against the will of ‘the other parent’, to distant lands where customs, cultural and moral values, and human rights are very different from our own.

Nor does it seem likely that the police will any longer be readily available to protect the vulnerable. The maintenance of law and order has always been in the forefront of Conservative Policy. The Party’s members yearn for a return of the days when ‘the policeman on his beat’ was a symbol of the availability of the enforcement of the law and struck terror into the hearts of vandals, hooligans and petty criminals.

That, I fear, is something that under the present government, they are not going to get! Police Authorities all over the country are cutting their budgets. This means that they are not going to maintain even their present standard of policing, never mind improving it. Manchester for instance, not exactly a crime-and-problem- free city, is cutting its police budget by 25 percent. There is no way in which ‘front line’ police services will be maintained after a cut of that magnitude. One might almost imagine that our prison population had already been enfranchised and that the coalition was angling for the ‘criminal vote’! They are certainly creating a brighter future for professional criminals, if for nobody else.

I hope that members of the government aren’t imagining that David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ volunteers will step into the law-and-order breach. It is easy to imagine our country descending into lawlessness resembling that of America’s 19th century Wild West. It certainly won’t be put right by issuing enthusiastic vigilantes with ‘Deputy Sheriff’s stars’, forming them into a posse, and encouraging them ‘to leap onto their mustangs and head off them goldarned thieving rustlers (or whatever) at the pass’

The World of the 1930s

Have you been watching Turn back Time: The High Street, on BBC1 tv on Tuesday evenings? They have been ‘re-creating’ a small-town High Street at various periods of its history. Last week’s (on 16 November) was of particular interest to me as a shop in Clacton’s Pier Avenue – not that you would have recognised it! – was one of the businesses re-created. The date of re-creation was 1938 and it was supposed to be typical of the 1930s generally.

Me (left), about 1935, with cousin Ron from London. Ron and I were good friends and occasionally got into terrible trouble together.

In 1930 I was ten years old and moving from primary to secondary school. In 1939, before my 18th birthday, I joined the Army as a Territorial volunteer. The ‘thirties were a decade in which I progressed from childhood through teenage to being almost-an-adult. It was a period in which I left school, started work and joined the army. In 1939 (on the day World War II broke out) I met the girl to whom I was destined to be happily married for sixty years. I well remember those fateful ten years; remember them better, in fact, than the events of yesterday or of last week!

Myself in February or March 1939. Not yet 18, I had volunteered to be a spare-time soldier in the Territorial Army

As so often happens when I watch a documentary or drama set in the ‘30s or ‘40s (Foyle’s War was an exception), they never seem to get the atmosphere or the details quite right.

The High Street grocer in the programme had a very large stock of sweets in jars and these really seemed to be a considerable part of his trade. In 1938 I had progressed beyond sweets and was into fags! In earlier years though my mates and I would never have dreamed of going to a High Street grocer for our sweets. They had them, of course, but they’d have been expensive and the, to us posh, grocers wouldn’t have welcomed unaccompanied ‘scruffy kids’ into their shops To get the most out of our ha’pennies and pennies we’d go to the back-street and corner shops – often the front room of a terraced house well stocked with a few cheap but popular sweets which were sold at a tiny profit to bring the ‘shop keeper’ a few inches above the poverty line.

Heather and I when we first met in September 1939. I was in the army but preferred to wear ‘civvies’ to take my new girlfriend to ‘the pictures’.

High Street Grocer’s shops I remember for their distinctive smell – a blend of the aromas of cheese, ham, tea and coffee; and for the wonderful slicing machines with which they’d cut perhaps just two or three slim slices of ham exactly to customer requirements, and the thin wire with which they would cut huge cheeses into manageable pieces. Then there were the wooden paddles used to shape pounds or half-pounds of butter or lard, and the scoop for flour, sugar or tea – all sold loose and packed into paper bags of course. Selling Groceries in those days was a skilled job, very different from getting packets off a shelf!

Another matter that on the tv programme certainly wasn’t as I remembered it, was the preparation for a street party held on Empire Day (24th May). We did remember Empire Day of course but it wasn’t a public holiday and, it was just an ordinary workday for most people. At school things were different. In my primary school I remember that we marched round the playground and saluted the Union Jack that fluttered proudly overhead. At Assembly the headmaster would pray for the Empire and its people and we would sing patriotic hymns and songs.

At my Secondary School we didn’t do any saluting but we too had a ‘patriotic’ assembly with a brief history lesson about The Empire and we always sang Kipling’s Recessional. As we cheerfully sang ‘Our faded pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre’ we little thought that fifty years on that prophecy at least would be fulfilled – and that most of us would then think that that was a good thing. Also on that day we always had a guest speaker – from India, New Zealand, Southern Rhodesia or some other outpost of Empire – who would tell us about the great careers that beckoned ‘out there’ to ambitious young men prepared to carry the white man’s burden and help the natives toward civilisation. There were certainly no street parties or all-age celebrations.

Despite these reservations I did enjoy last Tuesday’s Turn Back Time. It was an interesting programme that stirred a few memories for me, and would have given younger viewers at least a flavour of the time. I am glad that I watched it.

Never had it so good?

David Cameron really should choose his advisors more wisely. He surely has already enough very-comfortably-off upper middle class folk around him to be well aware of how they are enduring his efforts to solve Britain’s financial problems. What he badly needs is a few opinions from the real world of shabby streets with broken paving stones and obscene graffiti, of crowded and unreliable public transport, of job insecurity, a struggle for survival for the sick and disabled, and of Saturday night binge drinking for the young.

