Monday 17 October 2011

Rebel Without A Clue

There's an advert for npower which starts by saying how much they want to reduce our bills. I think after the news that fuel prices have gone up by 18 per cent this week, we all know this is patently rubbish. Why do they bother saying this?
A man from British Gas on TV argued plaintively that the company only make £60 profit a year from people paying by direct debit. Which suggests they make a lot more from all those people who don't pay by direct debit which, experience tells us, is the poor, the elderly and the unemployed.
Nice to know where they see the greatest profits.
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I'm all for a bit of a demo. I used to go on a few and they were great. Anti-apartheid, save the GLC, CND. You used to get a good turnout - 250,000 at one they said (and the police said there were 40,000 so there must have been a lot).
And the bands. The Jam playing unannounced off the back of a lorry and then, five minutes later, The Spinners walking on the march in woolly jumpers playing some old folkie nonsense.
And I always thought British demos had a bit more grit and a lot less staged drama than American ones.
We could never do a million man march here or a Woodstock but put The Damned on stage at Brockwell Park immediately followed by Madness in the days when they attracted a good skinhead following and it made for fireworks.
But now? Now you ask the country to occupy the city and you get 200 middle class kids outside a wedding at St Paul's who even have the good manners to applaud the bride and groom as they come out.
They can't occupy the City itself because, unlike Wall Street, a lot of the roads aren't public thoroughfares officially. So they have to go to St Paul's, on a weekend, when there's no bankers.
And have you seen who's there? A collection of vicar's daughters and middle aged teachers who haven't the foggiest.
I'm sorry, but it's not going to bring down the system. The system had packed up and gone to the country for the weekend and didn't even realise they were there.
I caught a few of the demonstrators interviewed on the wireless. They were rubbish. One girl - I shouldn't make assumptions but I bet she was once head girl at a very good home counties grammar - actually stated that most poor people in Britain were 'literally' living off nothing but baked beans. No, really.
Then when the interviewer asked another spotty kid (and even though it was radio you could tell she was spotty) what they wanted, she said she was protesting against mortgages being so high.
Honestly. Mortgages are now among the lowest they've ever been.
If anyone was going to protest against anything involving the obscene wealth of the city it should be cardigan wearing grannies and those who have paid off their mortgages because it's savings that are affected far more than borrowing.
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A word in support of MPs. No, really. There will be some fuss about MPs having another five days off in November. But actually it's just five days off from Westminster. Not actually five days holiday per se.
The thing is, some MPs won't see it like that and they'll be on the first plane to a mate's house in the Med.
But then there are those with school age kids who will not. And many others, like my old mate Teresa Pearce, who is an MP in South London, will welcome the break from Westminster for a completely different reason as it will give her another five days to do constituency work.
You see, there are a lot of freeloading politicians on both sides of the house but there are also a lot who really do spend a lot of their working time helping their constituents deal with problems and less time on TV shows.
It would be nice if they were all like that, but that's not how it works these days.
During the height of the expenses scandal, a few papers managed to find a handful of MPs who had not made any outrageous claims. And the story, of course, was that there were so few that could be found.
If MPs want to be taken a bit more seriously may I suggest one thing. If you are going to take another five day break from Westminster, don't call it a holiday.
We already have lists of who attends the most debates and votes. But that doesn't explain what they are doing when they are not there - it's perfectly feasible that many are doing something worthy somewhere else.
But let's find out.
At the end of the year, let's list every vacation taken by every MP of all sides and we can see for ourselves how much 'holiday' they actually have.
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And if that wasn't surprising enough, a word in support of Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail. His speech to the Leveson Inquiry was not as funny as Kelvin's but a lot of it made sense. Though his claim to be more of a broadsheet than the red-tops was slightly undermined by the online version of his paper that day in which I counted no fewer than five stories about Kim and the other Kardashians and four about The Only Way Is Essex.
However, I have to take issue with Alastair Campbell who described Dacre as poisoning democracy. I think he has the opposite effect. By polarising opinion, he brings out debate among the millions who hate the Daily Mail which stimulates democracy.
Alastair's way of dealing with this is to hide free copies of the Mail at airports. Which is, unfortunately, a very modern Labour Party way of winning an argument in recent years.
And after all, what could poison democracy more than, say, unelected civil servants sexing up an official intelligence document that leads to this country invading another under the false premise that they have weapons of mass destruction?
Perhaps we need some more demos. What do we want? A cup of tea actually....night night...Solly

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