The first of two ideas I have for this month is that social media has given hundreds of millions of people including existing media. a pulpit from which to proclaim their thoughts, knowledge experiences and feelings. Any reader of a web site can see and hear the views of millions previously denied a pulpit. Some sites show us how to mend things, others teach us arithmetic or philosophy.
Some pulpits encourage us to be independent, creative in our thinking and to take responsibility for our own actions. Others do not. However, everyone in a pulpit including me, has a reason to be there. I write this column because I like to think. In fact, I cannot stop thinking. This is because there is simply so much in this wonderful world to occupy my time and thoughts.
Thinking is a wonderfully stimulating, exciting mental activity and can be simultaneously reassuring and frightening. What we think and how we think, can make us confident or doubtful, it can make us happy or sad and can make us feel important or insignificant. Thinking, can take us to the height of hope or the depth of despair. All this, and more, is determined in our heads. And so it is to our heads that all the pulpits in the world address their messages.
How important therefore that before acting on any message from a pulpit our own minds are ‘balanced.’ A balanced mind will compare the message from the social pulpit with its own experiences and knowledge just in case the speaker is underplaying or over egging the argument. Such a mind will query if the speaker has an axe to grind and question the speaker’s own motivations. One’s own mind will then look for an alternative view.
Alternative views usually give us that sense of balance as shown in the Merriam Websters Dictionary definition. Balance being: “different parts or elements properly or effectively arranged, proportioned, regulated, considered.” We are thus better able to ‘value’ one thing against another.
My second idea moves us from scepticism about pulpits to the issue of Smart Meters. In January 2021 I ventured the view that having a Smart Meter was smart for the supplier but not for the customer. I said that variable rates would soon be applied to smart meters by half hour intervals and that the main purpose of smart meters was to try and reduce demand by higher pricing at peak times. Demand reduction is now necessary because Britain does not generate enough electricity to meet its own needs. Each day we import Nuclear- and Gas-powered electricity and there are several reasons for our shortfall. One is long-term bureaucratic complacency which fed the assumption that we could rely on imports at cheap prices. Another is the Zero Carbon emissions target which gave politicians and diplomats the ’moral high ground’ in discussions with foreign luminaries but has led to technical staff within the industry complaining that too much of the money available for research and new green generating capacity, was being spent on high profile unreliable wind and solar projects.
For two successive days in early February the Telegraph Business section carried articles on this subject that give lie to the TV advert that smart meters will help forecast demand. My technical expert within the industry tells me that accurate forecasting processes have always been around to activate back-up capacity and prevent outages. But allowing a supplier the power to put up the price is not all a smart meter will do. A government will be able to charge extra if a house is of a type or size not in favour. Alternatively, they may want to price according to post code and rateable-value income or wealth! But look on the bright side. They could put your winter fuel allowance onto the meter.
Despite this technical step towards a big brother state. I am just too much of an optimist to follow such a miserable thought to its logical conclusion, and so I return to my youthful years, and a leaflet handed out to the crowd which had gathered around an open-air preacher on Nottingham’s Slab Square:
Don’t let worry kill you off. – Let the Church help.
View from the Pew 