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What a very funny business this all is. I’ve just spent two days clearing the garage we inherited more than a year ago when we moved in here. Four carloads of stuff have gone to the dump, where I queued with lots of other people. All of us were chucking into a giant hole in the ground the things that other people once thought indispensible.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had less choice? If everything was the same boring bland grey? Then we’d all have the same stuff and none of us would be filling holes in the ground with more and more stuff.

But this is lunacy, of course: If stuff lasted, if stuff was all the same, if we didn’t have to endlessly replace and repurchase, the world would grind to a shuddering halt. We would all be sunk in a hopeless spiral of depression where even the best-off struggle to make ends meet, where the have-nots threaten revolution, where we eat scrapings off the abbatoir floor for want of money, where…

Oh.

Funny business, 2

What a very funny business this all is. You may remember that a few weeks ago, with movingly expressed, heartfelt regret, EDF reluctantly bowed to irresistible pressure and put its prices up.

By an average 10.8 per cent.

Yes, they were so upset, so reluctant, that a smaller figure really wouldn’t have justified the terrible heartbreak their shareholders were suffering.

Well, thank goodness they did so, for the wing of EDF’s business that provides energy to us greedy, grasping, ungrateful customers lost more than £120 million last year.

No wonder EDF was so upset.

Anyway, I mention all this in case any of you were worrying, because this week we can share the happy news that EDF’s UK profits, notwithstanding the energy we selfish scroungers nick off them for a pittance, rose by 7.5 per cent to £1.75 billion in 2012.

Yes, you read that correctly. £1.75 billion.

Now, let’s not even bother talking about the “ah, but supplying you lot with energy cost us £120million off our £1.75billion” argument.

Instead, let us remind ourselves of one fact in this argument about energy prices.

Because energy is so expensive, some people suffer hardship and some even die.

Some people die of cold.

Some people die of cold-related illness because they cannot afford to heat their homes.

(7,800 people are estimated to have died in their homes nationwide of cold-related illness in the winter of 2011, estimated by Professor Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster, using World Health Organisation data and models. If you prefer the Office of National Statistics, that estimates there were 25,700 excess winter deaths in this country in the winter of 2010. The government has previously estimated a figure of cold-related death in winter at below 3,000).

Whatever the number, what sort of person would accept a dividend knowing that the money was founded on the suffering of anybody, poor and sick?

According to the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, illnesses caused by cold homes cost the NHS £850m a year.

What sort of person is happy to accept money knowing that poor, elderly folk are queuing up in casualty because of them?

The price rises – EDF and its fellow energy giants – last year have pushed a further 300,000 UK households into fuel poverty, taking the total to 7.5million, according to the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group.

And EDF made £1.75billion in profit in 2012.

If ever you meet anybody who has even a single share in EDF, remind yourself of this: that person is no better than a common criminal.

Now is a good moment to signpost you to another excellent spot by the indefatigable Brother Fiddle: http://marksteelinfo.wordpress.com/ If you hesitate to sign up for even a moment, may I suggest you take a look at your energy bill.

Surf’s up

I like surfing the zeigeist: I see that this week that another couple of loathed old lefties, George Galloway and Billy Bragg, both made the same point as I did in last week’s blog: if you want an unrestrained deregulated free market, horseburgers is what you gets.

Horseburgers is what they’ve been serving in schools. Now we see, in a leaked memo from the ridiculous Michael Gove’s department for education, that the privatisation of academies and free schools is on the cards.

Academies and free schools are the vile Gove’s pet thing, though to the eternal shame of the Labour party it was a policy introduction on their watch. That they should have created something with so much appeal to a Neanderthal like Gove, living eternally in the distant past, is shaming indeed.

Schools that take these roads remove themselves from the control of, and therefore accountability to, elected local authorities. They are given more money (in the short term) and manage their own budgets; they are also entirely responsible for their own staff.

By this means does the disgusting Gove hope to remove the things Tories hate most – democracy, equality, accountability, fairness of employment –  from education. In an extra piece of typical Govean cruelty, money used to bribe schools to become academies is taken out of the pot granted to local authorities, so children whose parents and teachers refuse to compromise on their principles of education as the greatest means of delivering social justice end up losing out. Unless parents and staff think fast and work harder. Many in the north are refusing to be bullied into becoming academies, taking their refusal to the courts and defeating the utterly repellent Gove.

Now, the leaked memo reveals the hateful Gove’s ministers are considering “reclassifying academies to the private sector”, allowing them to be profit-making. This is how the Tories think they can deal with what has turned out to be the impact of the runaway costs of the academy and free school programme.

Hmm. Handing over schools to the tender mercies of the unrestrained and unregulated free market. Who could have seen that coming, eh? More horseburger, anyone?

Red Rum

It’s been an unedifying week: Tory politicians insisting that it’s not their job to make sure we don’t eat horse (am I the only one to have imagined rich boys Cameron and Osborne uttering the immortal words “let them eat horse”?), millionaire supermarket executives insisting it’s all their fault, and consumers joining in by insisting it’s not their fault either, but no thanks, they don’t want to be bothered enough to insist that somebody takes responsibility.

I’d say it was a rum old world, but I expect the rum’s made from horse wee.

And finally

After much improvement, I’ve finally been able to add the pictures with which Brother Hamster meant to illustrate his article two weeks ago. Have another look: http://www.stuartfraserwords.co.uk/?p=459