HELLO, AND WELCOME TO THE NEW ISSUE OF BSH – THE FIRST ONE AFTER THE LONG, HOT SUMMER… CAN WE HAVE IT BACK, PLEASE?
Idon’t know about you, but I’m getting a little p*ssed off with the powers-that-be, and their blatant not-givinga-sh*t-about-us, the ones who elected them. The gap between us, the average person on the street, and them, the increasingly out-of-touch elite in Westminster, seems to be widening with a speed that a Santa Pod
Top Fueler’d be proud of, and I can’t see it getting any less any time soon. Their unwillingness to stop the major fuel and energy companies continuing to massively, and unnecessarily, increase their prices, to make even more obscene levels of profit for their shareholders, causing businesses and, therefore, people, to go to the wall, is just the latest in a long run of ‘I’m sorry, what?!?’ policies, and it just seems the country’s gone bloody mad. I mean, I’m not an economist obviously, but if you allow energy companies to raise their prices so far that businesses have to close and people lose their jobs, then surely we, as in the country, will have to pay for all the newly-unemployed, won’t we? That means higher taxes on those who can least afford them (as they don’t tax their uber-flush chums, do they?), and so yet another slump in peoples’ standards of living. We already have probably the highest level of food bank use in Europe – won’t this just add to it?
Similarly, I don’t get why we, the ordinary public, always have to be the ones doing our (very small) bit for the planet while, for example, the Olympic Winter Games in Beijing were held on artificial snow; French ski resorts light up the slopes until midnight so rich people can ski at night; airlines run many ‘empty’ flights to keep their slots; most of the big football matches take place in the evening under massive energy-hungry spotlights; the gigantic new football stadiums required to host the World Cup in Qatar are air-conditioned (in a desert…); hundreds of lorries bring us fruit and vegetables from Spain and elsewhere while regional products sit and rot or go to the trash; the world’s largest cruise ships circle the oceans providing holidays to the wealthy; and China and India’s greenhouse gas emissions’re still at record levels and’re forecast to increase?
Meanwhile, ‘for the sake of the planet’ our Government’s going to prohibit driving slightly older diesel or petrol cars, and bikes, massively affecting people who can’t afford to change to a (very expensive) electric car, but have to use their vehicle for work. That’s not ‘being green’ – that’s just a demonstration of the fact that our ‘peers’ don’t really give a sh*t about us… but we already know that, don’t we? I mean, compared to what’s going on in the rest of the world, you and me using our bikes for work or at weekends really isn’t going to make even the slightest difference in the grand scheme of things, is it? We’ve already f**ked the planet, that much is obvious, and I seriously doubt we’re going to fix it.
Blimey, that got a bit political, didn’t it? I might just go and have a little lie down… see you next month!