The chips are down - time to renationalise?
‘I try to calculate how long austerity Britain will maintain its composure’
My father was very good at explaining to children things they ought, perhaps, to find dull. Names of plants that grow in hedges (“Hawthorn. Eat the buds when they’re this small.”) Drumming techniques on jazz records. (“He’s playing all of that off one high-hat. One high-hat. He’s not even touching the rest of the kit. And it sounds like war.”)
And nationalisation. “We were miners’ kids. Often, we’d be running around barefoot, with our arses hanging out,” he would recall, of the Fifties. “But your granddad would walk through the village and point at the post office, the train station and the telephone wires and say, ‘You own that, son. We own that. This family. We all own the steel and the coal and the trains. The British people own Britain.’ ”
All through the Eighties and into the Nineties they privatised British Rail, British Steel and British Gas; BA, BP and the water boards. Spokesmen explained that privatisation would do two things: improve these services – making them cheaper and more efficient – while at the same time making ordinary, share-holding citizens a little wealthier.
“But how can that happen?” we would ask Dad. “How can you make something cheaper and better – and make a profit?”
After talking about socialism and market forces, he would conclude, “It works with some businesses, but not with others. You just have to wait and see which ones.”
It was the only explanation he ever failed to make.
I was thinking of all this at Euston station a couple of weeks ago. Work had bought me a return ticket for £284, and I was looking forward to sitting in first class and opening and closing my own private curtains.
Then I looked at the ticket again and realised that it was, in fact, just standard class. 10.30am, London to Manchester, £284.
Now, I know there are a lot of things you could quote in mitigation here but, when it comes down to it, to me, the order of evidences that would suggest the privatisation of our railways has, ultimately, failed, would be: 1) If all the trains disappeared – literally disappeared. There were no trains at all. Someone left them somewhere, and couldn’t recall where that was. Maybe behind a hill, in Northumberland? 2) A horrific accident was caused when the chairman of a railway firm let his drunken teenage son drive the Birmingham Snow Hill-Marylebone “as a birthday treat”. Or… 3) A standard-class return from London to Manchester costs £284. That is a simple, obvious failure. If the national railway system can’t move someone between two cities on a prebooked ticket for less than the price of many of the cars I’ve owned, then we don’t actually have a national rail system. Just an actual, literal gravy train – profits for Virgin Trains were £41 million in 2011 before tax, with an additional tax subsidy of £133 million – with wheels made of complimentary biscuits and wine, for first class.
Supplies of electricity and gas, meanwhile, approach a “horrendous” crunch, Ofgem warned last week. Failure to replace decommissioned power stations means that, by 2015, we’ll be facing blackouts if we don’t start buying in energy from abroad. Britain has stopped being self-reliant. We are about to become dependent for our energy on a dizzyingly swift-moving and volatile world market, just to keep our peas frozen.
Again, perhaps I’m simple, but all I really want from my power companies is for them a) to have some power that b) I don’t have to pawn an eye to use when, eg, switching on a lamp. I’m not even shooting for the moon here by including c) calmly pursuing renewable energy, so that my grandchildren don’t live on an Ark. I’m just asking for good, old-fashioned a) and b).
Competition, and the market, is supposed to make a business keen – carnivorous. But there doesn’t seem to be much… intelligence involved here. No plans. No big innovations. British Telecom weretelephones in this country – and yet, somehow, as a privatised firm it totally missed the boat on the mobile-phone explosion. And of the water companies, six take advantage of offshore loans to defer millions of pounds in tax – while Britain leaks 3.36 billion litres of water a day. In the short term, these companies are, obviously, raking it in. But in the long term? How will Britain – austerity-struck, thirsty – eventually respond to these things?
In idle moments, I try to calculate how long an austerity-crippled country will maintain its composure, as it watches itself being smashed in the knees with a brick. I wonder at what point we will come to hate this kind of business so much that we renationalise.
Caitlin Moran – The Times, 2 March 2013
Ugh, I wish the fucking Nats would think like this (/think at all).
My father was very good at explaining to children things they ought, perhaps, to find dull. Names of plants that grow in hedges (“Hawthorn. Eat the buds when they’re this small.”) Drumming techniques on jazz records. (“He’s playing all of that off one high-hat. One high-hat. He’s not even touching the rest of the kit. And it sounds like war.”)