Lord Young, one of David Cameron’s closest advisors, really put his foot in it when he echoed a former Prime Minister who had announced, with a great deal more justification than Lord Young, that most people ‘had never had it so good!’ This confirmed my own opinion, that of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of every truly independent observer, that it is the poor and the vulnerable who are suffering the pain imposed by attempts to remedy Britain’s economic problems, while those likely to be in Lord Young’s social circle have not suffered even the mildest inconvenience.

There’s one little matter of fact on which Lord Young – and a great many other people – need to be corrected. Home owners (and I am among them!) do not benefit from low mortgage interest rates. We have paid off our mortgages and have, for the most part, put our subsequent savings into accounts administered by the same banks or building societies that had formerly loaned us the money for our home purchase. We are now seeing our hard-earned savings diminish in value as inflation outpaces the miserable amount of interest paid on these accounts.

Those who do at present benefit from the low interest rates, are the home buyers who are paying off their mortgages. They should make the most of that advantage because, as they will find out soon enough that if circumstances compel them to default on their repayments, the bank or building society is the true owner of their home. What is more, house prices are now falling. If they are now compelled to sell, they risk losing not only their homes but much of the money that they have already paid off their mortgages.

Footnote: I wrote the above before Lord Young resigned his honorary office of adviser to the Government. When I heard that he had done so I was considering erasing it. Then I heard on BBC Radio 4, David Mellor who served with Lord Young in a Thatcher government, strenuously defending his former colleague and castigating David Cameron for having had the impudence to rebuke him. It was obvious to me that although Lord Young had departed, his spirit was still among us. My comments remain unchanged!

Week 46 10 16th Nov. 2010

Tendring Topics………on Line

Full Marks for Ingenuity!

I have to give Britain’s coalition government full marks for ingenuity. The announcement of their new ‘workfare’ idea revealed true genius. Originating, as I suppose we might have guessed, in the USA, it means that people on benefit who are considered capable of any sort of work (never mind the fact that there may not be any appropriate work for them) will lose some of their meagre allowance unless they undertake ‘voluntary work’ for the community. The tv image of a ‘benefit volunteer’ happily swabbing hospital floors in a tv news bulletin revealed the true brilliance of the scheme.

In order to achieve the cuts demanded by central government, local and other public authorities, and managers of large private institutions, are having to ‘downsize’, ‘rationalise’, or ‘re-evaluate their human resources’, or whatever else may be the current fashionable euphemism for sacking some of their staff. Among those sacked will be computer programmers, draughtsmen, and other holders of jobs demanding skill, long training, and experience. There will also be holders of menial jobs – cleaners, porters, gardeners and so on. But floors will still need to be cleaned and rubbish cleared away, trolleys pushed from one place to another, hedges trimmed, lawns swept clear of leaves, vehicles hosed down, and so on.

That’s where those happy, smiling volunteers appear on the scene. ‘Menial tasks’ (I quote a government spokesman) that had been undertaken by employees on at least the minimum wage, will now be carried out by ‘volunteers’ regardless of their professional skills and experience, for a benefit guaranteed to be lower than the pay obtainable by anyone ‘in work’. Further cuts will ensure a never-ending supply of such cheap labour. This is called ‘encouraging the workless (and by implication the work-shy) back into work!’

Not even the most hard-nosed owners of Blake’s ‘dark, satanic mills’, of the early nineteenth century could have dreamed up a better way of obtaining cheap labour!

The Chinese ‘Secret Weapon’

No, there’s no cause for alarm. It’s not that kind of a weapon and it is not in the possession of the present or any likely future Chinese government, but of the ethnic Chinese whether they live in mainland China, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan or in London. It is a weapon that hurts no-one and is available to us all if we wish to have it. It is, I am convinced, of immense value to those who possess it, yet in Britain in recent years, fewer and fewer people seem to appreciate this.

It is a thirst for and a deep appreciation of the value of education. I first became aware of this as a result of emails from my grandson Chris who teaches English both to young children and adults in Taiwan, after having first done this in mainland China. We had been reading in our British newspapers about rising truancy in British schools, disrupted classes, violence toward teachers, and children who expected to be rewarded for simply turning up regularly and refraining from disruptive behaviour. Chris, on the other hand, was telling me about children eager to learn, and to please and earn the praise of their teachers, and of parents who gladly offered co-operation and respect to those who were helping their offspring to ‘get on in the world’.
Chris (at the back on the right) with some of his colleagues

It seems that this attitude towards education is to be found in Chinese worldwide. My younger son Andy (when one is old, how helpful it is to have eyes and ears elsewhere than in Clacton!) sent me a press cutting from the Guardian about the prowess of British Chinese in the field of education.

Nationwide in 2009, 26.6 percent of pupils eligible for free school meals (children from poorer families) achieved five or more GCSE grades (including maths and English) between grades C and A*. British Chinese children who were also eligible for free meals achieved 70.8 percent. Overall there was a wide attainment gap between children from the poorest and those from the better-off children. Among the Chinese, the gap between that of the children of the wealthy and the poor was just two percent. The Chinese poor are obviously just as keen as the wealthy to further their children’s education. So it is for young people and adults. British Chinese people of school-leaving age and over, are four times as likely to be full-time students as the rest of us.

