Week 9 1.3.11

Tendring Topics…….on Line

The Big Society – all from a bedtime story?

I had always imagined that David Cameron had snatched his ‘Big Society’ idea of local communities being responsible for their own services and being independent of Big Brother central government in Whitehall, from his own fertile imagination. Having searched my own memory though, I wonder if, while he was a little child, his mother or possibly his grandmother may have lulled him to sleep at night with stories of a golden age in a golden land where just such circumstances existed.

It wasn’t actually either a golden age or a golden land (bedtime stories don’t have to be boringly accurate!) but it is true that before World War II – which David Cameron’s grandma and perhaps even his mum – may have remembered, local communities did provide and manage services that are nowadays controlled either by central government, enormous private corporations, or large area authorities. They did it by means of local government – but it really was ‘local’ and its functions and responsibilities were very different from what is called ‘local government’ today.

Now taken over by the NHS, this was formerly Ipswich’s Public Health Department where I began my local government career in 1937. It housed a Maternity and Child Welfare Clinic, A School Clinic, and a TB Clinic as well as Health Visitors, District and School Nurses, and Sanitary Inspectors.

My first job was with Ipswich Corporation. At that time the population of the town was under 100,000 (a smaller and much more compact population than that of the Tendring District today). It had its poor and its wealthy but I think that it could reasonably have been considered to be ‘a community’. It was a community that elected its own representatives to its own Town Council. Each member was directly answerable to the electorate and liable to dismissal at the next election if it was decided that he had been a bad choice.

These democratically elected representatives of the local community ran every service that is run by any County, Borough or District Council today. They were much more independent though; deciding, for instance, whether or not they needed to build homes for letting and whether or not they would sell those homes to sitting tenants. In addition they provided gas and electricity, public transport, water supply, a sewerage system and sewage purification plant, social security (called poor law relief), a General Hospital, a Psychiatric Hospital (called a ‘Mental Hospital’ in those days), an Isolation Hospital, a TB Sanatorium and a Maternity Home, a School Medical Service and a Maternity and Child Welfare Service. That truly was a Big Society!

Despite the range and complexity of the Council’s responsibilities, they managed without a highly paid ‘Chief Executive’. They had a Town Clerk, normally a solicitor or barrister, who was the ‘first among equals’ of the professional officers – doctors, surveyors, solicitors, architects, engineers, librarians and so on – who headed the council’s specialist departments and who were responsible to the Council Committee dealing with the provision of that particular service. Even allowing for the massive inflation that has taken place in the past seventy years, their salaries were nothing like those of ‘top people’ in local government today – and they wouldn’t have dreamed of expecting ‘bonuses’ for giving the council the very best service of which they were capable.

The rot set in with the advent of that first Labour Government after World War II. I helped vote them into power and I agreed, and still agree, with their stated objectives. They believed that all public services should be publicly owned and managed. Sadly, they imagined that this could be achieved only on a national scale. They dismembered existing community owned-and-managed services like public health, social security, water, gas and electricity supply, sewerage and sewage treatment and handed them over to giant state-owned corporations. They and their Conservative opponents, called this – whether in praise or in derision – ‘socialism’. It was, in fact, ‘state capitalism’ and lent itself to the sale of our vital services into private ownership (some abroad!) with the advent of Thatcherism. Another blow to the idea of the self-governing ‘community’ came with the Local Government Reorganisation of 1974. The ‘local’ was effectively removed from ‘local government’ as, all over England and Wales, communities with little if anything in common were thrust together into a smaller number of much larger local authorities, more easily controlled from Whitehall. Brightlingsea and Harwich; even Frinton-and-Walton, and Clacton, could have been regarded as integral ‘communities’. By no stretch of the imagination is the Tendring District anything of the sort. A further development was the pernicious ‘right to buy’ legislation that compelled local authority landlords (but not private ones!) to sell off their housing heritage at bargain basement prices. More recently, local authorities were compelled to abandon their historic ‘committee’ administration and adopt either ‘cabinet’ government or – central government’s preferred option – a single all-powerful executive Mayor!

If the present coalition government really wants Britain to evolve into a country of self-governing communities with minimal central control, they should begin by breaking up existing local authorities into much smaller community-based units and according them something like the degree of responsibility and autonomy that local authorities enjoyed prior to World War II.

Somehow though – I don’t think that that is quite what Mr Cameron has in mind. So far I haven’t seen any of central government’s functions being passed down the line to ‘local communities’. However he does seem quite keen to see existing democratically elected district and borough councils stripped of their remaining powers and responsibilities. These are to be taken on by private firms or charitable organisations that may be either local or national (or international come to that!) and certainly won’t, in any sense, be either ‘local communities’ or their elected representatives.

Real community control of local affairs has been and is – ‘Going….going…..gone!’

Revolution in Libya

When, in recent weeks I published in this blog photos taken in the eastern Libyan desert in the winter of 1941/’42, I didn’t dream that that country would shortly be making front page news in our press. It was of course with eastern Libya, Cyrenaica, that I became unwillingly familiar during that time.

It was strange to hear Tobruk, Derna and Benghazi featuring in news bulletins, as they had - though in quite a different context – over seventy years ago! It was in Tobruk, on 21st June 1942, that I met my Nemesis when our defences were overrun by the tanks of General Rommel’s DAK (Deutsche Afrika Korps). The Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a member was preparing to make a last stand when we were ordered by the Garrison Commander (the South African General Klopper) to burn our vehicles, put the guns out of action and surrender.

Derna was a staging post in our thoroughly miserable journey as POWs, in the back of an Italian army lorry to Benghazi and thence, in the hold of an elderly tramp steamer, to Italy. At Derna I was at my lowest ebb. I had been a prisoner of war for about a week. I was unwashed, unshaven and without hope. The ‘prison transit camp’ was a barbed-wire-surrounded Muslim burial ground. I was suffering from diarrhoea and stomach cramps and, for the first and only time of my life, wishing that I had the means to end it. The transit camp at Benghazi was a little better. We did at least have tents to sleep in and sufficient water to wash ourselves. I was only there about a week until about 100 of us were picked out at random and marched through the town to the docks and our transport to Italy.

I saw little of those three Libyan towns, all of which were in the news last week, and even less of their Libyan inhabitants. They are all in an area of eastern Libya, Cyrenaica, the population of which liberated themselves from the clutches of Colonel Gaddafi. How extraordinary that, according to a BBC report, local people should have challenged airborne troops landing on Tobruk’s El Adhem airfield (which I remember well!) and beaten them off.

I wish the rebels all success and sincerely hope that they will succeed in unseating Gaddafi, and in leading their country into a free and prosperous future. At least they have a source of revenue, Libya’s oil reserves, at their disposal. Let us hope that they can distribute that oil income wisely and equitably, for the benefit of all Libyans – not just a ruling elite! They have yet to oust Colonel Gaddafi. That is unlikely to be easy. Watching him ranting on tv brought Adolf Hitler to mind – and we all know how much how much trouble we had getting rid of him!
Meanwhile as I write, a week before posting this blog, hundreds of Britons are stranded while our government belatedly fumbles ineffectively to arrange their evacuation. France, Germany, Portugal, Russia, Belgium and Holland were all days ahead of us. By next Tuesday I’ll no doubt know how effective our efforts have been.

I imagine that the leader writers, and probably most of the readers, of the Daily Mail the Daily Express and the Sun would consider it high treason for me to suggest that if we had been an active partner in a Federal Europe, all our citizens as well as all other EU citizens would probably by now be safely home.

‘Carpe Diem!’

Just another of those Latin phrases that tend to give those who use them a totally spurious aura of scholarship! It means, loosely translated, ‘Seize today’s opportunities – no-one knows what will happen tomorrow’. (I remember it because it is also the name of a very pleasant restaurant in Brussels where my son and grandson have taken me on a couple of occasions!)