And nationalisation. “We were miners’ kids. Often, we’d be running around barefoot, with our arses hanging out,” he would recall, of the Fifties. “But your granddad would walk through the village and point at the post office, the train station and the telephone wires and say, ‘You own that, son. We own that. This family. We all own the steel and the coal and the trains. The British people own Britain.’ ”
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| — | Caitlin Moran, The TImes (via mockingbirdmolotov) |
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Our Future is Terrifying without Equality by Caitlin Moran for The Times
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Caitlin Moran on TV If Jacko hadn’t existed, you’d be put in jail if you tried to make him (The Times - 8 December, 2012)
Caitlin Moran on TV If Jacko hadn’t existed, you’d be put in jail if you tried to make him
Caitlin Moran
8 December 2012
© 2012 Times Newspapers Ltd. All rights reserved
Bad 25 (BBC Two) Inside Claridge’s (BBC Two) Michael Jackson: Bad 25 was about two men with vaulting ambitions.
Bad’s subject, Michael Jackson, wanted to be the biggest pop star the Earth had ever seen — the best singer, songwriter, music video icon and dancer, in an industry where having just one of those talents is enough to make you both immortal, and a millionaire, a hundred times over. Jackson wanted to crush the opposition in his spangled white glove, then moonwalk away, victorious.
Extracts from Caitlin Moran’s “Moranthology”.
The opinionous Times columnist Caitlin Moran tells how she landed the job … by knocking on the Editor’s door
When I was 18, and presenting a TV show on Channel 4, part of the publicity campaign involved being interviewed by The Independent, where I grandly announced, “I’ve been offered an opinion column dozens of times — but I always turn them down. How can ANYONE have 52 opinions a year?” And, indeed, at the time, that was a wise thing to say. At 18, you have four opinions, tops — and two of them are about how Tiffany should never have died in EastEnders, as she was the best one. Obviously, I still feel like that about Tiffany — but by the time I got to the age of 28, those four opinions had been joined by a whole lot more. I felt a bit, to use the technical term, opinionous. Then working as a TV critic at The Times, I sat around coyly for a year, waiting for The Times to psychically divine that I was ready to be a columnist. When the infamous mind-reading magic between national newspaper and employee failed, I went in to see the then Editor. I’d never met him before. “Hello,” I said. “I’m dead ambitious. Can I have a column, please? Sathnam Sanghera’s got one already, so I know people from Wolverhampton technically can have them. It’s not illegal.” “What would you write about?” he asked, not unreasonably. “I’m sure I can flam something together!” I said. “I’ve got two kids now. They’ve got to be good for some copy. And I can go over that Tiffany thing again whenever you like. She was the Square’s princess. They should never have let her go. The Vic was her’s by birthright!” “Perhaps not Tiffany again,” the Editor said, gently ushering me from the room. “Stick to something … sensible.”
In defence of binge drinking
According to a BBC Newsround report last week, 50 per cent of children think they have seen their parents drunk — and 46 per cent don’t think adults should ever drink in front of them.
Before we go any further, let’s just tackle the obvious yet necessary points: if we’re talking about parents who go completely woo-hoo/Bill Sikes on the sauce; or who are only managing half the school run before sitting down in the middle of the pavement, puncturing a Gaz canister with their keys and sucking out the contents with a “special” straw, then guys, you need help. I am not interested in “partying” with you. If you come round to my house with a bottle of Lambrini, I will hide in the coat cupboard, while phoning in a perfect description of you to Social Services. You are not my good-time bredren. Consider yourself eschewed and betrayed by me.
Everyone else, however, is welcome to join with me in faintly piqued incredulity at the children of today. WHAT MORE do they WANT from us? Don’t they KNOW how this system WORKS? Mummies and daddies have to drink lots of wine down in one go on Friday night — because the schedule doesn’t allow it the rest of the week. It’s called TIME MANAGEMENT. If I don’t drink a whole bottle of wine on Party Night, I probably wouldn’t get time to drink at all — and that, obviously, would be ridiculous. Parents drinking is the reason you came into the world, and if we didn’t keep doing it then, by God, it would be the reason you went back out of it.
This is one of those many occasions where adult reason must overrule the ill-thought-out utterances of the young and stupid. You don’t want us to drink in front of you? Where, pray, are we supposed to drink? Obviously we’d like to go to the pub — we’d like to go to Harry’s Bar in Venice, in 1951 — but we can’t, because we’re looking after you. And, I might add, looking after you in the best possible way: has Mummy ever been more entertaining than when she stood on the patio table, opening and closing the big parasol, and singingYou Know I’m No Good by Amy Winehouse? Or when she had a little “wine nap” at the bottom of the garden, and Uncle Eddie and Uncle Jimmy wrote “BALLS” on her forehead in marker pen, and you got to colour in her nose and ears blue? If CLOWNS were doing this in a CIRCUS you’d think it was hilarious. And, let’s face it, it’s the only time Mummy can be halfway arsed to play Super Mario Kart with you.