The explanation, the Guardian reporter was told, was that with the Chinese, ‘education isn’t just desirable; its an obsession. Parents don’t just want their children to do well; they assume a ferocious duty to make it happen. Young children know that they have to study hard not to disappoint parents. The children have their own incentives too. A lot grow up in restaurants and want a different life for themselves. They work ten times as hard. Customers see the front of the restaurant. They don’t see the son or daughter of the proprietor bent over homework on a little table somewhere in the rear, under the occasional watchful eye of an adult’.

I dare not think what a twenty-first century British ‘educationalist’ or child psychiatrist would think of it all. I have little doubt though that it is dedication of this kind that will produce Britain’s leading lawyers, doctors, scientists and top politicians of the future.

'Thank you My Lord Archbishop'

It is always very pleasant to have our ideas, particularly when they are a little controversial, endorsed by someone for whom we have the greatest admiration and respect. I was delighted therefore to note that my concern about the effects of the government’s cuts on the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society are shared by no less a person than Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and head of the Church of England and of the Anglican Church world-wide.

Not only did he endorse my general concern on this subject. He also referred to a matter that hadn’t occurred to me but had been raised by my son Peter in his letter to his Lib. Dem. MP; the fact that capping housing benefit at £400 a week would have the effect of driving all but the very-comfortably-off out of city centres, particularly out of central London.

A glaring example of this was recently illustrated in Metro, the London free newspaper. A two-bedroomed council flat in London’s Elephant and Castle area (a traditionally working class neighbourhood) had been sold to an existing tenant under the infamous ‘right to buy’ legislation. It had subsequently been resold and was now advertised to let – at £500 a week! Here was a property that had been provided by local taxpayers at public expense to house working people. It was now being made inaccessible to the people for whom it had been intended. It could however be expected to make a comfortable profit for its now-private owner.

Needless to say, the Archbishop’s warning was greeted with derision by the popular press. In the columns of the Sun the Archbishop was described as ‘a chump’ and his words as ‘Bish-bosh*’. I don’t imagine that Dr Rowan Williams was greatly concerned. He was the latest in long line of spiritual leaders who have dared to criticise established authority, ranging from the Old Testament prophets through St Thomas a Becket, one of Dr Rowan Williams’ distinguished predecessors, and Fr. John Ball of Colchester, a leader of the Peasants Revolt, to the martyred Archbishop Romero of Costa Rica, Sheila Cassidy who endured torture at the hands of the henchmen of General Pinochet of Chile and later became a nun, Trevor Huddlestone, Archbishop of Mauritius and the Indian Ocean, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.

We hear a great deal in the press about ‘The Christian Religious Right’ particularly in the USA (Sarah Palin and her ‘Tea Party’ friends for instance). It is good to be reminded from time to time that there is, and always has been, a Christian Religious Left and a Christian Religious Centre, and that among their leaders have been men and women of renowned courage and spirituality!

*The Sun tries desperately hard to speak the language of the English Working Class of whom it aspires to be the voice. It never quite succeeds. When, for instance, did you last hear anyone wearing workman’s overalls describe a stupid person as ‘a chump’ or his utterances as ‘bosh’?

Week 45.10 9th November 2010

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Worse than heroin?

The official claim that alcohol does more harm to individuals and to society than heroin and cocaine, must have come as something as a shock to a great many of us. There have always, of course, been a number of drunks and alcoholics who wrecked their own lives and those of their immediate families. However, until the Government relaxed the licensing laws ‘so that we could learn to drink sensibly like our continental neighbours!’ one rarely, if ever, saw anyone visibly drunk in a town centre. The idea of groups of young people, mostly under 20, going out together at weekends and drinking for no other purpose than to get drunk, was totally alien.

Now, we have all become accustomed to tv news bulletins of the Police trying to clear the streets of drunken, abusive and violent teenagers, often fighting each other after binge drinking on a Friday or Saturday night. Even more disquieting is the news that, at weekends, the treatment of victims of genuine accidents in Hospital Accident and Emergency Departments is often delayed while professional staff deal with the out-of-control subjects of self-inflicted alcohol poisoning. Nowadays too, no one is particularly surprised to see someone lurch unsteadily out of a pub doorway at three o’clock in the afternoon!

Recently I saw a number of tv documentaries about the way in which some – I am sure a small minority – of teenagers abuse their bodies and shorten their lives as they pursue ephemeral pleasure through promiscuous sex and unrestricted consumption of alcohol. A nineteen year old diabetic girl, who had been brought into hospital (not for the first time!) unconscious and suffering from alcohol poisoning summed up the attitude of ‘a lost generation’ by announcing after she had regained consciousness ‘I’m gonna do what I wanna do when I wanna do it’.

It is, no doubt, shaming incidents like these that have led to the conclusion that alcohol is more dangerous than heroin and cocaine. It takes no account of other equally valid images of working men chatting companionably with their mates over a friendly evening or weekend pint, of a bottle of wine broached and shared at a celebratory meal, or of elderly pensioners (I can’t be the only one!) sipping a nightcap of watered down whisky while watching a tv programme before going to bed. We are urged ‘to drink responsibly’ and tens of thousands of us do just that. Neither heroin nor cocaine ever is, or can be, used moderately, companionably and responsibly.

I think it very unlikely that announcing that alcohol does more harm than heroin or cocaine will turn a single heavy drinker into a moderate one, much less a teetotaller. What it very probably will do is to produce more junkies drawn into drug abuse by the whisper; ‘Come on, try it. There’s nothing else quite like it, and - haven’t you heard? – it is now officially recognised as being less harmful than alcohol.

