Energy

Would you mind helping me out with something, oh reader?

I'm not sure how I feel about something, and I'd like to canvass some opinion. 

Here's the thing: every month, a direct debit for £89 whooshes silently from my bank account and into the coffers of NPower. In return for my £89, I have sockets which dispense electricity, lights which illuminate my family's home when we flick the switch, and toasty warm radiators when the temperature plummets in the winter months (for the record, it's not on yet, I've only got back into wearing trousers instead of shorts in the last fortnight).

A lot goes into that bill, you can see what proportion is spent on what by looking here.

Eighty-nine pounds. On the face of it, that doesn't seem too expensive for such a crucial product: energy. And it's not. When that bill lands on the mat, I groan, but not because it's really expensive. Just because it's a bill, and the only post I ever get is either telling me how much money is going into my account (not enough) how much is coming out (plenty) or how much is left (less than nothing, generally).

But we all need energy. Heating and lights are not things I would ever want to have to make do without (although there are those who do, and that's another blog post entirely). Energy is an essential. 

A socket, in my house, right now.

The thing I'm unsure of is this: do I think it's okay that the suppliers of our energy are making a shedload of money by selling it to us?

Today, Ed Milliband gave his speech to the Labour Party conference. In it, he said a Labour government would freeze the price of energy until 2017. Almost immediately, the Guardian (yes, sorry, I'm a bit lefty) comments section was full of people saying things like "it's a nice step in the direction of re-nationalisation" and others saying "re-nationalisation is just a return to the outdated politics of the 70s, when Labour fucked the country right up and there were power shortages".

Thing is, I don't remember the 70s, because I hadn't been born. I can well imagine that it was a bit shit, three day working weeks, strikes on all days ending in y, that sort of thing. But is there a reason, intrinsic to nationalisation, that the supply of energy couldn't be publicly owned? I don't know. What do you reckon?

What I see at the moment is a few, very large, companies who can pretty much charge what they want for energy, because what are we going to do about it? Unless we want a return to using candles to light our homes, to using an open fire to heat them, we can't decide we won't give one of the energy suppliers our custom. They can charge what they like, make as much money as they see fit, and we have very little say over it. That doesn't seem fair to me. 

But maybe it is. What do you think?

Purpose

I could probably write a post every single day about something a politician has said which has caused the urine in my bladder to approach boiling point. When I see what our elected officials are spouting the air in my vicinity adopts the vivid purple hue of a two day old bruise, as the blue from my swearing mixes with the crimson of my rage.

I don’t write those posts every day, because I don’t have the time. Or the inclination. Or the purpose.

Ah yes. Purpose. It’s not only me who lacks it. According to Childcare Minister Elizabeth Truss the nurseries of our nation are riddled with purposeless toddlers. Apparently, our approach needs to be more closely aligned with the French (yes, really, a Tory politician who thinks our continental cousins have something better than us).

Our nurseries are “chaotic settings, where children are running around”. How DARE THEY? Children, some as old as FOUR, with not even a hint of a schedule. Which means, of course, that by the time they get to primary school they are not prepared to sit down and listen to a teacher.

I’m sorry (I’m not), but what utter, utter tripe this is.

First off, let me say this: I want my child, and the children of others, to grow up in a world where they are allowed to be children. Actually, allowed? No. Encouraged. Being a child is amazing. Playing is amazing. All the fantastical things we believe as children which are driven out of us before our tenth birthday, Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, and all their friends, are great. Not having a care in the world is lovely, and it should last as long as possible.

Seriously, adults, just because we’ve signed up to a world model which requires constant growth which we have trouble sustaining, doesn’t mean we ought to be grooming our children to be part of it from ever earlier ages.

Second, has Elizabeth Truss ever seen how purposeful a two year old can be? Perhaps the nanny she employs to look after her kids could give her an insight into that one. Here is a brief video of Cam:

Looks pretty purposeful there, doesn’t he? Sure, the purpose he’s displaying might just be to remove as many tissues as possible from that box, but he seems pretty sure of that intention, right?

Cam’s not even two. He’s only just one. A purposeful one year old.

Like all other one and two year olds, his purpose is simple: learn through experience. Play. Discover. Explore. Interact with the world around him.

Be a baby. Be a toddler. Be a child.

Let the adults worry about having a purpose because, in all honesty, most of them probably haven’t worked theirs out yet.

Thatcher

Hear that rumble? It's the sound of a bandwagon, which I'm about to jump on. I've been deliberately staying away from this up until now, because I've been hearing all sorts of impassioned stuff. I didn't really feel I had anything to add when it comes to, you know, HER.

See, I'm a bit too young to remember what life was like when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. She was resident at Number 10 for the first eight years of my life, years where I was definitely more interested in the exploits of Optimus Prime than those of the Prime Minister.