David Cameron may have been a little tardy at plucking Brits stranded in Libya out of danger – but no-one can accuse him to failing to seize the business opportunities arising from the crisis in North Africa and the Middle East. He was the very first world leader to visit the ‘new Egypt’ and has been visiting other countries in the Middle East not yet affected by the wind of change there. He lectured those countries’ rulers, most of whom closely resemble those deposed in Egypt and Tunisia (if not being quite in Colonel Gaddafi’s league!) on the joys of free speech, a free press and free and fair elections.

At the same time the arms dealers in his entourage were, no doubt, impressing on those rulers’ lackeys the superiority of British-made water cannon, tear gas, rubber bullets, shot guns and stun grenades. This, of course, would be just in case Mr Cameron failed to persuade those rulers of the benefits of liberal democracy, and their subjects decided, like the Egyptians, the Libyans and the Tunisians, to take matters into their own hands.

Today is certainly be a good time to be selling the means of effective crowd control to Middle Eastern despots.

‘OLDER PEOPLE WILL BE CONSIDERED FOR ADOPTION AS
GUIDE LINES ARE RELAXED’

That, believe it or not, was a headline in the Daily Telegraph a week or so ago. What a vista of new career opportunities it could have opened up to we oldies! I had a vision of a 'professional' Grandad (I think that that may be a little more ‘Public School’ than Grandpa) living comfortably in his corner of the luxurious mansion of the new-rich family who had adopted him. A dignified figure, white haired and leaning heavily on a stick, he would emerge from his lair when required to be introduced to visitors, ‘Grandad’s one of the old school you know’. He would help himself to a large whisky and soda, dispense homely wisdom, inject something of the past into the very brief history of his new family, and then his adoptive 'grand-daughter' would explain, ‘Grandad gets tired very quickly these days’, and he would retreat to the familiar comfort of his den.

It sounded too good to be true – and it was. The Daily Telegraph’s sub-editor hadn’t been quite as familiar with the subtleties of the English language as lone might have expected. Older people will be considered as possible adopting parents, not for adoption. Never mind. I wouldn't really have wanted to be a professional grandad. Being a real one - and a great-uncle - is far more satisfying.

week 8.11 22.2.11

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘You are old Father William, the young man said,
And your hair has become very white…….
Yet nobody cares when you’re ill and in bed
I really don’t think that is right!’

The first two of the lines of verse above are Lewis Carroll’s and can be found in Alice in Wonderland. The other two were inspired by the Health Service Ombudsman’s recent report on the treatment of some old people in NHS Hospitals. It was a report that made those who, like me, have left both youth and middle age behind them, and who are becoming aware of increasing physical (and possibly mental) disability, feel a tremor of apprehension at the possibility of needing hospital treatment at some time in the future.

Some elderly patients had been left unattended, in pain and with open wounds. Some had been unwashed and had no opportunity for a bath or shower. Some, unable to feed themselves or attend to their own toilet needs, had pleaded in vain for help. These were, of course, only ‘a minority’ of elderly patients but the fact that they were a substantial minority should be a cause for shame.

I listened with interest as an ‘authority’ on the subject explained on tv that the problem was one of lack of communication. Nurses and other carers need to listen to their patients and discuss their problems with them. I began to wonder if that ‘authority’ lived in the same world as I do!

It was seven years ago, when she was just eighty, that my late wife Heather, having had a broken hip repaired in Colchester General Hospital, found herself, for rehabilitation, in the Kate Grant Ward of the Clacton Hospital. Heather had had a wider-then-most experience of hospitals. Illness led to her spending time in several London hospitals in her childhood. At the age of 24 (when we had been married for just two years) she spent two years in a Sanatorium with pulmonary and laryngeal TB, including two months in Papworth Hospital undergoing major surgery. In middle age she spent two brief periods in the Essex County Hospital for minor gynaecological surgery.

Visiting Heather at what was then the British Legion Sanatorium at Nayland. It had been taken over by the newly created NHS. Heather had to put on a stone in weight before having major surgery at Papworth Hospital near Cambridge which, at that time, specialised in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis

She was not a complainer. She had never liked being in hospital, but she was always cheerful and optimistic and prepared to make the best of it. She made friends with the nurses and other patients, and helped where she could. In the Sanatorium she made friends with whom she corresponded for the rest of her life.

It was only in Clacton’s Kate Grant Ward that she was desperately unhappy and keen to get out and come home at any price. It was not that the nurses or other members of the staff were unkind, uncaring or incompetent. There were simply not enough of them. One or two nurses or nursing assistants may well be adequate for a ward in which a good proportion of the patients are able to get into and out of bed, put on their dressing gowns and attend to their toilet needs and their meals. One or two nurses are not enough to cope with a ward of ageing or elderly women, the overwhelming majority of whom are unable to walk unaided.

Added to this is the (new?) rule that no nurse or nursing assistant may ever attempt to lift a patient on her own. This is an operation for which two helpers are always required. Then again, nurses disappear from time to time ‘for their breaks’ and at weekends regular nurses disappear and are temporarily replaced with ‘supply’ staff who know nothing of the patients. Is it surprising that getting the patients out of bed and dressed and back into bed again at night are operations that can take hours? Is it surprising that bells are unanswered; cries of distress unheard, and patients become incontinent for the first time in their lives? I wouldn’t for one moment suggest that any nurse should do lifting beyond his or her capacity, or be denied a break or a weekend off, but there should be enough nurses and/or other staff to cope with the special circumstances that exist in a ward of this kind. When that is done the nurses may well have the time and energy to ‘communicate’ better with their charges and discuss their problems. Perhaps, in the past seven years, things have changed in the Kate Grant Ward. I hope so – but I hope that I never personally find out!

For a week I arrived at the hospital before 8.00 am so that I could get Heather out of bed, washed and dressed. I spent most of the day there and I was always there in the evening to get her undressed and into bed again. I did this to impress on the Nursing Sister in charge of the ward that I was well able to be my wife’s carer. There was no need therefore to delay her discharge until a ‘care package’ could be organised. I soon realized though that by doing this I was also providing a real support for the hard-pressed nurses; a foretaste of David Cameron’s Big Society perhaps?

My most vivid, and most painful, memories of the time that Heather spent in Clacton Hospital were her distress when I parted from her every evening, and her joy ‘I thought you were never coming’ when I turned up in the morning. Until then I hadn’t fully appreciated the sense of loneliness and desolation that can overwhelm patients when they are alone with their thoughts in what they feel to be an uncaring atmosphere.

The late John Betjeman caught a glimpse of it in his poem Five O’clock Shadow, the time of the day when the visitors have departed. Here are the first and third verses:

This is the time of the day when we in the men’s ward
Say ‘one more surge of the pain and I give up the fight’.
When those who struggle for breath can struggle less strongly.
This is the time of the day that is worse than the night.

Below the windows, lots of loving relations
Rev up in the car park, changing gear at the bend.
Going home to a nice big tea and an evening of telly.
‘Ah well, we’ve done what we can. It can’t be long till the end’

‘Concentrate on something else – and it won’t hurt so much’

That’s the kind of advice that dentists used to give their patients before getting to work with their drills. Perhaps they still do.

Something similar seems to have motivated both politicians and newspaper editors in recent weeks. In Britain, government cuts threaten public services on which we have relied for many years. The number of unemployed is steadily increasing. Folk who had imagined they were ‘home owners’, when they were really only ‘home buyers’, are threatened with homelessness when they find themselves unable to continue their mortgage payments. Young people leaving universities with degrees are unable to find employment but are burdened with a lifetime of debt that, the government tells them ‘reassuringly’, they may never clear! Inflation has risen steadily. It is now at 4 percent (double the government’s ‘target’) and experts forecast a rise to 5 percent. Meanwhile incomes remain static or actually fall. In the Middle East, the ‘west’s’ policy of selling arms to, and supporting corrupt and tyrannical regimes. is rapidly falling apart. Worldwide, natural disasters make clear the reality of Climate Change, but national governments decline to take effective action to counter it.

