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Perhaps the creationists are right and Darwin was wrong: how could a race this stupid have evolved? We kill millions in the name of fairy stories, destroy the very world on which we depend for life, despoil beauty and deify ignorance, stare the blindingly obvious in the face and ignore it, permit ourselves to be lied to and cheated.

Banks go bust and perverts are named and shamed and everybody casually says: “Oh that? Knew that all along…”

The world goes bust and we deny help to people while busily finding more and more ways to make people poorer and less able to spend money.

Just one day’s news: Badgers are going to be gassed, though the Government’s own chief scientist went public in questioning the reasons. A simple audit may have stopped the West Coast main line rail fiasco, apparently (so might nationalisation). 58 people could have lived at Hillsborough if the emergency services could have got to them. The International Monetary Fund says the drooling idiot Osborne may have underestimated the cost of his austerity programme, now thought to be costing this country £76 billion (for the maths, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/oct/13/imf-george-osborne-austerity-76bn ) Sir David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS – that’s chief executive of the NHS – has joined every single body in any way involved in public health in this country in condemning the lunatic reforms being shoved through by this government, now under the giant intellect of health secretary Jeremy *unt. The government’s controversial reforms could end in “misery and failure”, Nicholson said. High-profile, politically driven changes almost always end in disaster, he said. He warned against “carpet bombing” the NHS with competition.

That’s just one day’s statements of the blindingly obvious being ignored. Just one day.

Take the rest of the news, great or small: the UN and the world’s mighty watch the bloodbath of Syria and, like Zimbabwe or Rwanda, but unlike Afghanistan or Iraq, choose to fiddle while the country burns. One of the world’s largest democracies is preparing to ignore a man who says we should tax rich people and care for the sick and elect, instead, a lying tax evader who believes in fairy stories and thinks the majority of the non-rich are scrounging idlers. They’re really, really taking seriously Mitt Romney. But then, they elected George W Bush. And Ronald Reagan.

Evolution?

Anyway, here, the icing on the rotting, festering cake that is our life as a society under this government: corporations that were corruptly gifted massive private preference, enabling them to bank billions and pay shareholders billions, announce: “We’re putting your prices up”.

Let’s be under no illusions about the gravity of the energy price situation: greedy, amoral, rich people are making money out of the misery of the majority in a time of recession, hardship and fear.

Am I over-doing it? Centrica, parent of Scottish and Southern Energy, which has put prices up nine per cent, announced £1.45billion profit in the first half of this year.

Those involved who permit this to be the case are vile criminals and should be in prison, not laughing all the way to the bank. These people should be made to hand back the profits they have soaked from their helpless victims. Damn it, because of these criminals, people are going to die. The latest research suggests 7,800 people in our country died through cold last year. Died.

Why is anybody mincing words here?

Anybody with a shred of human decency in them would sell their shares or, better, use their ill-gotten position of influence at the heart of a greedy grasping callous corporation to demand the boards treat people with proper humanity. Anybody who doesn’t do that, shares in the crime of risking the lives of poor people.

One of my great heroes is the Scottish socialist Jimmy Maxton, a pioneer of the left that lifted people out of the poverty to which these latter-day criminals are again condemning them.

I’d like to reflect on him because I think we can read this and think not only of the elderly and poor struggling to pay the big six energy companies, but also of a proposed £10billion cut in welfare by George Osborne.

Maxton addressed the Commons in 1922, as the government was enforcing a programme of “rigorous economy because we must save money”. In a debate, many facts and figures were quoted, including those which allegedly justified removing free school milk from children, or instructing hospitals not to admit children suffering from whooping cough or measles.

Maxton rose to speak. “I am not interested in the statistics of this,” he said. “I am interested in the tens of thousands of fathers and mothers tonight watching over the cots of little babies wondering whether they are going to live or die. If I could strike the public conscience to see that this is absolutely wrong and unjustifiable in a Christian nation I should think I had rendered some service to my country.”

He talked about the withdrawal of help in the name of economy and looked into the faces of the Tory politicians opposite him. Defying rising howls of protest, he told them: “In the interests of economy they condemned hundreds of children to death and I call it murder. I call the men who walked into the lobby in support of that policy murderers. They have blood on their hands – the blood of infants. It is a fearful thing for any man to have on his soul a cold, callous deliberate crime in order to save money. We are prepared to destroy children in the great interests of dividends. We put children out in front of the fighting line.”

What a great image for today: Cameron, Osborne and the shareholders of the big six energy companies marching into battle against economic difficulty, shielding their luxuriously clad stinking greedy worthless cowards’ carcasses with the bodies of the poor, the elderly, the sick, the children.

The might of the House of Commons rose against Jimmy Maxton. Repeatedly, he was told to withdraw his accusation of murder. Repeatedly, he refused. When Conservative MP Sir Frederick Banbury asked him to withdraw the accusation that the Conservatives were murderers, Maxton refused, saying “(Banbury) was one of the worst”, and asking him “to supply me with a word that described his action, other than that of murder.”

Other socialist MPs rallied to support Maxton. Tom Johnston wrote: “I would rather have died that evening than refrain from showing by every means in my power my sympathy and agreement with Maxton.”

In the end four Scottish socialists – including Maxton and Johnston – were suspended from Parliament and even threatened with losing their wages. Maxton treated the threat with the contempt it deserved: he said he and his colleagues represented working men and women who lived every single day with the threat of their wages being taken away, and worse.

