FraserWords

Here is the news. Or rather, here isn’t the news.

Buried away at the weekend, the country’s energy watchdog announced that the utility companies are charging us all too much.

Really? It is news that the shareholders of the privatised power firms are delighted to cash in ever-increasing dividends while old people who can no longer afford to heat the homes shiver and die in the cold?

It’s been going on since the evil witch Thatcher first dreamed up this particular piece of wickedness. While there is much appetite to do something among those of us who believe warmth, light and water are essentials for basic human rights to be provided equally to all, not luxury commodities to be traded for profit on the open market, sadly, we are in an era when such thought is portrayed as extremist, or loony, and those who believe these particular lies are too stupid to question who it is exactly who’s peddling them.

The utilities should be privatised tomorrow. There should be no compensation paid to the owners. In fact, those who’ve owned shares in the energy companies should be thrown into prison for crimes against a decent society and only released when they’ve explained how they’re going to pay back every single fucking penny of their ill-gotten gains.

Here isn’t the news: David Cameron is going to spend £20 million teaching English to Muslim women.

This has dominated all media today – yet is it ‘news’? No. It is a thinly disguised sop to the racists on the moderate and extreme right of the Conservative Party and their UKIP chums – human-type shapes so stupid they believe £20m will make a difference, so gullible they believe this is tough talk, so eager to believe anything they think will deter immigrants.

But every single media outlet has fallen for this shabby little trick and obediently trotted it out every hour, on the hour, the pathetic Cameron pretending to be tough as he mums for the willing cameras.

Here isn’t the news: Jeremy Corbyn is a 1970s throwback who’ll return power to the unions and enable the red menace to nuke our defenceless little arses. But… that ‘news’ arises because the BBC’s Andrew Marr spent half an hour on a Sunday morning refusing to talk policy or debate issues with Corbyn, instead focusing on what his imagination believes to have been the 70s policies that he believes influence the Labour leader.

Look at the funny man! He’ll have submarines but he won’t have their nuclear warheads! And he’ll still employ people even though there are no missiles!

But… but… doesn’t that answer the main criticism of his wish to end the fiction of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent? That abandoning it will throw thousands out of work? He’s said very clearly that they’ll still have work. Dammit, we may once again have a navy rather than an already-obsolete nuclear missile we need American permission to use. But no: we must look at the funny man who’ll make sure the dead are left unburied and rubbish piles up in the streets.

Here isn’t the news. Because the majority accept what they’re given. Who’s got time to think? If we thought for even a single moment, we may consider the families who can’t afford to feed their blameless children; the children freezing in the cold as they flee Syria; and the shareholders and overpaid executives of public utility companies who laugh up their cashmere sleeves at it all.