But by the skewwhiff logic of the younglings, my father had a better attitude to drinking — in that we never actually saw him drink. Instead, we’d be left outside the Red Lion in a Datsun, engine running so that Radio 1 could entertain us. As we howled along toTake On Me by A-ha, Dad would occasionally reel out of the saloon bar door and push a packet of crisps through the crack in the window — saying “Remember you’re a Womble” — before going into the pub again.
Three hours later he’d suddenly come bombing out holding something incongruous like a fish tank, say, or a bag of plaster, hissing, “It’s all gone a bit serious in there,” and pulling away from the kerb at 60mph. Then he’d pass out on the hall floor, and we’d rinse his pockets for spare change.
Was he ultimately the better parent? The fact that I once watched him throw two litres of petrol on to a bonfire — “because The Two Ronnies is on in ten minutes” — thus setting fire to our garden fence, means that I can answer this, frankly, “No”.
But we are, at least, of accord on the issue of parental drunkenness. Look, man. I don’t do foxhunting, diamond collecting, spa breaks or that much nitrous oxide any more. My leisure time has to operate within the boundaries of being conducted a) within 40ft of my children b) between the hours of 6pm and 1am, Fridays only, and c) costing no more than £30. Therefore, I like to get a very, very cheap bottle of supermarket whisky — the kind that, when you drink it, turns you into a pirate: closing one eye and shouting “ARGH!” — then sit down with a couple of chatty people, and get a bit toasted.
If you’re of joyous mind, that kind of drinking is like a mini-break — as exhilarating an experience as spending three days sightseeing in Rome, or walking Scafell Pike. You’ll have imperially wiggy conversations, solve the world’s problems three times over, spontaneously remember all the lyrics to I Don’t Know How to Love Him from Jesus Christ Superstar, and wake up in the morning feeling oddly cleansed and cheerful.
And if the kids don’t like it? Darlings, you talk this much nonsense, and fall down the stairs that dramatically, every day of the week. You haven’t got a leg to stand on.
Extracted from Moranthology
I refuse to make you party-bags. Leave before I summon a policeman
I am not a curmudgeon when it comes to my children’s birthdays. Not at all. I make them a card, I make them a cake. Let’s cut to the chase — I made them. I am a birthday originator. If it weren’t for me, they’d just be card-less, cake-less, aimless sperm.
But whilst there is no end to the amount of delight I am prepared to shoehorn into my daughters’ big days, I do draw the line at one thing: party-bags. I find party-bags unconscionable. I will not hand them out. I think they are the symbol of a decadent and corrupt regime. There is no logical reason why they ever have come into existence, or why we — as reasoning, sane people — should continue to support them.
In the 16, peaceful years that my husband and I have had together, there are only two subjects on which we come to blows. The first is over his repeated, intolerable desire to own an oven glove — MAN UP AND USE A FOLDED TOWEL. YOU DON’T NEED SOME MANNER OF PAMPER MITTEN TO GET A TRAY OF OVEN CHIPS OUT, YOU THUNDEROUS NANCY.
And the second is party-bags. Twice a year, it is the same argument.
Him: “Party tomorrow. Better get the party-bags ready.”
Me, reasonably: “Pete, as those children leave, they will already HAVE a party-bag. The bag is their own heads — and the gifts inside are the memories of a great day, spent violating a balloon-animal man.”
Him, not listening: “I don’t want to put the same things in it this year as I did last year. Last year I did mini-Rubik’s Cubes. It’s got to be something different.”
This desire for “unending bag surprise” has led my husband down some unexpected party-bag alleyways. Last year, he made every single kid at Lizzie’s 9th birthday a compilation CD of songs that he thought they’d like.
We never got any feedback on the 90 minutes of the “more accessible” works of Stackridge, Kraftwerk and psychedelic folk-jazz titans Pentangle — possibly because kids these days have everything on MP3 instead. They must have been intrigued by the odd rainbow drinks-coaster in their bag.
Perhaps they thought it was a duff pirate Blu-ray of Avatar.
Pete’s problem is that he is essentially a good man, trying to make sense of a bad system — but he should never have been pushed into the invidious position of trying to get nine-year-old children into psychefolk in the first place. Why on earth would a child attending a party receive, essentially, a gratuity? It’s like we’re tipping them on the way out of the door.
