Mark Twain wrote: ”Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform” – Notebook, 1904. So if you found yourself at the back of a mile long queue for petrol this week surely it was time to “reform” your thinking, do the opposite to the “majority” and go home.

Transport minister Mike Penning admitted that Mr Maude had made a “mistake” after he advised people to store petrol. However, he insisted that “Mr Maude was right to advise drivers to keep their petrol tanks full as the seven days’ notice the union is required to give before going on strike would leave little time to prepare”.

“Little time to prepare”! What planet do these people live on? When the country is behaving to normal petrol buying patterns we generally need less than a few minutes to prepare to go and get fuel. In fact many of us don’t even need that, we fill up when we see a petrol station on the way home or maybe when we need something else - like my need for milk the other night!

The Government has had a self-inflcted two weeks from hell. I cannot believe anyone in authority was that misguided or could have so little grasp on the reality of the possible outcome of announcing the new Government policy: do not panic outright, just panic on a regular basis. The instruction to keep your tank full had so many more repercussions than just the tricky business of deciding when you consider it to be the time to refill to full. Think about this – because the Government clearly didn’t – everyone was told to go fill their tank, now calculate the number of cars, the number of petrol stations and the number of hours in a day, and it is a shock that queues of ten miles long weren’t cropping up all over the place. We could have had true meltdown, but instead we had a mini meltdown that still resulted in an untold number of additional trips made to the end of queues where people sat burning more emissions than we could have done with – good to see that joined up thinking kicking in with DECC’s carbon reduction targets.

OH but now there might not be a strike!  Absolute genius.

Mark Twain also created something called Opposite Day…probably when he saw a queue of people forming for almost zero apparent reason and he ran in the other direction.

Note to people that queue: don’t…note to self: order milk from the milkman.

        The idea that policy is for sale is completely obscene, isn’t it? But what is even tougher to take personally, is that right under our leader’s nose we have built a sustainable, ethical organisation that fits with everything his government has asked for,  empowering communities and generating social and environmental solutions most of which none of them could have begun to envisage, and yet we don’t register on the radar.  We have done our very best to “be the change…” but apparently that doesn’t cut it.  To be “taken seriously” we need to enter the “premier league” and then “things will open up” for us. The qualifying amount is – according to the Conservative’s chief fundraiser – as stated above £250,000.  Peter Cruddas has resigned since that statement and even before Andrew Marr could call for him to do so on his show this morning, which, as Marr said: “given that the clocks went forward this morning was pretty good going”!  Mr Cruddas’s parting comment was that it was all “bluster”.  Had it not been a sting by The Sunday Times would it still have been “bluster”?  Any which way, it is hardly very “be the change” is it?

        Anybody that has any good ideas how to get my MP to talk to my PM to get him to take a cursory glance at the movement, which has spread across the UK, that began right here in his own constituency, other than raising a huge six-figure sum that is, then please do reply to me at:

chris@community-buying.com

I mean it’s not like they even have to write to eachother in the standard parliamentry way, it is after all just a quick chat with the man in the mirror.  David, yes David, about that brilliant Big Society idea of yours David, yes David it is rather brilliant isn’t it, well David just a few miles from the family home… 

We have posh neighbours! David Cameron’s “family” home is about six or seven miles away. In a different direction Richard Branson lives – well for a few weeks a year – about five miles away.

Mr Branson has just published a book, a seven year personal project no less, called “Screw Business as Usual”. Mr Cameron outlined his own concept of messing with the perceived ”norm” a couple of years back, his vision is of course called “The Big Society”.

In short they are both saying there is a different way of doing things.

Who’d argue with that when we see examples on a daily basis that scream loud and clear that the old economy does NOT work: Banks, Newspapers, Energy Companies and massive Scottish Football clubs all extremely ”mature” businesses with last century business models that are faiing. But they are not even close to being the best example of our failed economic thinking, we should reserve that honour for the NEETS list!  One million teenagers out of work and we have failed that generation on such a massive scale we have had to create a new list for them to be on:

“NEET is a government acronym for people currently “not in education, employment or training”. It was first used in the UK but its use has spread to other countries, including Japan, China and South Korea. People under the designation are called NEETs.”

We even exported it; how positively not neat is that? Clearly an extremely intense complexity I turn for guidance to one of our other neighbours, Winston Churchill who resides for 365 days a year less than four miles from us, he wrote: “out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge”.  An intense simplicity has emerged.