‘Kick away the ladder – I’m safely up it!’

Every current Member of Parliament who holds a University Degree had his or her University tuition fees paid by the state. Those whose parents might have had difficulty maintaining them during their time away from home, received a generous grant towards their living costs. They wouldn’t have had to be desperately poor to qualify for such a grant. I was a middle rank council official in 1971 when my elder son was offered a place at Cambridge. The County Council, as Education Authority, paid half the estimated cost of his maintenance. The other half was the ‘parental contribution’ paid by me.

These are facts that should be written in letters of fire in the House of Commons when those same MPs are deciding to limit undergraduate living grants only to ‘the very needy’ and raise the sum that Universities can charge students for their tuition fees to as much as £9,000 a year! It’s a policy which, in the army we used to describe as, ‘Up ladder Jack!’ shorthand for ‘Kick away the ladder Jack, I’m safely up it!

Nowadays students are expected to recognise and repay the advantage that a University degree gives them in the jobs market. They can obtain student loans to cover living costs and tuition fees, which they repay by instalments once their income rises above £21,000 a year. This means that graduates typically begin their working lives with a burden of debt in the region of £20,000. With increased tuition fees, that sum is clearly destined to increase, probably to double, in the future.

My wife Heather and I had been brought up in working class homes with a horror of debt. Had the situation been the same in the 1970s as it is today, we certainly wouldn’t have encouraged our offspring to aspire to a university education.

The present government complains repeatedly (and probably with good reason) about the burden of debt imposed on us all by the policies of their predecessors. How extraordinary therefore that they should be cheerfully transferring some of that burden to the individual shoulders of the very gifted young people on whose skills we are relying to get us out of this crisis brought about primarily (let us never forget) by the avarice and incompetence of our financial services and the short-sightedness of our politicians.

How should the situation be dealt with? We could bear in mind that a university degree hasn’t quite suddenly conferred on its possessors an unfair advantage in the jobs market. Those graduate MPs were undoubtedly helped in their political careers by their university successes. So were most successful bankers, businessmen and women, captains of industry, and high flying civil servants

Why shouldn’t they begin, however belatedly, to repay the unfair advantage that they have had over their less fortunate fellow men and women. And what about those who, by the accident of birth, followed their parents into privileged positions? Being the son or daughter of a Press Lord, a merchant banker or the head of an international corporation confers an advantage far greater than that enjoyed by even the most distinguished scholar.

A properly graded (and loophole free!) income tax system would solve this problem, and give the wealthy the opportunity to bear their fair share of the national burden. No one would be asked to pay a penny more than they could afford and it might have been thought that our MPs would sleep more soundly at night in the knowledge that they were no longer imposing on others a burden that they themselves were not bearing.

But that is the one remedy that so far has never been seriously considered!

A footnote

Did you see that the new head of one of our Banks is to have an annual salary of £1 million, plus estimated bonuses of £2 million? It was explained that the justification for this was that the bank had to secure the very best for the post. It is a poor outlook for Great Britain and indeed for the world, when the very best in any field of human activity, can be obtained only by offering bribes on this scale.

Many of those whose memory we shall be honouring in churches and at war memorials next Sunday (14th November) lost their lives, the most precious thing that they possessed, for as little as ‘two bob a day*!

A week or so ago I quoted the refrain from one of Bob Dylan’s popular ‘protest’ songs of the ‘60s – ‘The answer is blowing in the wind’. Here’s a refrain from ‘Where have all the flowers gone’, another popular protest song of that period. It seems particularly relevant to the matter of bankers’ monetary rewards:

‘When will they ever learn, Oh, when will they ever learn!’ When indeed?

*‘two bob’ (two shillings or 10p) a day was a private’s – or gunner’s - pay when I was called up into the army in 1939. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I it was one shilling (5p) a day.

Name Calling!

Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have referred to England as ‘Perfidious Albion’. I suppose therefore that our neighbours across the Channel can’t complain too bitterly at being described by Bernard Jenkin, Conservative MP for Harwich and North Essex (whose judgements don’t have quite the same weight as Napoleon’s) as the Duplicitous French. Criticising the Government’s decision to share some defence facilities with the French, he is reported as having said ‘We need to recognise France has never shared, and is never likely to share, the same strategic priorities as the UK. There is a long track record of duplicity on the French part’.

David Cameron’s grasp of twentieth century history seemed a little shaky when he asserted (and was quickly corrected!) that Britain was the ‘junior partner’ of the USA in the struggle against Hitler in 1940. It seems that Mr Jenkin’s grasp is even shakier. I would have thought that French sharing with us the carnage on the Western Front of World War I indicated a certain unity of purpose with the UK. The USA, whom I imagine Mr Jenkins does regard as a reliable ally, took part only in the final year of the struggle. Then again, Britain with the Commonwealth, and France were alone among the world’s nations in declaring war on Hitler’s Germany when the Nazis invaded Poland. Hitler had not directly attacked either country but both believed that destroying Nazi Germany was ‘a shared strategic priority’. The USA? They joined in only when Hitler declared war on them in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Duplicitous? Well – the French did supply the Exocet missiles that the Argentines used with murderous effect on our Naval Task Force, but then we had trained some of the Argentine troops who had invaded the Falklands. They didn’t know that it was to be against British ships that those Exocets would be used - any more than when we helped train the ‘gallant and freedom-loving Mojihadin’ to kill and maim Soviet troops, had we known that those heroic Mojihadin were to become the fanatical Taliban using the skills we had taught them, to kill our troops!