It might have been thought that these circumstances provided both politicians and the popular press with plenty of material to arouse their fear and anger. But those haven’t been the issues that have aroused most ire. They have preferred to concentrate on the trivial and the irrelevant. Take, for instance, the case of the army’s redundant warrant officers. Twenty, one actually serving in Afghanistan, were sent their redundancy notices by email. All the indignation has been vented on the email. It should surely have been concentrated on the redundancy, no matter how those concerned were informed of it. Does it make sense to discharge 20 experienced professional soldiers, still in their forties, while a war of attrition is being waged in Afghanistan – and while millions of pounds are being spent on nuclear submarines armed with Trident missiles purposelessly prowling the oceans?

Then there are the two rulings of the European Court of Human Rights – that most prisoners in Britain’s gaols should have the right to vote, and that after fifteen years, sex offenders should have the right to appeal against their names being retained on the register of offenders. From the outrage in press and parliament you’d have thought that an invading army had landed on our shores! We would be better engaged in persuading a majority of those of us who are not in prison, to vote, rather than making sure that prisoners can’t. It would surprise me if many prisoners want to vote anyway. I reckon though that most of them would welcome with enthusiasm the possibility of cash compensation for having been refused that right!

As for sex offenders; they have been punished for their crime. Surely it isn’t unreasonable to consider the possibility that those who have lived an unblemished life for fifteen years since their discharge from prison may have permanently changed their ways. The right to appeal doesn’t mean an automatic right to have their names removed. In many cases it well be decided that they should remain on the register.

Ah well – these issues gave us all something about which to think and vent our indignation. For a few days they successfully diverted us from the real threats to our world and our civilisation.

A part-time job?

A short while ago Colchester Borough Council approached Tendring District Council with the idea of ‘sharing’ an expensive Chief Executive – in effect ‘Two for the price of one!’ They were rebuffed, but have now reached agreement to share a Chief Executive with Braintree Council. Colchester’s Chief Executive is currently paid £117,107 and Braintree’s £119,000. It is claimed that the agreement will save Colchester £150,000 a year, and we must surely assume that Braintree is hoping to achieve a similar saving. Mathematics was never my strongest subject at school but I can’t quite follow the arithmetic there.

I believe that Tendring Council’s outgoing Chief Executive enjoyed a salary comparable with those of both Colchester and Braintree. He also had two Assistant Chief Executives each on a salary higher than that of any other Council employee.

Colchester and Braintree are by no means unique nowadays in sharing a Chief Executive. Tendring Councillors must surely be wondering if they have been paying three very substantial salaries for what now appears to be regarded as a part-time job!

Week 7 15.02.11

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Another trip through Space and Time!

A few weeks ago I published in this column some photographs taken in North Africa in 1942 that had transported me in mind and memory across a continent and an ocean to the Egyptian/Libyan border area of nearly seventy years ago! There was a picture of one of the 6in howitzers with which I had served as a gunner in action – and also semi-submerged in a flooded gun-pit after a tropical storm. There was a group picture of a gun-crew which could have been – but wasn’t – the one of which I had been a member.

I have now received from the same source a picture that I am finding even more evocative. It is again a photograph of a gun-crew standing round the ‘trail’ of a 6in howitzer during the winter (despite the sunshine we all have jackets on!) of 1941/’42. This time though it really is the gun crew of which I was a member. It was nearly seventy years ago and I have, and have always had, a bad memory or faces. However I can recognise and name five (including myself) of those on the picture. Sgt. Peter Harris and Lance Sgt. ‘Busty’ Taylor are the first two on the left. Fifth from the left is Lance Bombardier Alfie Bloomfield, sadly destined to die of diphtheria in a POW Camp in Benghazi later that year. I am the one, seventh from the left, wearing a woolly hat. Behind me, to the left of me in the picture, is a Gunner Fletcher who, in his early thirties, was some ten years older than most of us, while at the very end is Dick Pulford, former manager of a seed store in Woodbridge, with whom I shared a ‘bivvy-tent’

On the picture, though I can’t positively identify him, must also be Jim Palmer, a former Ipswich milkman. He and I remained together while prisoners of war and arrived back together in Ipswich on 18th May 1945, ten days after VE Day. It was my twenty-fourth birthday!

Also there, must be ‘Ferret’ Hawes, a fisherman from Orford. He and I were good mates. I have a picture of myself with him in a rickshaw in Durban, where we enjoyed a brief ‘shore leave’ on our outward voyage to Egypt in August 1941.

‘Ferret’ Hawes (left) and myself in Durban. The rickshaw man never pulled that rickshaw. He just stood around smoking (you can see a fag between the fingers of his left hand) until British soldiers came along wanting to be photographed with him. There must have been hundreds of similar photos taken!

I can’t say that I ‘enjoyed’ either the time I spent in the army or as a prisoner of war. Both though were experiences that, looking back over my life, I am glad to have had.


Prophetic Topics

A month or so ago, when I learned that the Government, were ‘taking on’ the bankers whose activities triggered the current financial crisis, who had been rescued from bankruptcy with millions of pounds of our money and who were once again proposing to hand themselves astronomical salaries and bonuses, I suggested in this blog that it was a conflict between the representatives of the British people and the High Priests of Mammon. Furthermore I predicted that whatever smooth words and phrases might be used to make a defeat sound like a victory, it would ultimately be Mammon’s servants who would come out on top.

And so, it has proved – including the attempt to make defeat sound like a victory. What was the outcome of weeks of negotiation? The top moneylenders (that is what bankers actually do isn’t it?) will still get their million pound salaries and their million pound-plus bonuses, but they have promised to make a few billion pounds more available for loans to businesses, and there’s to be more ‘transparency’ about the salaries and bonuses that are paid. Making a few billion pounds available for loans doesn’t mean that more loans will actually be made. The bankers will still be able to withhold funds from those businesses that are not considered to be ‘a good risk’. It is they who will do the ‘considering’, and they who will set the interest rates and terms of repayment. As for transparency, I don’t particularly want to know who gets those multi-million salaries and bonuses. I don’t think that anyone should get them.

Top people in the public service (any public service) with a large salary are immediately pilloried for getting ‘more money than the Prime Minister’. Quite right too! But I have never heard of anyone working out how many Prime Ministers could be bought with the total remuneration of the Chief Executive of any major bank?

‘Of all the local councils, in all the Town Halls, of all the counties, towns and districts of the UK………’

(Apologies to the late, but unforgettable, Humphrey Bogart)…our District Council of Tendring has to be the one to pick up the gauntlet that the city of Liverpool tried and found didn’t fit. They have applied for and have accepted the ‘Big Society’ partnership challenge of the Coalition Government.

It seems that Tendring got in on the act at an early stage by including a Big Society fund of £500,000 in this year’s budget and by organising a meeting of all local voluntary bodies (or as many as cared to be represented) at the Jaywick Community Centre on 31st January. I am not sure what, if anything, was decided at that Meeting, but I was interested to learn that the representative of one local charity commented that there had been a recent change in the character of their volunteer helpers. They used, at one time, to be the ‘recently retired’ but were now increasingly younger and from among the unemployed.

The main purpose of‘ ‘The Big Society’ idea seems to me to find unpaid volunteers to do tasks (in parks and gardens, in hospitals and care homes, as gardeners care assistants, circular deliverers and so on) previously performed by paid labour. Success in doing this will certainly ensure an ever-increasing pool of unemployed from which to find suitable volunteers! And, as the government has promised that folk ‘on benefit’ will never be better off than those in employment, the incentive to seek non-existent jobs will remain, and quite a lot of money will be saved!

Meanwhile Tendring has been accorded the government’s highest accolade – description as a ‘can-do council!’ Communities Minister Eric Pickles is quoted as saying, ‘Can-do Councils like Tendring show what can be achieved by local government working tirelessly with and for their communities’. Mr Stock, leader of Tendring Council, said, ‘To be working with the Government in this way is a significant coup for the council and the district. We have shown ourselves to be ahead of the game in coming up with our Big Society fund and it has been recognised on a national level’. He added that he looked forward to further details being revealed.