Of course, as luck would have it, I lived in the South West of England, so my family wasn't being directly affected by things like the closure of coal mines. My dad was made redundant during her tenure, but not as a result of anything she did. Would I have understood or cared even if he had been?

So I wasn't old enough to have an opinion of the Iron Lady at the time she was exerting her will upon the nation, nor was I in one of the geographical areas most impacted by her policies. According to many, this means I'm not allowed an opinion on her now.

Well, sorry, but, no.

One of my ex-girlfriends lived in a shared house at university. Among her housemates was a young woman who would only watch films, or read books, which were set within her lifetime. Incredibly, anything prior to this was considered completely irrelevant to her. That's weird, right? Really weird?

I hold an opinion on Margaret Thatcher because she was important. She did big things. Changed the way a lot of people think. Wreaked havoc on whole swathes of the country and had no interest in hearing people's objections.

Some people have probably thought about (and cursed the name of) Margaret Thatcher every day for the last twenty years. I haven't. But I have thought about her in the last week, because:

- She was kind of a big deal
- She died
- It has been the top story for every media outlet ever since

Probably the most divisive political leader in living memory, and some people think we shouldn't be talking about her. Except that's not what it is, is it? The people who are resisting the negative comments about Thatcher are the people who believe that she saved the nation (and, for the record, I think anyone who sees no bad in her actions is a fool, but I also think her actions came at a time when something needed to be done, and big changes are never positive for everybody). These are the people who want to hear only praise. Probably, in large part, they are the people who did well during Thatcher's time in government.

Now, I have no desire to go to a party in celebration of anyone's death, that's a bit macabre for my tastes. Do the people staging these things think that somehow Lady T still had her hand on the steering wheel all these years? That the unwell old lady portrayed by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady was a cunning disguise? Maybe don't put your energy into celebrating Thatcher's death, put it into fighting against her ideological offspring's current style of government. Or, maybe, have a death party, I don't really mind. I also wouldn't mind if you were celebrating the death of someone whose politics align more closely with mine. It might be bad taste, but I don't find it offensive.

If Margaret Thatcher is now in some other plane of existence, watching down (or up…) on us I don't think she'd be offended. I might be too young to remember, but apparently she was quite a strong character.

PS - The alleged cost of the funeral though? That's taking the piss, especially with the "we're not telling you how much it cost until it's happened" line which the government are taking. No-one's funeral should cost that much. Silly.

Preference

Sorry, I know I'm a bit late to this party, but what about that David Davies?

He's a Tory MP, so it should come as little surprise to hear him saying something I disagree with. Par for the course that, and something I can usually bring myself to ignore. Good job really, since if I wasn't able to ignore the blatherings and blusterings of Tory MPs I'd probably collapse in on myself like an imploding star. The resultant black hole would probably be no good for people of any political preference.

Which leads me (sort of) to the specific thing David Davies was going on about which got me wound up enough to blog about it.

Preference.

We all have preferences. It would be a dull old world if we didn't. They're very personal for the most part. Some are less so, driven by a sense of right and wrong. There are also many, many things where people have no preference.

For example: Given the choice of kicking David Davies in the left shin or the right, I would have no preference. They would be equally enjoyable and amusing. There would be, as far as I can reasonably foresee, no advantage to doing one or the other.

Mr Davies told us on the weekend (in the midst of the wider, tedious discussions on gay marriage) that he "thinks most parents would prefer their children not to be gay".

This has been irritating me since I heard it.

He's not being homophobic by saying that you understand. He can't be homophobic, because he once sparred with a gay boxer. Not only that, he LIKES AND RESPECTS said gay boxer. Obviously this is the best argument in the world; I use a similar one when my mum asks why I don't like Brussels Sprouts: I can't dislike them, I ate one when I was seven.

Erm, anyway, he thinks parents would prefer their kids not to be gay because they want to be grandparents. My sister is gay. She has a four month old baby. For goodness sake David, this is 2012, of course gay people can have children.

But that's not the point. It isn't the role of anyone's child to simply pander to the whims of their parents. Even if Davies' statement is true (and I really, really hope it isn't) it doesn't matter one bit. Just ask the millions of dads who would prefer their sons to become professional footballers. What a parent might prefer and what is actually going to happen can (and probably should) be a world apart.

Among my list of non-preferences is the gender of the people my son ends up doing the naked pentathlon with. I honestly couldn't give a solitary shit. And if I did give a shit, I would hope I'll have raised my son well enough to know that he should tell me to fuck off.

Which is exactly what I'd prefer David Davies to do.

Re:shuffle

Dear son of mine, how nice it must be to be a baby. When you wake up singing every morning one or other parent (usually your mum, I'm not going to lie) comes into your room and is treated to a beaming smile. You are a happy little soul. Your only care in the world is the array of teeth jostling for position beneath your gums.