The furore caused a massive split in the Labour Party, then led by Ramsay MacDonald. The vast majority, as today, chose not to rock the boat. But Maxton and the band of 70 who supported him got child welfare discussed in every city in Britain, got policies addressed and reversed, began the process of making his country a country in which it was, as he demanded, “safe for children to be born.”

James Maxton. A very great man. What wouldn’t we give for a James Maxton today?

The detail, by the way, comes from a biography written by Gordon Brown. Yes, that Gordon Brown, who wrote the book (Maxton, Mainstream, 1986) when young and idealistic. I wonder how often he thought of Jimmy Maxton when schmoozing the people to whom he and Blair cosied up in the name of power. Brown, of course, might mention means and ends.

To me, Maxton represents the leader we lack – the inspirational figure who could mobilise millions in a campaign of non-payment against the cheating greedy criminals on the boards of the energy corporations.

But in this age of the end of evolution, apathy rules, even when being cheated and abandoned.

I see The Campaign for Affordable Energy has garnered a mighty 9,117 signatures on an electronic petition calling for an end to the ‘big six energy fix’. The campaign’s demands are simple: impose a levy on the big six firms with funds raised ring-fenced to make homes more energy efficient; give the regulator new powers to cap prices; launch an independent public inquiry to come up with an energy market that puts people before profit.

And only 9,117 people think that’s worth supporting.

On HM Government’s e-petitions website, I see more than 100 current and past e-petitions calling in one way or another for action on energy prices. None have many signatures – few have more than 100. The problem is mainly that there are so many different petitions and campaigns because nobody is uniting opposition.

Instead, everybody warns that the energy situation will become more grave. They say prices will rise. Nobody says prices must be prevented from rising so our people can keep warm.

Every energy company puts prices up though its profits sky-rocket, and everybody howls. But nobody does anything about it.

Have we forgotten history? Because of coordinated opposition, the poll tax was abandoned and Thatcher toppled. Because of coordinated opposition, Blair’s reputation was destroyed forever because of the Iraq war. Coordinated opposition has brought us the vote, our health, our safety, our democracy and therefore all our lovely material possessions. It works. But we’ve forgotten it.

Like I said. Evolution? Not so sure any more.

Living in the past

I much prefer living in the past, and have spent much of the past fortnight buried in books, nosing through ancient archives and unearthing the stories of people long dead. I am particularly proud to have found an 18^th century vicar’s handwritten note condemning four local people for “lying in the forms of fornication each with the other”.

My old chum Guy Henderson turned his thoughts to the past as well, with a piece on the journalism of yesteryear and the pleasures of being entertained by the forces (I’ll post the link when the old fool gets round to sending it to me). I, too, fondly remember being a guest of the military. I once was instructed by Belgian officers in a mess in Ypres to join them in celebrating the birthday of the King of the Belgians. We drank a very great deal indeed until I was helped to bed at some indeterminate hour of the night.

I awoke to a damp November morning, feeling poorly, and my hosts asked me the nature of my distress. “I was celebrating the birthday of the King of the Belgians”, I replied, faintly. They looked surprised: “But that’s in June.”

There are less pleasant memories. Boarding a frigate by ascending a rope ladder swinging from its three-mile-high side to the mocking laughter of the matelots far above. The face of Captain Kay as he fell out of a helicopter onto a Dartmoor tor and was left there.

Captain Kay is the Arthur mentioned in Guy’s piece. He was bound to turn up this week, really, with the subjects of socialism, journalism and fornication on the agenda.

He rang me at the weekend to see if I thought he stood any chance of a fat compensation cheque from the BBC.

When The Onedin Line was filmed on location in Dartmouth in the 70s, the Captain shot a film about it and also appeared in many episodes, once playing the vicar who married James Onedin. In those far-off days the Captain bore a marked resemblance to Terence Stamp, and was vain of his appearance in the interests of the pleasures of the flesh. Therefore, he insists, he was propositioned on more than one occasion by members of the cast and crew, not all of them, by any means, female. So, he asked me. Was he abused?

I suggested that if indecent propositions to consenting adults of any and all sexes were to form a means of abuse, we had all better prepare for a court case. And didn’t he think that the sight of a handsome man attired in a vicar’s costume was always going to inflame the ardour of those of a certain persuasion?

He has agreed not to press charges.

Guy’s piece referred to Arthur and he being manhandled by French security forces during the visit of then President Francois Mitterand to Dartmouth, maybe because of the Napoleonic pose in which the Captain captured Mitterand. A famous photo:

 

With hindsight, the Captain captions it thus:

“How a simple act, like tucking one’s scarf into one’s coat, or, in my case, forgetting to do up one’s flies, can give to the observer a false and damaging impression of one’s true character. In Mitterrand’s Napoleonic pose, the impression is completely false. In my case, however, especially if I happen to be wearing my egg-stained cardigan, it is unfortunately true.”

Only the Captain knows, of course, how much joy it brings me to have his picture and my words on the same page again.

 

And finally…

Talking of pressing charges, I see our friendly second-hand car dealer has alleged I did not pay for a certain Ford Sierra. Look, I didn’t buy it so how could I have paid for it? Eh? Talk about the hard sell. If you went into business with Brother Hamster, the two of you would make so much money you could buy up the big six energy companies and get us all out of this mess.

Oh… and couldn’t somebody have looked at Brother Fiddle’s links on homeopathy last week and argued with him? Come on, make an effort.