And so do I!


The New Levellers

Towards the end of our Civil War in the 17th Century there was a movement (it never really did become a political party) called The Levellers. There was even a Levellers Manifesto advocating popular sovereignty, an extension of the suffrage (not, of course, going so far as suggesting that all adult men and women should be allowed to vote!) equality for all before the law, and universal religious tolerance. These very modest aims, which we take for granted today, were too much for either King Charles I or Oliver Cromwell. Levellers were persecuted, thrown into prison and executed. Eventually they disappeared from the scene.

If I were fifty years younger (if only!) I would seriously consider founding – or, more likely, trying unsuccessfully to found - a new Political Party, The New Levellers. Its main objective would be to narrow the currently enormous gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest in our country, which (rather than 'Europe', 'the last Labour Government' or even 'the bankers') surely lies at the root of our current ills. This could be achieved only slowly and over a number of years but I believe that when the benefits began to reveal themselves, the pace of change would accelerate.

Already there are at least tentative moves in the right direction, if only in the public sector. It has been suggested that the highest paid employee of any public body should not earn more than twenty times the lowest paid. I have heard it said that while that might be possible in the public sector it would be quite unacceptable in private enterprise – in stock broking or banking for example.

Why should it be? The current minimum wage is £5.93 an hour. That gives a weekly wage of £237 for a forty-hour week or an annual income of about £12,000. Twenty times that amounts to £240,000 – not far short of a quarter of a million pounds. That is, as they say, more than the salary of the Prime Minister and should surely be more than adequate for anyone’s needs. I certainly don’t think that any public employee should get a higher salary than that and – unless it is considered that gambling on the stock exchange or large-scale money-lending is of greater value to the nation than the duties of the Prime Minister, or of any public servant, I don’t see why incomes higher than that should be tolerated in the private sector either.

I think that levelling should be at both ends of the income spectrum – raising the incomes of the lowest paid and reducing those of the highest. A variety of means could be employed to do this – the minimum wage; a reformed and progressive income tax; more services and industries being carried out by local authorities, by co-operatives and by employee partnerships like John Lewis; splitting up the big banks and giant business corporations to provide real competition.

Progress would be slow but sure. Neither Socialism nor unfettered Capitalism can, in itself, provide a solution. The important thing would be to persuade the general public that greater economic equality would be to everyone’s benefit, and to work towards that objective.

Utopian? Pie-in-the-sky? Revolutionary nonsense? Perhaps, but that is what was said of the objectives of the 17th Century Levellers and of the Chartists two hundred years later. All of those aims have now been achieved!

Week 6 8.2.11

Tendring Topics…..on Line

‘Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble’

So sang the three witches in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ as they added ever more revolting bits and pieces to their bubbling brew. What, I wonder, will eventually emerge from the currently seething cauldron of the Muslim-majority states of North Africa and the Middle East. As I write, the Tunisian people have overthrown a corrupt and tyrannical ruler, who had enjoyed the support of ‘the West’. The Egyptian people appear to be in the process of doing the same. There is no shortage of similar rulers in the same area and the successes of anti-government forces in Egypt and Tunis have encouraged similar dissidents elsewhere. There are demands for freedom in the Yemen, and the King of Jordan has taken what I am sure he hopes will prove to be effective pre-emptive action to dampen down rebellion in his country.

A sense of foreboding that I feel about these on-the-surface encouraging moves arises from the fact that history demonstrates that the overthrow – particularly the violent overthrow – of cruel and autocratic regimes is all too often followed by the establishment of equally bad or even worse ones.

Liberal minded people throughout Europe welcomed the overthrow of the French Monarchy in 1789 and the advent of the republican government with its slogan of Liberty, Fraternity, Equality (aims that many of us pursue today!) – but the cruel and oppressive monarchical system was followed first by the ‘reign of terror’ of Robespierre, Danton and Marat, which was itself supplanted by that of Napoleon Bonaparte! The medieval tyranny of the Russian Tsarist government maintained by bands of Cossack ‘enforcers’ armed with sabres and whips, the threat of Siberian exile and the CHEKA (a secret police force differing little from the KGB), was followed, ultimately, by Stalin!

More recently in Iran, the overthrow of the all-powerful Shah was followed by the rule of the Ayatollahs, enemies of any form of liberalism. In Afghanistan; was the Soviet rule that ‘the west’ conspired with the ‘gallant mojihadin’ to overthrow, really much worse that that of the Taliban, whom we had supported against the Soviets, and who are now taking an almost daily toll of the lives of our young men striving to oust them?

Will freedom-loving democratic forces emerge triumphant from the present turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East? I very much hope so, but fear otherwise.

We in Britain, where the level of freedom and democracy that we enjoy today has been gained slowly and after centuries of bitter struggle, may overestimate the attractions that parliamentary representative government has to people in an entirely different environment and with an entirely different history and culture. It is worth remembering that, even in Britain, the idea that everyone over 18, men and women, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, should have a vote and therefore a small share in the country’s government, would have been regarded less than two centuries ago as dangerous and seditious nonsense. Only the Chartists, regarded by contemporary ‘responsible citizens' as ‘the loony lefties’ of the nineteenth century, even suggested such an idea.

It was not until within my own lifetime that universal suffrage was achieved. It was in 1928, when I was seven years old, that the right to vote in Parliamentary and Local Government Elections was conferred on all men and women over the age of 21. It was in 1969, when I was 48, that the voting age was lowered to 18. We have yet to achieve the proportional representation that I believe is a prerequisite of true democracy.

It is not very likely that people whose experience of government has been limited to one or other kind of tyranny, and who believe that all the laws of any importance were dictated directly by God some 1,500 years ago, will find the idea of electing human lawmakers an attractive one. Surely, they will think, all that is needed is experienced theologians able to interpret those God-given laws in the light of modern circumstances. To suggest otherwise must undoubtedly be blasphemous.

For this reason I fear that the present turmoil in Africa and the Middle East is just as likely to end in the triumph of one or other of the extreme forms of Islamism as in the kind of liberal democracies that most of us in ‘the west’ would like to see.

The Crime Map of the United Kingdom

I reckon that the publication of the ‘On line Crime Map’ of the United Kingdom was one of the dafter projects of the present government.

Type in your postal address and postcode and a street map will appear of your district with numbers shown in strategic places. Click on the number nearest to your home and you’ll learn how many incidents of various kinds of crime have taken place in the immediate vicinity during December last year. Residents of Clacton’s Jubilee Avenue, just off the old London Road on Clacton’s outskirts, had a nasty shock when they discovered that the number of burglaries that had taken place in their vicinity made them the third most crime-ridden area in the UK. They weren’t aware of any law-breaking whatsoever in their quiet residential road.

The explanation lies in the fact that Jubilee Avenue is adjacent to one of Clacton’s largest and most popular holiday caravan sites (I remember it well from my public health inspecting days!) It was there, ‘in the vicinity’ of Jubilee Avenue, that the crimes had taken place. Several caravans had been burgled ‘by person or persons unknown’.

I typed in my address and postcode with some trepidation. I have lived in my present bungalow in Dudley Road since 1956. My family and I have certainly never felt threatened in any way here and I wouldn’t wish to live anywhere else. It must be said though that Dudley Road hasn’t had an exactly crime-free past. Immediately opposite my bungalow is a narrow passageway in, or in the vicinity of, which at least three muggings have taken place over the years. Some years ago I recall that a small ‘cannabis farm’ was found in the roof space of a dwelling in Dudley Road some distance from my home, and I have heard that drug dealing has taken place in the neighbourhood. I have even, in the over-half-a-century I have lived here, added to the crime statistics myself by reporting to the Police (for insurance purposes, rather than in any hope of the perpetrators being caught) the theft of hubcaps from my car, the theft of a bicycle left in my driveway and, more recently, the systematic destruction of my front boundary wall by vandals. No doubt there were other crimes in the vicinity, some more serious, that I didn’t hear about. I don’t go out looking for trouble!