I envy you.

Soon enough you will wake up and watch the news. If you had done that this morning you'd have heard that a man in London, a man who shares your name but, with luck, nothing else, had made some changes to his team of Cabinet ministers which he'd be announcing later in the day.

You could have gone to work, wondering whether Mr Cameron had decided that the policies his government have pursued since their (sort of) election in 2010, the policies which caused his Chancellor to be booed by eighty thousand spectators at the London Paralympic Games last night, policies I believe are designed to alienate and demonise the disadvantaged people in our society in order to make the rest of the electorate think it's okay to remove the support the state gives them.

Deep down, you'd probably know that was unlikely. That Cameron wouldn't be changing his mind about the correctness of any of his party's policies. That the next two years will just feature more of the same.

More of DavCam's smug-faced, earnest assurances that everything they do is for the greater good. More of George Osborne's unbearable smirk in response to any questioning of his methods.

Actually, that's not strictly true. The changes to the Cabinet mean the next two years might be EVEN WORSE. Yay! The appointment of Jeremy Hunt to replace Andrew Lansley as Health Secretary could have implications for abortion rights (he doesn't like the idea of them being allowed more than twelve weeks into a pregnancy, okay ladies? I'm sure you'll understand). Not only that, Mr Hunt voted in favour of homeopathy hospitals. Maybe it's this vote that got him the job; infinitesimally small quantities of dubiously effective ingredients dissolved into lots of water are probably a cheaper treatment for cancer than the latest drugs, and we all know how important it is to reduce the deficit (it is, but is it really so hard to find some ways to do it that don't involve fucking over everyone on the way?)

There are other appointments, but, to be honest, I stopped paying too much attention. I already know I don't like the way the Tories vote on a wide range of issues. Putting a different, equally unqualified, Tory into a new role doesn't really mean anything more than a furtherance of the nastiness already happening. Same shits, different day.

The silver lining, I suppose, is that surely after another two years of this there won't be too many swing voters ticking the Tory box on their ballot? Labour may be (are) far from perfect, and I may never forgive the Liberal Democrats for looking like a real alternative and then capitulating to almost every Tory whim, but this current lot make my skin crawl. Make me want to divorce myself from the whole system, so low is my belief in it.

This isn't the first Tory government I've lived through, but it's the first I'll remember. I'm happy that you won't remember it Cam, because I want you to have whatever perfect happy thoughts are in your head now for as long as possible, and I'm pretty sure you're not dreaming about your namesake.

Parenting Classes

Here's what I think of the concept of parenting classes:

1.  Hi, my name's James and I'm a really shitty example of a parent.

I don't pay any attention to my kids, they do whatever the fuck they want most of the time. It was probably them who keyed the side of your car the other week, but I didn't tell them off. Shit, I don't even know if it was them who did it. I don't really care how they turn out, whether they have good morals, values and standards or any of that guff.

Apparently, that wanker David Cameron has decided I can get some parenting classes. I don't really know what they're about, I don't really care, because I sure as shit won't be going to any of them, because I'm a really shitty example of a parent.

2.  Hi, my name's Richard and I'm a good, average example of a parent.

I love my kids, I'm in touch with what they're up to most of the time. They get up to a bit of mischief every now and then, but they're given a telling off when they need it and they know right from wrong. I do my best to make sure they're being brought up right, and I think I'm doing a pretty good job.

Apparently, that wanker David Cameron has started rolling out parenting classes. They sound like a good idea, sometimes we all need a little help. But I've got friends who are also parents, all the books about parenting and I know where to go online to get advice I trust. I don't think I need classes on top of that, I mean, what can they tell us that isn't already easily available? Seems like it might be a waste of time and money.

3.  Hi, my name's Gideon and I've got a bank balance the size of a small African nation's GDP, I also have kids and I want what's best for them.

We have a full time nanny, who's very well qualified and always knows what to do when little Tarquin plays up. When the time comes he'll be off to boarding school, just like his daddy. They'll teach him all he needs to know, right up until he gets his place at Cambridge and becomes a board member at a blue chip firm.

Apparently that wanker David Cameron is going to waste a load of our money on some stupid parenting classes. Of course I won't be going; they'll no doubt be teeming with poor people.

4.  Hi, my name's David Cameron and I'm trying REALLY HARD to convince everyone that I think family is the most important thing in this country, while allowing my party to systematically strip away layer upon layer of the support networks that exist for vulnerable families at present.

I've introduced parenting classes because if I go on about loads of STUFF all the time no-one will notice that I'm not enough of a Tory to be good at that, but just enough of one to fuck up everything I touch.

We're all in this together, innit. Brrrrap.

So, where do I sign up, and what do you all think? Parenting classes, yay or nay?