Let me make this clear: I am not thanking them for coming. I’ve just laid on three hours of food, amusement and tolerance in the face of Alfie taking over the disabled toilet at Pizza Express, and using it as his own private office-cum-hangout, much in the manner of the Fonz conducting his “business” from his favourite booth at Al’s diner. I have also had to deal with Emily, who has explained her attitude to pizza thus: “I don’t have the pizzas with tomato sauce, or cheese, on. Not those”.
The message I have, to 24 departing children, is not, “Here is your bag of treasure. I am grateful for this special time with you”. It is, “You’ve had your fun — now sling your hook, sunshine, before I summon a police constable”.
I don’t believe in children’s party-bags in the same way that I don’t believe in “the Gifting Room” at awards ceremonies. People rocking up at the Oscars don’t need to be taken into a room full of high-end consumer durables and/or “pamperment experiences”.
By the time you’re walking down a red carpet, a kilo heavier from all the diamonds, all your life is basically one big gift. You know — Mariah Carey’s had a great day. She’s got out of the house, worn a nice frock, had a conversation with John Travolta that she probably didn’t understand, and now she’s going home again. She doesn’t need a Diamonique-covered Magimix and some spa vouchers to sweeten the deal.
And yet this pointless giving of gifts continues. Parents are brought to the edge of despair by it. You see them, the day before a party, wandering around shops with that “party-bag look” in their eye.
“I just need a collection of stuff that comes to no more than £2 per child,” their posture is saying.
“It honestly could be anything. I will put an apple, a box of tacks and a copy of the Daily Express in there if I have to. I just need a quantity of stuff to weigh a child’s hand down as it goes out of the door.”
The honest, untrammelled reaction of a child, meanwhile, reminds you of the pointlessness of the whole thing.
“Oh,” they say, looking inside the bag. “This rubber is all covered in cake-jam.”
And then they throw the whole lot in the bin.
I hired a nanny for a week, onceThere aren’t that many problems with living in a society with increasing prosperity — apart from Waitrose occasionally being clean out of guavas — but one of the big ones is the employment of domestic help.
In the past ten years the amount of money Britain spends on domestic help has quadrupled. A whole generation of formerly lower-middle and working-class people are, for the first time in their family’s history, employing a cleaner or a nanny, and therefore have no idea what you’re supposed to do with them, how you’re supposed to talk to them, and whether throwing a jar of pickled eggs at them with the words “You’ve been a good lass today — help yourself” is a good bonus or not.
I hired a nanny for a week, once. Aside from the childcare aspect, I have to admit that my main motivation was imagining how bohemian I would look with a gay Australian nanny — particularly in light of that fact that I would be referring to him by the witty nickname of “Hairy Poppins”, which had previously come to me in a great dream.
Alas, on the first day of his employ — despite having mentioned how much he liked both Gigi and Bottega Veneta during his interview — Hairy Poppins made reference to his girlfriend.
On Tuesday, he asked me not to call him “Hairy Poppins”. And not to refer to him as “The Manny”.
On Wednesday, he continued to wear the same trousers he’d worn on Monday and Tuesday.
On Thursday, I found a copy of Dora’s Teletubbies Magazine that Brian — Brian! How could I have thought he was gay! — had doodled in. Over a group-shot of the Tubbies, Brian had drawn Tubby-skulls and Tubby-ribs and, particularly disturbingly, small, anatomically correct Tubby-pelvises. The attention to detail was astonishing. It was almost as if he’d routinely sliced open Laa Laa. That’s not a good dream.
On Friday, I found another picture Brian had drawn. It was of a naked woman. She had a swarm of flies where her eyes should be. I told him he might as well go home for the day, as Dora “looked like she might get ill later”, and popped his “Dear Brian” letter through his letterbox at 1am in a cowardly funk.
Maybe I was overly jivey. The whole thing could have just been down to his artistic temperament — even the trousers. But one of the attributes I’m looking for in a nanny isn’t their potential to present a tent to the Saatchi Gallery entitled All the Clients’ Children I’ve Dissected and win some awards. To be honest, all I’m looking for in a nanny is someone who’ll let me call them “Hairy Poppins,” but I’m too scared to ask my mother-in-law, who now looks after the kids, if she’d mind or not.
But hey, my embarrassment and fear are every new domestic help-employer’s embarrassment and fear: hence Domestic Army (ITV1). We all need information and help about this growing social trend of “staff”, and what do we do when we need information and help on something? After Googling “Nanny murderer Teletubby”? Of course, we turn to the telly. Alas, there was no information or help inDomestic Army. At one hour long, Army was one of those soporific, carbohydratey wodges of television ITV1 so often stick in at 8pm, seemingly as part of a government initiative to keep people stupid enough to watch ITV1 off the streets and “out of trouble”.
