Cold comfort

Yesterday, I woke to find my left arm didn’t want to rise above shoulder height without great pain, and typing was painful too. Lends a new meaning to ‘writing is pain’. So my time at the keyboard has been limited.

I must have pulled a muscle while carrying a couple of 12.5kg butane gas cylinders – required to heat our home in this warm climate that Ian Duncan Smith and his minions envision.

 

The e-petition 'Stop the Governments victimisation of pensioners living abroad who have contributed to the welfare state by withdrawing their winter fuel payment' recently reached 14,796 signatures and a response has been made to it.

As this e-petition has received more than 10,000 signatures, the relevant Government department have provided the following response:

“The Government remains committed to protecting key support for older people for the life of this Parliament, in line with Coalition Agreement. Winter Fuel Payments are non-contributory and were originally introduced to give older people in the UK the reassurance they can keep warm during cold weather. However, following a European Court judgment, Winter Fuel Payments are now also made to eligible people living outside the UK in another European Economic Area (EEA) Member State and Switzerland. To help return to the original policy intention, the Government intends to bring in an eligibility criterion, effective from winter 2015/16, based on country of residence with Winter Fuel Payments going only to eligible people living in EEA countries with colder climates.” This e-petition remains open to signatures and will be considered for debate by the Backbench Business Committee should it pass the 100,000 signature threshold.”

In other words, nothing has changed; they're not listening. Am I surprised?

So, in effect, as predicted in my blog here, they’ll play with statistics to exclude expat pensioners who have and indeed in many cases still are paying UK taxes. Their get-out clause is that the winter fuel payment is ‘non-contributory’ which suggests that tax-payers didn’t contribute, which is a load of baloney, since any money that the government hands out is from the taxpayer – past and present.

Cold comfort, indeed.

 

FFB - PORTENT

Now we have some experts telling us that in a matter of decades most of Earth will be uninhabitable due to man-made global warming – unless we act soon. I suspect the earth might throw a proverbial spanner in those predictions… Even so, this Friday Forgotten Book may be considered timely. Published in 1992, Portent is one of the late great James Herbert’s best.

The cover warns that ‘The world will never be the same again.’ The story begins with newspaper clippings of penguins committing mass suicide in 1990, then in the next two dozen pages ranges to the near future, to the Great Barrier Reef, the Gulf of Mexico, and British Columbia, where we witness the catastrophic demise of some interesting characters; it’s as though the world’s gone mad, the weather and tectonic systems in concert with the appearance of eerie bright lights, are causing untold devastation, swamping islands, killing thousands of people.

One survivor from an earlier disaster, Rivers, a climatologist, is summoned to the home of a strange family; here, he meets Diane, her two mysterious adopted children and the academic who believes the world has had enough with the depredations of mankind and is fighting back…

James Herbert, R.I.P.

Portent is a superior disaster novel, and maintains a tense suspenseful pace throughout. The vignettes are well researched – some of the disasters recognisably extrapolated from recent events (1990s) – and divulge a great deal of interesting detail. The many characters we encounter from numerous countries are believable and evoke sympathy. The action and disaster sequences are graphic but not gratuitous, credible and, because of that, quite horrifying. The various disasters are portents: auguries of the death-throes of a planet? Ultimately, the book is about good and evil, in all their guises. A Green plea which deserves to be heard – and read. Highly recommended.

[Note to politicians – just don’t use this to try to make us feel guilty and tax us even more!]