The work of the vandals! The rubble had already been moved from the nearer section of the wall.

However the ‘crime map’ revealed that during December 2010 the vicinity of my home was relatively crime-free. There was one violent crime, and just one complaint of antisocial behaviour. The ‘one violent crime’ is rather disturbing – another mugging perhaps? There are many kinds of violent crime. Clicking on nearby streets in the area of Clacton in which I live (I have heard it described as ‘working class residential’, which is OK by me) it is clear that the overwhelmingly most common problem is ‘antisocial behaviour’. This is very worrying since I have little doubt that most antisocial behaviour goes unreported either because of fears of reprisals or of the well-founded conviction that ‘there’s not a lot that the Police can do about it’.


My new ‘Vandal-resistant’ garden fence

I whiled away an entertaining half-hour with the Crime Map but, at a time when the government tells us that we must get our pennyworth out of every penny spent, what on earth was its purpose? It doesn’t tell the Police anything they didn’t already know. They supplied the information. How on earth can the crime map possibly, as the government claims, ‘empower’ me? Supposing, for instance, instead of there being one violent crime in my neighbourhood, there had been twenty. I would have been seriously worried but there would be nothing I could do about it. The Police would have already been aware of it. Particularly nowadays, when they are compelled to limit their resources and cut down on staff, they can only increase the policing of one area by cutting down elsewhere. They have more knowledge on which to base their decisions on priorities than either local people or local or national politicians, and I have more faith in their judgement than in that of politicians!

I’m ready to be persuaded otherwise, but it seems to me that the ‘crime map’ will alarm some people unnecessarily, induce a false sense of complacency in others, and move yet others – like the folk of Clacton’s Jubilee Avenue – to righteous indignation. I wonder how much of our money was wasted in setting it up?

‘The easy speeches that comfort cruel men’

As far as I know G.K.Chesterton, author, essayist and minor poet (best known perhaps for his ‘Father Brown’ detective stories) wrote just one hymn. It begins ‘O God of earth and altar….’, and includes a verse that asks for deliverance from, ‘lies of tongue and pen, and from the easy speeches that comfort cruel men’. I think of that verse when I hear some of the speeches of our political leaders today. They are not, of course, cruel men (and women), but well-meaning ones who inflict unintentional (but none the less real!) cruelty on others as a result of their political convictions. It can’t be denied though that they use ‘easy speeches’ to comfort themselves and justify their actions.

They cut benefit paid to the unemployed and tell us that they are actually helping them by giving them an extra incentive to find work. They overlook the fact that thanks to their own policies, there is already a growing army of unemployed competing for fewer and fewer jobs. They cut grants to Citizens’ Advice Bureaux and for the salaries of debt advisers and say rather patronisingly that their aim is to stop people getting into debt in the first instance rather that helping them out of it at a later stage! They overlook the fact that their policies on University Tuition Fees and support for Further Education will put a large proportion of the younger generation heavily in debt for most of their working lives!

There was once a top politician who, between puffs on his pipe, would sometimes begin a televised statement with, ‘Now let’s be absolutely honest about this…..’ That was when we knew that our credulity was going to be stretched almost to breaking point.

Today’s political watchword is clarity. If I had a fiver for every time I have heard a government spokesman claim ‘We have always been absolutely clear……..’, or, echoing one of his predecessors ‘Let’s be absolutely clear about this…….’ or, ‘We stated very clearly…..’ I would be able to buy myself a new mobility scooter!

Usually whatever they were talking about was far from clear. But it leaves us wondering uneasily if we may be exceptionally stupid and that whatever was being discussed was perfectly clear to everyone else.

‘The times are out of joint!’

What a strange world we live in today!

Sex education, including ‘safe sex’ techniques, is taught in schools to senior pupils in mixed classes. Full sexual activity among teenagers is regarded as normal and taken for granted. Yet I have just read of two senior girls at a Colchester school having to face disciplinary action for holding hands – behaviour that would have seemed perfectly natural, even commendable, among the most demure and bashful young lady characters of a staid Victorian novel!

Week 5 2011 1st Feb. 2011

Tendring Topics…..on Line

A Matter of History

It came as something of a shock to hear the newsreader on tv refer to the contender for film honours ‘The King’s Speech’ as ‘a historical drama’. ‘Historical’ means to me crinolines and toppers, or doublets and hose, not events that happened in my lifetime and that I can personally remember. I well recall the constitutional crisis that ended with King Edward VIII abdicating the throne so that he could marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson; not least because the divorce that left Mrs Simpson free to marry was settled in a court in my hometown of Ipswich. The King’s younger brother took his place.

I was a pupil at the Northgate School at the time and we were all given ‘time off’ to cycle down to the Cornhill and, in front of the Town Hall, hear Ipswich’s Mayor proclaim the former Duke of York to be our new monarch, King George VI. Two years later, joining the Territorial Army at the age of 17, I took an oath, ‘to defend his Majesty King George VI, and all his lawful heirs and successors, according to the conditions of my service’.

It was, I think, generally known at the time that the new King had an impediment in his speech that he was struggling to overcome. I have a vague memory of hearing him on the radio (only we called it ‘the wireless’ in those days!) not long after his accession and thinking that his speech wasn’t at all bad. Had I not heard that he had an impediment I might not even have noticed it. He certainly never shirked his duty of public speaking. One well-remembered radio speech was his Christmas broadcast in 1939, made when Britain had been at war for just three months.

On that occasion he quoted from ‘God knows’ a poem by Edwardian poet and scholar Minnie Louise Hoskins:

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown’, and he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way’.

Not, I think, a bad message for a nation embarked on the second world war of the twentieth century. It is also a message (just look at it!) that contains plenty of those words, beginning with a consonant, that those with speech impediments find so difficult. I think that George VI was a man thrust into a position that he hadn’t wanted and for which he hadn’t been prepared, at one of the darkest periods of British history – and that he filled that position with distinction.

Although I suppose that my egalitarian political views could be described as ‘well left of centre’, I have never been a Republican, and think that there is a lot to be said for having a Head of State who is free of all political party entanglements. How else can that be achieved except by a hereditary, constitutional monarchy? Yes, I would prefer ours to follow the Scandinavian model – but that’s another matter!

‘Naught for your Comfort’

As we come to the beginning of the second month of 2011, the pain of the government’s savage cuts to the public services is beginning to be felt locally. A recent issue of the daily Coastal Gazette has as its lead story the outrage of Tendring Beach Hut owners (in Clacton, Frinton, Walton, Dovercourt and Brightlingsea) at an increase in the annual charge for their hut sites of four percent for Tendring District residents and of eight percent for outsiders.

The most enormous increase though is on the one-off fee payable to the Council when a beach hut changes ownership. This leaps from a not-inconsiderable £75.29 to a staggering £360 – an increase of 378 percent!

These increases, hut owners say, will kill the tourist trade. And so they may – but they are only among the circumstances that will damage the holiday and tourist trade. The increase in rail fares and the unprecedented increase in the cost of petrol and diesel, will make visiting our holiday coast increasingly expensive. At the very least it will mean that when visitors get here they will have less to spend on meals, drinks, accommodation and seaside entertainment that is also inevitably becoming more and more expensive.

A recent correspondent to the weekly Clacton Gazette couldn’t understand why people were making such a fuss about a 2.5 percent increase in VAT. Food isn’t subject to this tax, he pointed out, and it simply meant that an object that pre-increase had cost £1 would now cost £1 and two-point-five pence, surely a price rise that everyone will be able to manage.

