As happens every year, Bexley Council does nothing in August leaving BiB to
flounder and drift. This year there is only one meeting in September, the
Transport Sub-Committee and I will try to get there
to see if the new Chairman is better than the old one. Shouldn’t be difficult.
In the past I have tried pretty much going off air for the Summer months but that can
provoke speculation on the state of my health but wittering on about
non-Council issues is not universally welcomed. “I find your political
views confusing.” Very possibly; a natural Conservative slagging off Tories. Hopefully not for being
Conservative but for being liars and Labour-lite or worse. As always, if you
don’t like that there is no compulsion to read it.
Personally speaking I like to read left wing views if for no other reason than
to remind myself how things could be far worse than they are.
On my journey to Ramsgate last week a lot of time was taken up with discussing
the dire state of almost every aspect of the country and its governance, majoring
on fuel bills. When one friend asked me my opinion of the two Tory Leadership
hopefuls I mentioned that I had blogged about Liz Truss in particular a few minutes before leaving home.
Among my comments then was that the blog was almost all sarcasm but that someone was bound
to fall for it. Several as it happens. Surely saying “See? Running the country
properly is easy isn’t it?” was fairly obvious sarcasm? Apparently not. I
actually laughed out loud when one reader suggested I should read The Guardian for a more balanced opinion.
I am optimistic about Liz Truss but only because she is not Johnson, Sunak or
Starmer. She does at least sound something like a Conservative should.
If running the country was easy I think we would have found a reasonably
competent Prime Minister by now but this millennium has yet to see one. The more
I think about it the more I am inclined to think that many of our present
problems have their origins in Tony Blair and Ed Davey - but that is a topic for another day or maybe not at all.
I didn’t quite fall for
Boris Johnson’s buy a kettle recommendation; he was
allegedly creating a poor metaphor supporting nuclear power now to reap the
benefits in years to come. Prime Minister Cameron should have done that ten years ago but the
Lib Dems in coalition were getting in the way.
In similar vein I have been trying to calculate the pay back time for home
storage batteries. The arithmetic gets to be very complicated because of my free
solar energy which largely disappears in the Winter. For me, on my tariff and
maybe no one else, the payback time may be as short as four years if I can get a
good deal on the reputedly most reliable batteries. That is a lot better than
three years ago when the calculation led me to believe the payback time would
exceed the life of the battery.
I went through a similar dilemma in 2010 when solar panels first became in vogue
but that has paid off in Spades. Will batteries be the same?
My latent socialist streak comes to the fore when I think that the very best
off-peak tariffs (for battery charging) are only available to owners of electric
cars who can afford to shell out four years worth of electricity bills up front.
As always seems to be the case, the poor get hammered hardest. But making
everyone equally poor, as I was in the socialist seventies, is not the answer.