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Of course he was barking mad: it’s obviously ridiculous to suggest, as a UKIP councillor did, that the appalling weather we’ve been suffering has been caused by God’s anger at the idea of marriage between couples who happen to be gay. The very idea. Clearly, the appalling weather we’ve been suffering has been caused by God’s anger at the way our society is turning on the poor, the sick, the unloved and unwanted. Could it be anything else?

Well, yes, it could. In fact, when you actually think about it, God has quite a lot to choose from if he or she wants to display his or her merciful wrath… forgetting the instruction about rich people, camels and eyes of needles, for example, or refusing to turn the other cheek, or adapting ‘suffer the little children to come unto me’ to ‘suffer the little children to come unto me so long as their parents aren’t foreign, poor, disabled or have a spare room, in which case the little children can fuck right off’.

In fact, the list is so long that God, poor thing, must be sitting on his or her cloud wondering what, in particular, he or she should choose to punish us for… War? Famine? EastEnders? Michael Gove? No wonder the almighty hasn’t got the time to sort out world peace and an end to want.

I don’t suppose God has got time to smite UKIP councillors either, because when he or she isn’t wondering what misdemeanour to punish us all for, he or she is having to listen to all those dull prayers from evangelists who believe they talk to God.

On the Today programme last week, a Christian was interviewed. He wrote to Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, the Guantanamo Bay prisoner believed to be responsible, in part, for planning the World Trade Centre terrorist outrages.

The Christian told his interviewer he’d talked to God about his plan to write the letter: ‘I said, hey, God…’ Now, if I was the almighty, I’d have smote the bugger on the spot for his impertinence, but the Lord or Lady obviously moves in mysterious ways, for instead of shouting “Leave me alone to deal with world peace and an end to want, you self-righteous little prick”, he or she apparently suggested the Christian should write to the Sheikh.

Which he did, filling a couple of pages with earnest entreaties about sharing the gospel and love of our lord Jesus Christ. Devious, the almighty. Nothing the Americans could come up with could compare with that for torture, could it?

The Sheikh replied, 36 pages of it, and nobody thought to suggest he ranted on for that long because he was so bloody irritated and patronised. They should have asked me. I know what it’s like to rant on uncontrollably.

I have no time for people of any faith who believe their faith requires them to tell other people what to do. On the other hand, I have every respect for people of faith who leave all that judging business to their god. People who, like the reverend Sister who is this place’s Spiritual Guide, believe in inclusion, conversation, love for all – the almighty, as our Sister once suggested to me, as a welcoming motherly figure in a celestial kitchen, up to her elbows in flour and baking, turning to the open door and saying ‘Come in love, the kettle’s on’.

Voices off

An interesting debate with Brother Yardie last week about BBC1’s The Voice. He said there was some real talent on display. Brother Fiddle and I said it was trite, banal, manufactured, autotuned, backing-tracked rubbish. Brother Yardie is right, though. There was genuine talent on display. The heartbreaking thing is that people believe a proper outlet for that genuine talent is hamming up gimmicky karaoke in front of Tom Jones, Kylie Minogue and Will I bloody Am.

Voices on the line

Thanks to everybody who wrote, phoned (!!), talked about or e-mailed kind comments following last week’s blog about the scandalous disgrace that is BT Open Reach.

I was particularly moved by the plights of two honorary sisters of this place, if they don’t mind me calling them that: Sister Animal Aunts was without phone or broadband from December 24 until yesterday. Despite various grand announcements from various BT Open Reach personnel that they would now ‘take ownership’ of her problems, and despite the fact that she was a ‘priority’ business customer, she was shut off from the outside world for 26 days.

And our Sister Librarian told me, with an understandable catch in her throat, of the week she and her husband both lost their mothers. As if that weren’t enough misery, they also lost their phone and broadband the day the first mum passed, and were told by an uninterested and uncaring BT Open Reach that it would take five ‘working days’ to reconnect them even though they had bereavement to deal with.

I would like to note that those Brothers and Sisters of this place who believe in the ideal of privatisation, who believe the market will solve all ills, haven’t so much as dared to squeak a syllable in defence of BT Open Reach’s status quo, nor have they attempted to explain to me how privatisation has enabled customer choice, for me, in the area of who supplies and maintains my phone and broadband line.

I would also like us all to remember that BT Open Reach still uses the archaic definition of ‘working days’ when it undertakes to repair within three ‘working days’, even though every other profession and service in the world works every day. And this definition, this undertaking, is itself a lie – a member of the management at BT Open Reach’s depot in Bodmin told me engineers had been working at weekends to cope with the level of faults.

The level of faults was, of course, ‘unprecedented’, just as the level of faults was the last time I had a problem, and the time before that. On the previous two occasions, interestingly, there had been no bad weather but the level of demand was still ‘unprecedented’. You’d think they’d have learnt something by now.

At the moment I’m explaining to BT precisely how much their wretchedly appalling service cost me, and they will pay. As they have before. I’ll let you know how we get on.

BT Open Reach generated £5 billion of revenue for the BT Group during 2012-13. Its chief executive answers to the chief executive of BT Group, though Open Reach’s brief is to provide a level playing field of network access to all phone and broadband providers. To be fair, it certainly achieves that: it provides a level playing field of abject mediocrity.

BT Open Reach contributed to reported BT Group profit of £2.5billion to March 2013; BT Group’s profits before tax were nearly £2.7billion. What did the group do with this largesse? Invest in employees to maintain a quality service to me, Sister Animal Aunts and Sister Librarian? No, it increased its final dividend per share to shareholders to 9.5p, up 14%. The shareholders got the cash; we got the lousy service.

And the outlook? BT Group is forecasting dividend per share increasing by between 10% and 15% between 2013-14 and 2014-15; revenue is forecast to grow to £6.3bn by 2015.

Imagine what all that money could do to deliver a reliable, safe, efficiently maintained nationwide superfast broadband service.

The companies that deliver water and power to our homes have a legal obligation to repair immediately there is a problem; when our main burst a couple of years ago, South West Water sent a man out at midnight to fix it within hours. In this day and age, when we all rely on communication, how can it be that BT Open Reach escapes this obligation? This, like our telephone lines, needs fixing right away.

Alternative voices

Finally, Brother Fiddle has a suggestion for you. Watch this: http://youtu.be/5fbvquHSPJU It’s long, but it’s a comprehensive take on modern economic theory and another explanation of why the capitalist free market model with which the world is presently inflicted is broken.