Perhaps so, though these days there isn’t much that you can buy for £1! It would certainly make expensive items even more expensive. It has to be remembered too that although food and some other items are VAT free, they still have to be brought to the supermarket, outfitter or departmental store that sells them. Soaring fuel prices (including both petrol duty and VAT!) and the rising cost of spare parts and maintenance will mean that prices of VAT-free as well as VAT-liable items will rise. Purchasers of VAT-liable items will be doubly penalised.

The issue of the Coastal Gazette that carries the story of the disgruntled beach hut owners also tells its readers that Tendring Council is all set to cut £100,000 from its grants to voluntary organisations and charities. John Walton, Chairman of the Jaywick Community Forum is reported as saying ‘The implications of these cuts in the deprived area we operate in are enormous’. Ian Archibald, from the Tendring Furniture Scheme (a voluntary organisation supplying donated used furniture to needy home-makers) said that the cutting of voluntary services would see people ending up in hospital or in prison, and the total overall cost would be likely to be higher. No wonder the government is officially urging us all to give more to charity. They know that their cuts to local government finances are indirectly depriving charities and voluntary organisations from carrying out vital work in their local areas.

There will be more bad news to come. We haven’t yet heard how meals-on-wheels and other social services to the old and disabled will be affected. I am only thankful that, so far at least, I haven’t needed those services.

If only there were news from other economic areas to give us a glimmer of hope. There isn’t. Unemployment, especially youth and graduate unemployment, is rising while – at the same time – the government is making it easier for those over 65 to ‘carry on working’, and is trying to get the disabled off benefit and back into work. Inflation is rising towards 5 percent and the Bank of England is – so far at least – reluctant to raise interest rates (their usual solution) because of the effect that this would have on economic growth. Meanwhile wage settlements, where there are any, are below the level of inflation so that all of us are, in effect, worse off.

Finally we learn that the economy, that had been confidently expected to continue to grow, if at a reduced rate, had in fact shrunk during the closing months of 2010, raising once more the spectre of a ‘double dip’ recession. Messrs Cameron and Osborne assure us that this was due to the appalling weather at the end of the year. Perhaps - but independent observers are a little sceptical of this explanation.

I am beginning to feel that our national politicians, on both sides of ‘the House’, have little idea of the full nature, extent and effect of the current economic situation and no clear idea at all about how best to remedy it! I am reminded of a couple of lines from G.K. Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse about the struggle of King Alfred and his army against the Danish invaders over a thousand years ago.

I tell you naught for your comfort. Nay, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet, and the sea rises higher.

There is little consolation in the fact that The Ballad of the White Horse has a happy ending!

Our Middle East Peace Envoy

This week I have read with interest a report by Symon Hill in ‘The Friend’, a Quaker Weekly Journal, about Tony Blair’s (our Middle East Peace Envoy) second appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry about the causes and conduct of the Iraq War.

Roderick Lyme, described by Symon Hill as ‘the panel’s most combative member’ said that the way in which the decision was made to invade Iraq was crucially important to many of those who declared in the run-up to the invasion that it was ‘not in my name’. I am proud to be able to say that among them – and among the million who marched protest in vain in early 2003 - were my two sons, daughters-in-law and grandsons!

Quoting cabinet minutes Mr Lyme said that despite the fact that Tony Blair had assured President Bush that Britain was prepared for war, there had been no ‘substantive discussion’ about Iraq between April and September 2002. ‘At what point were you actually asking the cabinet to make decisions?’ Incredibly the answer was that the ministers knew military action was being considered due to stories in the media. Asked if it would have been better to include more ministers in decision-making, Mr Blair replied ‘It would not have made a great deal of difference. I had the right people there’. Well, of course. He had appointed them and could have dismissed them had they proved ‘unreliable’! No, he hadn’t told George Bush that he had received formal advice that the invasion would be illegal. ‘It would have started raising doubts about whether we were really with them.’

Symon Hill says that the members of the panel were far more confrontational this time than they had been at the earlier hearing. Nevertheless, the protestors present weren’t satisfied. Tony Blair should stand trial for war crimes, they said.

Hadn’t they grasped the essential principle of international affairs – that the only top people who have to face war crimes tribunals are those of the losing side. If it were otherwise there would never be any wars – and we couldn’t have that, could we? It would ruin our flourishing arms trade!

‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’!

Regular blog readers will recall that last year my good friends Kornelia and Andreas Kulke of Zittau (the small German town where I was once a PoW but have now found warmth and friendship) sent me a personalised pictorial calendar with a photo of their two lovely children on each page. Hung up in my kitchen/living room, it was a calendar to which my eyes have been drawn every day; a sure antidote for depression induced by gloomy news headlines and bulletins!

Now, thanks again to Konni and Andreas, the 2011 edition of that same calendar has taken its place. The two children (my honorary German nephew and niece!) are a year older. Little Maja will be five towards the end of September this year and her young brother Tom will be two at the beginning of the same month.

Aren’t they cheering and inspiring? It must have been of children like these that Jesus told his disciples, ‘Allow the little children to come to me. Don’t forbid them; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’.

Week 4 2011 25 Jan.2011

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘There is no new thing under the sun’

The author of the Old Testament’s Ecclesiastes exaggerated a little when he made the assertion above. However it is amazing how often, brilliant new ideas turn out to have been tried in the past – sometimes with success, sometimes with failure.

Take the English Baccalaureate for instance. This is an exam aimed at obtaining a broadly based educational standard for school leavers. Candidates will be expected to achieve at least ‘C’ level in five subjects – Maths, English, a foreign language, two sciences and either History or Geography. It seems that only 16 percent of sixteen year olds taking their GCSE exams last year achieved the Baccalaureate standard. That though, is hardly surprising, as that standard had yet to be set and many candidates hadn’t even studied the subjects required!

In the 1930s I was one of the privileged minority who went to a secondary school and stayed at school until I was sixteen. The majority of my contemporaries were thrown onto the Labour Market at fourteen. We studied for and, before leaving, took what was called the University General Schools Certificate Examination. We had to take English (language and literature). Mathematics (arithmetic, algebra and geometry), a foreign language (French was the only one taught at my school), and at least two other subjects one of which had to be a science. Those who achieved the pass mark of 40 percent in five subjects, including the compulsory ones, passed the exam. Those who achieved a credit mark (50 percent) in those five subjects were awarded ‘Matriculation exemption’ – exemption from the entrance exam of the University (in our case London University) setting and marking the examination.

The examiners were granted a little latitude in deciding who had passed, who had failed and who had matriculated. I, for instance, was awarded Matric exemption even though I only achieved a Pass Mark in French, because I had a credit mark in five other subjects, including a Distinction – the highest mark – in English and History.

I took English, Maths, French, History, Geography and General Physics. The last of these was my science subject. It could have been tailor-made for me. It was guaranteed to be about general principles only – no nasty problems involving the use of maths!

I didn’t go to University. My parents couldn’t afford it. There were a limited number of scholarships in those days but neither grants nor loans. In any case the only working class boys that I knew who had been to university became either teachers or priests and neither profession had any appeal for me.

The General Schools Examination of the 1930s may not have been called a Baccalaureate but it was surely remarkably similar to one. No, we didn’t receive any vocational education. School education was aimed at turning us into literate and numerate adolescents, with some knowledge of the world’s history and geography and of our own country’s culture. Vocational education was something one acquired after leaving school and was primarily our employers’ responsibility.

I wonder whether today’s state education has the same goals – or is it aimed at preparing young people for futures as docile Human Resource Units (HRUs), the third millennial equivalent of medieval serfs and of the blue-overalled ‘proles’ of George Orwell’s ‘1984’; with no purpose in life beyond making fortunes for more privileged people, and no leisure interests beyond boozing, promiscuous sex, football, celebrity-worship, video games, and the lottery?

How the Magi got there!

A fortnight ago, I included in this blog a photo I had taken of the ‘Christmas Crib’ at Clacton’s St. James Church, depicting the ‘Epiphany’; the arrival in Bethlehem of the ‘three wise men’ bearing their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. On Sunday 16th January, my younger son Andy, with his wife Marilyn, visited Southwark Cathedral and has sent me a picture of the depiction of the Epiphany there. It certainly is very splendid – but I reckon that for a parish church in a small provincial town, St James’ effort has few rivals.