The French did have the independence and force of character to resist being drawn into an illegal war in Iraq which, as well as costing thousands of lives and ruining the country's infrastructure, has done more to recruit volunteers to Islamic terrorism than any number of inflammatory sermons could ever hope to do. Come to think of it, wasn’t it just a little duplicitous to persuade British MPs to vote for war against Iraq by convincing them of that country’s non-existent links with international terrorism and its imaginary weapons of mass destruction?

Christmas Stamps

The celebratory Postage stamps for Christmas 2010 are now available in Post Offices. The secular stamps feature Wallace and Gromit, and very cheery and colourful they are.

However for those of us who like our Christmas greetings to be carried in an envelope with a stamp bearing a relationship to Christ’s Nativity, the very attractive 1st and 2nd Class Madonna-and-child stamps, that have been available for the past two years are available again. You do have to ask for them specifically though. At my branch Post Office the usually-very-helpful lady behind the counter looked at me in total astonishment when, after enquiring about Christmas stamps, I added that I would like the religious ones. ‘You mean you don’t want the Wallace and Gromit ones?’ she asked incredulously. ‘That’s right’, I said, ‘I believe that there are some 1st and 2nd Class Virgin-and-child stamps available. Those are the ones I want please’. Clearly taken aback, she disappeared into a back room for several minutes, and emerged bearing some sheets of the stamps I wanted in her hands.

She was even more astonished when I asked for quite a lot of each denomination. I could almost read the thoughts going through her head. ‘The poor old chap’s really off his rocker this time. He can’t possibly be sending off that number of Christmas cards and letters. Ought I to take his money?’ She was, of course, quite right about that. I don’t send off that amount of Christmas post. However I do like to use those stamps throughout the year as a quiet and unobtrusive affirmation of Christian Faith. I think that the supply that I bought last Christmas lasted me through to mid-October!

Oh yes, and they can prove a worthwhile investment too. When, as happened this year, the price of stamps goes up, First and Second Class stamps retain their value, whatever may have been their price at the time of purchase!

Week 44.10 2nd November 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘In winter I get up at night, and dress by yellow candle light……
……..In summer, quite the other way. I have to go to bed by day’

So wrote Scottish poet and author Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his poems for children. Last Saturday evening (30th October) we put our clocks back an hour, giving us all an extra hour in bed, and bringing nightfall an hour earlier into the afternoon – a process that will continue inexorably until just before Christmas.

We can’t do anything about the period of daylight each day shortening in the winter and lengthening again with the spring and summer. We can though decide for ourselves how to alter our activities – ruled by our clocks – to make the most of what daylight there is. Is it more helpful to have the longer period of daylight in the afternoon and evening, or first thing in the morning? In the summer we have no doubt about it. Most of us don’t want broad daylight at 4.00 a.m. but we do appreciate the ability to work or enjoy outdoor leisure activities in the summer evenings, so we put our clocks forward an hour, bringing daylight an hour later in the morning and putting off dusk until between 9.00 p.m. and 10.00 p.m. in May, June and July.

At the end of October we put those clocks back an hour to Greenwich Mean Time. Darkness, often enhanced by leaden overcast skies, advances into mid-afternoon.

During World War II every minute of daylight counted – especially for those working on the land. We put our clocks forward two hours in the summer (Double Summer Time) and brought them back just one hour to what we now call British Summer Time, in the winter. I remember when I returned from Germany in 1945 finding that it was still light at 10.30 p.m. in June!

After the war we experimented with British Summer Time throughout the year, from 1968 till 1971, but in 1972 reverted to British Summer Time in the summer months and Greenwich Mean Time in the winter. Attempts have been made to bring back the wartime Single and Double Summer Time but all have so far failed. This year though the idea has been revived and is thought to have a reasonable chance of success. We are again in crisis and once again we need every minute of daylight we can get both for work and leisure. In addition, it has been calculated that with lighter evenings, less energy will be used, and as there would be a lighter ‘rush-hour’ there would be fewer road accidents and fewer casualties. Children would be safer coming home in daylight throughout the year.

Strongest opposition comes from Scotland where it is pointed out that children would be going to school in darkness as it wouldn’t get light there till as late as 10.00 a.m. There’s nothing that can be done about the fact that the further north you are, the shorter is each winter’s day and, conversely, the longer each summer’s day. If the Scots prefer children to come home, rather than go to school, in darkness it would surely be possible to make Scottish school hours from 10.00 a.m. till 5.00 p.m. instead of 9.00 a.m. till 4.00 p.m. Could it be that last Saturday was the very last time that we shall have to put our clocks back to Greenwich Mean Time?

'Never mind the offender. Let’s punish the whistle-blower?’

Years ago, when I was Clacton’s Housing Manager, the usual initial response of any Council tenant about whom a complaint had been made, was not to deny or justify his or her activities but to demand indignantly ‘Who told you that?’

It seems that much more distinguished people react in precisely the same way when their actions, or their failure to take action, are revealed to the public gaze. Thousands of documents, leaked from British and American Forces operating in Iraq and recently published by Wikileaks, revealed that captured Iraqi insurgents had been handed over to their compatriots in the knowledge that they would be mistreated or tortured, and that on at least one occasion Iraqi insurgents trying to surrender had been gunned down by a US helicopter gunship. It has been upon Wikileaks, and upon the news media publishing the content of the leaked material, that the wrath of the Establishment, particularly in the USA, has been focussed (‘Arrest Wikileaks’ head and try him for treason!’ was the predictable demand of some right-wing Republicans).