Our three villages have now found another way of buying stuff as a group and by challenging and changing the current economic model we have created the opportunity for NEETS kids to develop their own micro-venture. On Saturday nearly 200 bags of compost – bought together at a group discounted rate and delivered into the community on one truck – were wheelbarrowed to the doors or up the steep steps or round the back of garden sheds of 45 local residents. This is the third micro-venture that the NEETS kids have generated from our group buying activities. It is about a community acting intelligently and finding an intensely simple solution, and by doing so changing the economy. Along the way the power of the group also influenced behaviour change – fifty percent of that compost was peat free, the other peat reduced. That is a truly sustainable development.

One of our neighbours would be impressed – the other two are probably too busy looking for solutions with intense complexity to notice.

Apparently we have begun something that is doing just that: we have found “our own unique way”. Don’t take my word for it, someone else sent me that quote this morning and extremely generously said: “I guess you’ve done that…” But this is very much more than an “I” thing and very much a “WE” thing. We are a group – it’s about the Power of the Group.

The WE thing is getting organised to rant again. Last year a coordinated and systematic campaign – with the help of some with influence like MP Tony Baldry – got the issue of outrageous profiteering by rural energy suppliers raised in The House. The same campaign sent the media our way – Radio 4′s iconic You & Yours, the BBC One Show, local radio and TV, national newspapers – and there is little doubt that it was a success. However, it is now even more important to ramp up the rant!

The issue of those dramatic price escalations – particularly for heating OIL – forced the hand of the Office of Fair Trading and they brought forward their enquiry into off-gas energy supplies. Published last October it all looks rather impressive, until you actually read it! A nine month enquiry and there are no solutions. I have made zero secret in pretty much every meeting I ever have – even my poor Mum is fed up with hearing these words – that the OFT’s report is lamentable. Their attempt at understanding the shenanigans of the pricing structures of rural energy, the supply and delivery of heating OIL and LPG in particular, fall extremely short of satisfactory. It feels like it all got too complex and big so, like everyone else, they threw their hands up and just let it be. In response to a specific question within it about misleading internet prices I was told: “we did not have enough resource to investigate every single site”. Clearly, not really as important as we were lead to believe then.

And now: “The Office of Fair Trading is launching a fact-finding review to understand more about the challenges facing consumers and businesses in remote communities across the UK.”   Time for us to get organised again then! Rather worryingly, the first mention of energy – as one of the issues to cover - is deeply embedded in the subsequent pages about the evidence they intend to collect. But rural energy is the starting point for why any community would feel remote. Those who are fuel poor, and reliant on constantly changing crude OIL based energy products, are remote whether they live a mile or two from the nearest market town or across a 50 mile stretch of water on an island.  Without a coherent rural energy strategy every rural community that is off the gas network is remote.

This “fact finding review” is our opportunity to truly bombard the OFT – and the government – with the message that enough is enough and it is time to start treating the “Four million households in the UK [that] are not connected to the mains gas grid” (source: OFT off-gas energy review) as equals! Just because it is judged to be “different” and, therefore, perceived to be difficult to regulate – which it is NOT – does not mean that the collective blind eye should continue to be turned.  We have until 20th April to get our views in, visit: http://www.oft.gov.uk/news-and-updates/press/2012/09-12. If you want to be part of a coordinated campaign with some facts and figures then please mail us at thinking@community-buying.com with the subject title of OFT RANT 20th APRIL and we’ll reply with letters you can copy, or use as a base for your own bespoke rant, and send to both the OFT and your local MP.

One government department, BIS, has just about grasped the concept of buying groups and, in tandem with Coop Futures, have launched an interesting competition. I have been forwarded that link by over twenty different organisations across the UK and yet not once have I been forwarded the link to this OFT review. Ironically, one of the goals the OFT outline is to find “novel and effective approaches to improving market outcomes to remote communities”.  So the very thing that we have found – “our own unique way” – is the best bet remote rural communities have for creating change and the OFT could actually play a key role in getting that message out, however, it seems they don’t have much of a reach to actually tell many about this review!  But, seriously, what can I expect? We only buy more community rural energy than anyone else in the UK and they weren’t much interested in what we had to say last time.

Think it is important enough for it to be different this time – please add your weight to the campaign and your opinion to the debate. We need a coherent, intelligent rural energy strategy; we need a lot of people finding their own unique way to help us create that change.

Thank you for your continued support.

chris@community-buying.com

...the seat of reinvention and a rural revolution!

From this site the UK’s first ever intelligent rural energy strategy will be conceived, designed and implemented.