All of this made me think of the monologues that my wife Heather and I wrote nearly ten years ago giving imaginary accounts by ‘ten witnesses’ of their experience of the Nativity. These monologues were, in any case, in my mind. A friend of a friend in Germany, who was very enthusiastic about them, had recently translated all ten into German! Among those ‘witnesses’ was the ‘caravan captain’ who had guided the Magi to Bethlehem – and safely home again. It occurred to me that it might interest blog readers. So here it is, complete with a preamble that I wrote at the time of publication.

The Caravan Captain

‘The Caravan Captain’ was another of our wholly imaginary characters. The three Magi (St. Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t say that there were three of them – that has been inferred from the three gifts) must have come ‘from the East’ in some kind of a caravan, which must have had some kind of organiser and guide.

We invented the thoroughly professional Hussein, whose caravans were renowned for getting to their destination ‘on time and intact’, to fulfil this role. He provided the common sense, which the ‘wise men’ for all their wisdom, seem to have lacked. This is his story.

I’ve heard them described as ‘three kings’ – a ridiculous idea! Can you imagine three kings travelling together in a camel caravan for as much as a couple of miles without falling out, and probably starting a minor war? ‘Three wise men’ is closer though, as you’ll hear, in the ways of the world they weren’t all that wise.

No, they were three Magi, men who claim to be able to look into the future, read and interpret the movement of the stars and to have a lot of other mysterious powers. Their skills are much sought after in Persia. Consequently they’re pretty wealthy, which is how they were able to hire my services.

Me? I’m a professional caravan captain. From Baghdad to far Byzantium, ask any regular traveller. He’ll tell you, ‘Hussein’s caravans get there on time – and intact’. I get the camels together, supervise the loading, plan the route, guide the caravan to its destination and hire sufficient reliable armed guards to deter and, if necessary, fight off any attack.

I needed them too, for the project for which the three magi had engaged me. They wanted me to take them to Judaea to welcome a new king who was to be born there. According to them he was to be a very special king, whose arrival would change the whole world. Judaea, by the way, is a little place way out west. You have to pass through some real bandit country to get there. I suppose that it was the splendour of the Magi’s dress and equipment that made the ignorant and poverty-stricken natives imagine that they must be three kings.

It was just the worst time of the year for a long journey but I got the caravan together and found a few other travellers who were going that way and were glad of our protection. The modest fee that I charged them added to my profits of course. Eventually we were ready and we set out.

Well, we got there without losing a camel, a traveller or any of the travellers’ goods – and we got safely home again! Hussein’s caravans always do. It was touch and go though and once or twice I found myself regretting having accepted the Magi’s gold.

The worst moments arose when we reached Judaea. It is part of the Roman Empire of course but there was a kind of sub-King there, Herod was his name, on whom my Magi insisted on calling to pay their respects and to ask for advice. They needed to get to Bethlehem, where they believed the new king was to be born. They wanted Herod’s help in getting there.

Well, I know the way to Bethlehem, of course. I had strongly advised them to give Jerusalem, Herod’s capital, a miss. You’d have thought that they would have realized that no king, however unimportant, is likely to welcome news of a potential rival in his little kingdom – especially a king who is going to change the world! They took no notice of me. They said that courtesy demanded a social call. It’s my belief that after weeks ‘on the road’, they had hoped to be invited to a slap-up meal in palatial surroundings.

And so they were. They enjoyed their evening of luxury and Herod enjoyed hearing about the baby who was to be the new King of Judaea. He asked them if, when they found the new king, they would let him know, so that he could come and pay appropriate homage. Would you believe it, in their innocence, they had promised to do just that!

While my bosses had been wining and dining with the mighty, I’d been having a cosy chat with some of the palace staff. They were willing enough to talk for a few shekels once they had satisfied themselves that I wasn’t one of the king’s spies. They told me that Herod the Great was a cruel and unprincipled cut-throat who thought nothing of murdering members of his own family if they thwarted him. Fat chance a new baby king would have with Herod looking out for him.

We hastened on to Bethlehem. I doubled the guard at night and told the sentries to look out for anyone following us who might be a spy or an assassin.

Well, they found their baby all right and handed over to his parents the expensive gifts that they had brought – gold, frankincense and myrrh. I looked in on them. The father was in early middle age and – I thought – probably a pretty successful artisan. The mother was a lovely girl, still a teenager I’d have said, and as welcoming and courteous to me as she was to my wealthy clients. The baby was lovely too – he seemed to have a special smile for me – almost as though he understood my problems! He didn’t look much like any king I’ve ever seen though. I enjoyed my brief visit and it saddened me to think that the whole family were almost certainly destined to be slaughtered by a power-drunk tyrant.

Next morning though, events really made me begin to believe for the first time, in the Magi’s superhuman powers. We were to pack up immediately and get out of Judaea as quickly as possible, giving Herod’s Jerusalem a wide berth. At the same time I learned that the parents, with their baby, were packing up and heading for safety in Egypt. I hope that they got there and missed the blood-bath that I was told followed our departure.

I wonder if I shall ever hear of them again?

Times – and attitudes – change!

One would expect attitudes toward marriage and child-birth to have changed in the 2,000 years that have passed since Christ’s Nativity. Listening to the current debate about maternity leave and paternity leave made me realize how much such attitudes have changed in the last half-century! In the 1940s and ‘50s it was normal for couples planning to live together to get married, and for the husband to be the breadwinner, the wife the home-maker. Quite a few young women continued working for the first year or so of marriage but, once children arrived, most of them (some at least, with a sigh of relief!) found that making a comfortable and welcoming home and bringing up children was, in itself, a satisfying and sufficient career.

No doubt as a result of this, a great many potentially brilliant women scientists, public servants and entrepreneurs were lost to society. On the other hand, because mums were always at home to welcome their offspring (and to keep a watchful eye on their activities!), there was much less juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancy, juvenile drunkenness and drug-taking, and occurrence among juveniles of sexually transmitted disease. There were too, far fewer broken homes and far fewer single mums in those days. Things were very different. It will be for future historians to decide whether they were better or worse.

As for maternity and paternity leave; I took a week or two off work when my sons were born in 1953 and 1955, but I fully expected to have to deduct that from my annual holiday entitlement of, at that time, three weeks. Heather, of course, never thought for a moment of any career other than that of bringing up our two sons and 'Keeping the Home Fires burning’. She was a great success at both!

Week 3 18.1.11

Tendring Topics…….on Line

The Cost of Disillusion

As we move into the second decade of the third millennium, I don’t remember ever before experiencing such general disillusion with all politicians and with all political parties, as there is today.

The Conservative-dominated coalition leaps in impetuously to right wrongs, redistribute power, build a fairer society – and ends up either bogged down (rather like the French cavalry at Agincourt!) or producing the direct opposite of their stated intention. They were going to save millions of pounds by getting rid of all the Quangos, until they discovered that for the most part Quangos were doing a worthwhile job. The most that could be done was merge some of them or pass their functions on to some other body.

They were going to abolish the bureaucratic NHS Primary Care Authorities and hand their responsibilities over to ‘the doctors’ in their areas. But ‘the doctors’ have plenty to do caring for the sick. They don’t want to take on the administrative tasks of the PCAs. They are combining into area consortia, creating little bureaucracies of their own.

They were going to stem the great flow of overseas immigrants – but farmers and others couldn’t function without the foreign workers prepared to undertake tasks that no Brit cared to do. They were going to reduce the power of the government and hand it over to ‘local communities’. They haven’t handed over a single function of central government but they have taken power away from local authorities – the elected representatives of local communities!