Wikileaks is accused of being unpatriotic. Its revelations would assist El Quaida and similar organisations in their recruiting campaigns. I suppose that they might have done so had not the insurgents already been well aware of what was going on. Unless we really believe that not one of the victims of this misuse had ever been released or had escaped, the insurgents are sure to have known what was happening – and will have already used it in their recruiting campaigns. Had they told us about the abuse we would simply have denounced the revelation as lying propaganda.

It is those who committed these war crimes and those who failed to seek out and punish the perpetrators, who have endangered the lives of our troops. It is they who have encouraged recruitment to the insurgents and the terrorists. It is significant that, in all the thousands of words condemning the whistle blowers, there has not been a single suggestion that the accusations are untrue.

Although the focus of the press has been on the misuse of prisoners and the slaughter of insurgents trying to surrender, a very large number of cases of ‘friendly fire’ also feature in the leaked papers. Between 2004 and 2006 United States and other coalition forces mistakenly attacked British forces on at least eleven occasions. Attempting to overtake US vehicles appears to have been a particularly hazardous venture. Early in 2004 three British vehicles overtook some Czech trucks near the Kuwait border and found themselves held up by a slow-moving American convoy. Attempting to pull out and overtake they were threatened by a US soldier with a heavy machine gun! This happened three times despite the clearly visible British military number plates on their vehicles. Later in the same year British vehicles were fired on in the same area and under similar circumstances, on three occasions from American convoys and once from a Bulgarian one.

It seems that ‘our boys’ in Iraq learned to regard these attacks from their allies with true British phlegm. In February 2005 a report from a three-vehicle British convoy about being strafed by an American gunner, concluded laconically, ‘both convoys continued on their journeys without stopping’.

Friendly Fire!

The ‘friendly fire’ revealed by Wikileaks seems, thank goodness, to have been remarkably ineffective. Perhaps itchy trigger fingers tend to be on shaky hands! Sadly, not all friendly fire is like that. There have been far too many incidents – culminating in the recent death of the kidnapped Aid Worker killed in a bungled rescue attempt – in which soldiers and innocent civilians have been killed by bombs, shells or bullets from their ‘own side’. Nor is it purely a recent phenomenon.

Thursday of next week (11th November) is what we used to call ‘Armistice Day’ when, at eleven in the morning (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) in 1918, the guns of World War I were silenced and four years of unparalleled carnage came to an end. On the following Sunday (14th Nov.) at War Memorials and in places of worship throughout our land, we shall be remembering and honouring the memory of those in the forces who lost their lives in two world wars, and in the armed conflicts that have gone on and continue to go on, ever since. A verse from Laurence Binyon’s To the Fallen will be recited again, and again, and again, together with the sounding of The Last Post, a verse and a trumpet call that never fail to stir the emotions of any old soldier – including myself.

They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Well, I am one of those who were left. I have grown old, age has wearied me – and I do remember them.

There were between seven and eight hundred of us in the 67th Medium Regiment RA. We were all young men mostly between eighteen and twenty-five, from Ipswich and the coastal area of East Suffolk who – with patriotic fervour – had volunteered for the Territorial Army when war threatened. We had been called up for full-time service on 2nd September 1939, the day before Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. One hundred of us were destined never to see Suffolk again.

On 21st June 1942, after six months almost continuous action in the Egypt/Libya border area, we were over-run in Tobruk by the tanks of Rommel’s Afrikakorps and ordered by our garrison commander to put our guns out of action, burn our vehicles and surrender to the Germans. I remember as we walked disconsolately along the desert track to the prisoner of war ‘cage’, a German soldier called out (a little enviously I thought!), ‘Hey Tommy, cheer up. For you zee war iss ovair’. Little did he, or we, know that we were all just entering the most perilous part of our army careers.

We had had battle casualties of course, but not very many considering how much action we had seen. By far the majority of those one hundred fatal casualties occurred after we had been taken prisoner. We lost a few in a diphtheria epidemic in a transit prison camp near Benghazi. We lost rather more of starvation related disease in vast prisoner of war concentration camps in Italy. One or two died in industrial accidents in working camps, at factories and on railway sidings in Germany, several, who had found themselves in POW camps in Poland, died of hunger and exposure as they were marched westward during the bitter winter of 1944/’45 to avoid their being liberated by the inexorably advancing Soviet Army.

No less than half of my regiment’s casualties though died as a result of ‘friendly fire’. In November 1942, as PoWs, they were loaded onto the Italian steamer SS Scillin in Tripoli Harbour, to be transported to prison camps in Italy. Halfway across the Mediterranean the Scillin was torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine! The fifty from the 67th Medium Regiment RA were by no means the only PoWs on board the ill-fated vessel. A very few were rescued by the submarine but some 680 British and South African prisoners were drowned by ‘friendly fire’ that day.

I survived all those perils and have lived to remember fallen comrades whose graves are to be found in North Africa, throughout Italy and Central Europe, and others who have no grave but the ocean. I have visited both Italy and Germany in peacetime and found friendship and hospitality in both. I now have good friends in Germany and I have a little German honorary nephew (aged 1) and niece (aged 4). It has been estimated that 50 million people – men, women and little children, combatants and civilians, of every country and every race – died directly or indirectly as a result of World War II. Is the world of 2010 so much better than that of 1938 as to have made all that human sacrifice worthwhile? Looking back over the years, I ask, ‘Was it all worth it? And could it ever happen again?

