Regular readers of this column might correctly make the supposition that I have often little time for politicians, of any party; less tolerance for some than others, admittedly, but my tolerance is at best not high.
Specific ones are very good and work hard but as a breed they can be highly annoying, which is why I do make a habit of not listening to any political question-and-answer programmes; they lie, evade the question, exaggerate, deflect or blame someone else. Their answers are rarely illuminating, and unfailingly bad for my blood pressure.
As an aside, I feel I should say that all our current crop of local MPs seem very good, at least from my point of view, which involves scanning Hansard looking for relevant stories to report. This includes the Tories, Karen Bradley in Biddulph and Aphra Brandreth, whose Chester and Eddisbury constituency reaches oddly round our area in a weird way, like Mr Tickle’s extraordinarily long arms trying to reach a victim. The exception is Esther McVey. Bonkers.
However, inadvertently this week, while on the school run, I was unfortunate enough to catch Kemi Badenoch pontificating on the BBC, and she had me shouting at the radio within seconds.
Badenoch (who seems a decent person, a bit like Biddulph’s Karen Bradley, so I’m going to call her Kemi from now on) was whibbling on about the current situation in Iran.
The first of her assertions was that we should not need to rely on foreign oil and gas, and should start extracting more from the North Sea.
This always sounds like a really sensible idea until it is introduced to reality, in which case it shrivels up and dies.
This is because new wells are expensive, take years and years to start producing, and most of our oil and gas go for export anyway. Moreover, we do not set the prices – these are determined on the global market. On top of that, our production is small and does not affect international markets. Riddle the North Sea with holes as much as you like, but we won’t get cheaper fuel. Aside from all this, Kemi was bang on … sarcasm aside, she was talking crap.
Then she made it worse, and started banging on about net zero.
This is easy to knock, as everyone knows it’s a cause beloved of the misguided woke, who are to blame for all the world’s ills (except when they are nurses, doctors, teachers, scientists, social workers, artisan brewers or anyone else who thinks of wider society ahead of themselves).
The reality is that not only will net zero reduce our contribution to climate change, cheering up the woke, it will also reduce our reliance on foreign imports.
One of the main benefits of net zero is that we will no longer be reliant on overseas power, as the miserable British weather is able to produce lots of wind and we mysteriously receive enough sun for solar. If only we could capture the energy of falling raindrops, we’d be laughing.
Net zero, which Kemi doesn’t like, and energy security, which she does, are but two sides of the same coin. Net zero will reduce our input to climate change but also our reliance on oil from troubled areas of the world, or at least areas of the world where Donald Trump (the only man in recent history to make people think “Yeah, go Iran!”) decides he needs to bomb, because he’s puddled.
As this is being written, 11.40am on Wednesday, 11th March, 76.6% of our country’s energy is coming from sources of power that foreign wars and mines in the Straits of Hormuz can’t touch: renewables. Solar is supplying 20% of our energy, wind 55.9% and hydroelectric 0.8%. Nuclear is at 7.7% and biomass 4.5%. Gas is producing just 7.6%. We are buying energy from Belgium, Denmark and France but selling it back to Ireland, the Netherlands and Norway. Over the past week, wind has provided 60.6% of the nation’s energy. I will avoid any joke about politicians and hot air.
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We have carried several stories recently about the poor postal service, and people complaining about it being a local issue.
It is not a local issue. We perhaps should have dug deeper.
Royal Mail has apparently instructed the staff to deliver parcels ahead of letters, because it makes more money. A postman told me this; I wasn’t quite sure how true it was (although posties are usually spot on), but the Business and Trade Committee at the House of Commons (decent MPs doing a good job) has taken Royal Mail to task.
Liam Byrne, committee chair, wrote: “Concerns have been repeatedly raised that Royal Mail appears to be prioritising parcels over letters … There have also been suggestions that in some cases Royal Mail deliberately chooses not to deliver letters until a ‘batch’ of mail is ready to be delivered to that address. This alleged practice of ‘batching’ letters, if true, clearly risks customers missing important time-sensitive information such as medical appointments, as well as impacting upon Royal Mail’s delivery performance.”
Royal Mail has responded with, not surprisingly, bullshit. You can tell the allegations are true because the company response expends many words saying how good it is, briefly answers the questions, then expends many more words saying how good it will be.
It does answer some questions directly, because it has to. Ofcom’s new target is 99% of mail being delivered no more than two days late, and Royal Mail is currently delivering 96.6% of first class mail within three working days and 98.4% of second class within five working days, three and five both being bigger than two.
“We do not operate a general policy of prioritising parcel deliveries” it writes, except: “in exceptionally busy periods .. or when we are faced with short-term resourcing issues.”
Given that they are always short-staffed, that would be most of the time, then.