They were going to curb the power of the bankers – especially those whose irresponsibility and incompetence had been the immediate cause of our financial woes, who had been saved from bankruptcy with our money, but who were proposing to continue handing themselves five-figure bonuses. If only the government had been prepared to back up fiery words with effective action! The confrontation between bankers and the government was reminiscent of the medieval struggles between church and state – except that the conflict is now between the representatives of the British people and the High Priests of Mammon. The struggle isn’t quite over as I write these words but, whatever face-saving words may be used to make defeat sound like victory, I have little doubt that it will be Mammon who will come out on top.

The Lib-Dems? They had to pay too higher price to become junior partners in a coalition government. Instinctively ‘green’ and ‘Europhile’, they find themselves allied with Climate Change denying Europhobes like our (Clacton) MP, and compelled to support policies to which, up to the day of the election, they were strongly opposed. Student fees, for example, and control orders for suspected terrorists. Poor old Vince Cable was humiliated for saying, in what he had imagined was a private conversation, that he had ‘declared war on Rupert Murdoch’ (well, It was certainly time someone did!). He was replaced by someone whose impartiality had been demonstrated by unequivocal support for the Murdoch media empire!

Altogether I can see little hope of either coalition partner changing ‘The good old law, the ancient plan, that he shall take who hath the power – and he shall keep who can!’

As for the Labour Opposition – I think that Ed Milliband is probably doing his best to breathe new life into his Party. However, I can’t forget that under New Labour the yawning gap between the incomes of the rich and poor widened; we were dragged into two unwinnable wars by blindly following the most reactionary American president in living memory; the infamous ‘Right to Buy’ legislation that had turned urban municipal housing into slums and destroyed rural communities, remained on the statute book; while New Labour’s leaders took their holidays in the palatial residences of their multimillionaire friends! No wonder Lord Mandelson, who – with Mr Osborne, our present Tory Chancellor – had enjoyed the hospitality of a millionaire friend on his luxury yacht, told the press that he ‘had no problem with billionaires!’

I very much fear that the time is ripe for the emergence on the scene of a young, energetic and charismatic politician, with brawny and heavy-booted supporters, who will promise to get rid of venial and self-serving politicians, and the ‘alien riffraff taking our jobs and threatening our culture’, cut our ties with Europe, establish comradely links with Sarah Palin’s ‘Tea-Party’ warriors in the USA, and lead Britain on a new path – toward the kind of future that would have brought joy to the hearts of Hitler and Mussolini! We must be thankful that so far at least, neither the BNP nor UKIP have leaders of that malignant quality.

Footnote – The clear winner of the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election was disillusion. 48 percent of the electorate voted. This means that those who didn’t vote (52 percent) were in a majority. Your guess about the motives of those who did vote is as good as mine. I think it likely though that a great many of the votes secured by the winning candidate were cast against the coalition partners rather than for New Labour.

Disaster strikes Ipswich?

As I switched my tv set on a few mornings ago, the news reader was saying ‘…and Ipswich has been inundated, with 2,000 families rendered homeless’.

I wasn’t at my brightest at that time but it was amazing how many thoughts flashed through my mind in what was probably less than half a minute. I was back in memory to January 1939. Heavy snow and prolonged frost had been succeeded by a rapid thaw with torrential rain. The Gipping Valley had been inundated. The wooden road bridge at Sproughton, a few miles up stream from Ipswich, had been swept away. My family’s home was safe enough but there was severe flooding of low-lying streets in parts of the town. Was this scene from the past being re-enacted with even more flooding than before?

Of course not. I had momentarily forgotten that there is another Ipswich, in Queensland, Australia, not far from Brisbane. That was the town that was under water. It was, in fact, part of an inundated area in north-eastern Australia larger than the combined areas of France and Germany!

Australia is part of the Commonwealth with which we have historical and cultural ties. Some of us have friends and/or relations there. It is hardly surprising that it has been the flooding there that has received most British news media coverage. It is though by no means the only part of the world to have endured almost identical disaster. Sri Lanka and Brazil suffered far more human casualties than Australia and although the flood waters have now receded in Pakistan, the havoc that they wrought remains – and is likely to remain for months, perhaps years, to come.

This is no coincidence. Although the Meteorologists, wary of making a false prediction, say that it is too early to be certain of the cause of these floods, it seems to me to be evident that global warming is responsible. The vast expanse and volume of water in the southern oceans (Atlantic, Pacific, Indian) has warmed up, resulting in more evaporation and a moisture-filled lower atmosphere. At the same time adjacent land masses – South America, Australia, the Indian sub-Continent – have warmed up even more. The warm air above these land masses, rises and is replaced by moisture-filled air from the ocean. As this moisture-filled air cools, particularly when flowing over mountains, the water vapour precipitates as torrential, and potentially devastating rain. It is what happens already in the southern Asian Monsoon.

Climate change deniers delighted in telling us that the bitterly cold weather we experienced in November and December proved beyond doubt that Global warming was a myth, propagated by scaremongers. On the contrary, our icy weather may well have been a result of world-wide warming. We know that the polar ice-caps are melting. Tens of thousands of gallons of fresh water, only just above freezing point, are being precipitated into the North Atlantic daily. I don’t know whether, as some believe, this is affecting the flow of the Gulf Stream on which North-Western Europe’s normally equable climate depends. I am quite sure though that it must have a cooling affect on the waters of the North Atlantic, thus making our winters colder.

I think it likely that weather in Britain will become more extreme. At least until all the polar ice cap disappears, our will winters continue to become colder. Our summers will be cool and cloudy while the prevailing wind direction remains from the west or south-west. When it changes to coming from an easterly or south-easterly direction it will, perhaps only briefly, become abnormally hot.

Unless or until we take Climatic Change seriously that is the future to which we can look forward.

Double Opportunity for Harwich

Last year Tendring Council failed to secure a government grant for Harwich because Essex was considered to be too prosperous a county. Perhaps, overall, it is, but the Tendring District certainly has areas of severe deprivation, parts of Harwich, Clacton and Jaywick among them.

Harwich at least, could have a brighter future. The Council has launched a £5 million bid to attract the wind farm industry to the town. The idea is to build a skills and business centre to support an ever-growing industry. The ultimate aim is to make Harwich a major centre for the maintenance and manufacture of Wind Turbines. The historic port is internationally known as a staging post between England and the Continent and is well placed to serve the now-established wind farm offshore at Clacton and the developing farms both to the north, in the Thames estuary and off the coast of Kent. Councillor Neil Stock, the Council’s leader, says that such a development could result in up to 40,000 jobs and add hundreds of millions of pounds to Harwich’s economy.

The home. in Kings Head Street, of Christopher Jones, master of The Mayflower

To turn this dream into a reality the Council is again applying for a grant – this time from a £1.5 billion regeneration fund established by the government to help areas hit by public service cuts. Mr Stock says that this time they are quietly optimistic as they prepare a compelling case for a grant.

I very much hope they succeed, not only for Harwich but for the future of Western Europe. Quite apart from the need for sources of reliable renewable energy to combat climate change, we have to realize that the world’s reserves of oil and gas are finite. Alternative energy sources must be found well before they run out, or become so difficult to secure that they become prohibitively expensive.

In the meantime are you happy about the fact that most of our oil comes from the always volatile Middle East and our gas from reservoirs in Siberia?

The 2012 Olympics may well give Harwich another economic opportunity. The port is already well-known on the Continent as a gateway into Britain. It could become Britain’s main staging post to the Olympics. From the town there are direct rail and road routes to the Olympics stadium at Stratford, avoiding the need to pass through London. I hope that our Tourist Authorities will publicise that fact among our mainland neighbours and EU partners, and make sure that there is adequate first class hotel accommodation for those who wish to use our area either as a staging post or a base.

Harwich’s historic ‘Three Cups’ Inn. Lord Nelson and Emma, Lady Hamilton are said to have stayed there and in the 14th Century, Queen Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer are said to have obtained horses here before going on to defeat her husband King Edward II. Has Harwich a bright future as well as a colourful past?