I recently read a ‘reader’s letter’ in the East Anglian Daily Times in which the writer (who I suspect was in his forties or fifties) claimed that the servicemen and women of World War II, had fought for a free and independent UK, and were being betrayed by those who were now urging ever-closer ties with the European mainland. Unlike that letter writer I had been one of those servicemen. I had thought that I was taking part in a world-wide struggle to end the petty nationalism of which Nazism and Fascism were extreme examples, and to create a new united Europe of co-operation, freedom and peace, a precursor of the day when, as Alfred Lord Tennyson had put it a century and a half earlier,

The war-drums throb no more and the battle flags are furled,

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’

Week 43 10 26th October 2010

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘We’re all in it together?’

I have to confess that when the Chancellor of the Exchequer finally announced his spending review on 20th October, my first feelings were of relief. The cuts didn’t, at first glance, seem quite as bad as had been expected. Government Departments, for instance, had been asked to cut only 19 percent of their spending when, just a fortnight earlier, the prime minister himself had suggested that those cuts would be 25 percent. Pensioners winter fuel allowances were untouched, as were our free prescriptions, tv licences and bus passes!

Looking back over the years though, I remembered that whenever unpopular finance measures had been introduced, they had never been quite as awful as had been predicted. The former Public Relations Officer in me entertained the cynical thought that some of that gloomy prior speculation may have been deliberately promoted, so that our feelings of dismay when the facts were revealed would be tempered by those of relief. We had been encouraged to expect even worse.

One cut that was deeper than had been anticipated has been in central government support for local authorities. This is to be cut, not by the anticipated 25 but by 26 percent; only one percent – but one percent of a very large sum is quite a lot. The effects of this cut won’t be noticed for months, perhaps not for a year or two. And then, when refuse collections are halved, broken paving stones are not replaced, the needs of the very young and the very old are neglected, libraries and leisure centres are closed down or survive only by introducing crippling charges to users, it won’t be central government that will be blamed but ‘that lot at the Town Hall’.

Among the local authorities whose governmental support will be cut is our own Essex County Council. We now learn that they were millions of pounds ‘in the red’ even before this financial crisis hit us. Surprised? I’m not. Jetting influential councillors and top officials half-way round the world to stay in luxury hotels, establishing an office in mainland China to encourage Essex exports (has it, in fact, found us any markets?), setting up a bank, taking over failing Post Offices, and putting self congratulatory adverts on tv cost money. What a pity that, unlike the Government, they can’t blame the debt on the profligacy of the previous Labour administration! The County Council is, of course, responsible for the care and support of the elderly and disabled. I’ll just have to try my very hardest keep out of a care home and maintain my present degree of independence for whatever remains of my life. I’d be unwise to count on much Social Service support!

There are plenty of people who will suffer – really suffer – as a result of this spending review. They are the people, and the families, who survive on the benefits that are to be reduced or eliminated. Some of them no doubt are scroungers who have chosen a life of squalid idleness, funded by benefit fraud and minor crime. I shall be very surprised if these are any more than a small minority. Most, I think, lack saleable skills, are mentally, physically or emotionally inadequate, or have been just plain unlucky. Some would undoubtedly take any job that was offered. But none is offered. And if there is one thing that can be predicted with certainty, it is that the coming months will bring fewer jobs and more unemployed.

Those of us who were brought up in loving homes with parents, however poor, who valued education and wanted their offspring ‘to get on in the world’ often don’t realize how very, very lucky we have been. It is those who didn’t have those advantages, those who drew a losing ticket in the lottery of life, who will have to suffer most to free us from the economic prison into which we have been led by avaricious financiers, and myopic politicians incapable of looking beyond the next election.

Saving the Planet! (and saving on gas bills)

From time to time there are features in the popular press ‘exposing the renewable energy racket’. According to the authors, all this business about the need for alternative sources of energy and the savings, or even profit, that can be made by solar power or wind turbine installation is illusory. There’s rarely enough sun or wind in Britain to make either source of power profitable. Better by far to install double-glazing and draught proofing, and rely on tried-and-tested gas or oil (‘there are still plenty of reserves of both in the world!) for space and water heating. What rubbish!

I know nothing about privately owned wind-turbines in the back garden, or roofs with their sunward slopes covered with solar panels; heating homes and hot water and selling surplus electricity back to the national suppliers. My experience is limited to a single small solar water heating system that I had installed in my bungalow just before Easter in 2009. I knew that I was unlikely to live long enough to see it recover the capital cost of its installation, but I thought that it would add value to my home and that its saving would probably exceed the meagre interest that I was receiving from the ‘rainy-day-fund’ in my Building Society account. It has fulfilled all my expectations.

On the southern slope of my bungalow roof I have a solar panel and two photoelectric cells, one on each side of it. An antifreeze solution is pumped in a closed circuit through the solar panel to heat the water in a heavily insulated storage cylinder in the roof space. This cylinder is connected to my main storage cylinder so that when domestic hot water is drawn off for baths, showers, washing and so on, preheated water flows into the main storage cylinder. During sunny summer days, sufficient water is heated to meet all domestic hot water needs. Even in the winter the domestic water supply is preheated, so that less fuel is needed to bring the water in the main storage cylinder up to the required temperature.

There are, in fact, two electric pumps, both activated by the photoelectric cells on the roof. One circulates the antifreeze solution between the solar panel and the new storage cylinder in the roof-space, the other exchanges the water between the new storage cylinder and the main storage cylinder, when the temperature of the water in the upper cylinder is ten degrees Celsius higher than that in the main cylinder. This means that there is little wastage of cold water when the hot taps are turned on, and that, on warm and sunny days, I have two cylinders – between 50 and 60 gallons in all – of stored solar heated hot water. Temperature sensors, connected to a control panel in my airing cupboard, switch the two pumps on and off.

The completed system is complex but the principle on which it operates is straightforward enough. I described a very basic solar water heating system in my ‘David and Charles Manual of Home Plumbing’ and my ‘Teach Yourself – Plumbing’, published way back in the 1980s. Then though, I knew nothing about photoelectric cells or electronic control. Nor, I think, had anyone at that time conceived the idea of the second pump. My solar system is now working perfectly – though I wouldn’t pretend that it didn’t have plenty of teething troubles, to which the installers (Solar Power (UK) Ltd. of Rayne, Braintree) gave prompt and painstaking professional attention.

I pay my gas and electricity bills together by direct debit monthly to one supplier, Eon through an ‘Age Concern’ account. Eighteen months ago I was paying £110 per month. A year ago, when my solar heating system had been installed but was still having teething problems, my monthly payment was reduced to £70. I have just been informed that, from 1st December this year, I shall be paying £53 a month only – and that is after a long, hard winter and a far-less-than-perfect summer. The Building Society annual interest on the capital cost of the installation hadn’t been anything like the £684 annually that solar power is saving me – and that saving is tax-free!

Let no one tell me solar water heating doesn’t pay. Mine certainly does!

Writing about tax-free savings…….

…….reminded me that among the features of the Spending Review that brought joy to the hearts of all of us pensioners, was the retention of our Winter Fuel Allowance, free bus passes, free tv licences and free medical prescriptions. The national press had prophesied that the first two of these might well be dropped or at least means tested.

However, my sense of satisfaction was severely dented when I read the headline in one of the dailies that I trust, ‘Disabled and sick pay the price to save winter fuel allowance’. I read on: The main losers are those receiving Employment and Support Allowance, a payment of up to £97 a week for those unable to work because of ill health or disability. Under the changes, claimants will receive the benefit for only 12 months………..At the end of that time, some of those still claiming will either be forced to find work or given the Job Seekers’ Allowance instead, meaning they could be around £30 a week worse off. Others will be given a slice of the old benefit under a means tested basis. All of this comes on top of the £11bn chopped from the welfare budget in June’s emergency budget; cuts to the disability living allowance, housing benefit and child benefit, and a £3.2bn tax credit squeeze.

Is the un-means-tested winter fuel allowance paid to us pensioners, at the expense of others many of who may be worse off than at least some of ourselves? Ought we to receive a universal benefit, whatever our circumstances may be, while others lose theirs or are severely means tested? Should our eligibility for winter fuel allowance be means tested, or limited to those disabled or over a rather higher age than at present? I don’t like means-tested benefits. They are expensive to administer and some who really do need the extra money might be reluctant to fill in the required forms, disclosing their poverty. We oldies are sometimes proud!

I suggest a fairer idea would be to make the winter fuel benefit taxable, though I suspect that the suggestion will outrage many of my fellow pensioners. Our state retirement pension is already ‘means tested’ in that it is added onto any other income that we may have, and income tax is deducted from the total. Why not treat winter fuel allowances, in the same way? Those who have no private pension or other income to supplement their state pension would continue to get their benefit with no deductions. PAYE would deduct the appropriate sum from the total incomes of the better-off at source. I would still, I think, get about two thirds of my present winter fuel allowance. Others, whose private pension or other income bring them within the higher tax band, would retain about half of theirs.

It is a system that would surely be reasonable and not too difficult to administer. Why not apply it to other ‘universal’ benefits? The main objection that I can see is that our current income tax system needs to have more income ‘bands’ and that those who receive (I can’t bring myself to say ‘earn’) over a million pounds a year, pay just the same rate on their taxable income as the inhabitants of ‘Middle England’ with an income of perhaps £50,000 a year. It is a reform that could certainly be introduced by a resolute government that was not blinded by billionaires!

How the ‘other half’ lives!

How appropriate that just as the Chancellor was telling us all to tighten our belts, the Supreme Court in London was ruling on the divorce settlement of a couple of millionaires! The marriage of Katrin Radmacher, who is said to be worth more than £100 million and Nicolas Granatino had ended. The latter had hoped that the Supreme Court would help him get his hands on what he considered to be a fair share of his former wife’s fortune.

He failed, but we don’t have to worry. He won’t be joining the queue for ‘benefit’ from a hard-up British government. His ‘failure’ leaves him with a million pounds in cash, the use of a £2.5 million property rent-free for 15 years, a holiday home in the south of France until the youngest child of the former marriage is 22, a personal income of £76,000 a year for the next fifteen years, and child maintenance of £70,000 a year even though he is not the primary carer. He will also get £25,000 for a car, and most of his debts paid of by his ex-wife. Most of us, I think, could manage to live with that kind of failure! ‘We’re all in this together’, says the Chancellor. I doubt if Mr Granatino and the former Mrs Granatino, beset by their own personal problems, have even noticed that the society in which they live has a few financial problems of its own. If I may make a minor alteration the last verse of a once-popular folk ballad:

It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure.
It’s the poor wot ‘as to pay.
Thus it was in former ages
And it’s just the same today!

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.