Service I could do with opting out of
8:27am Monday 10th March 2008
If your telephone company approaches you bearing gifts, keep a careful eye on what it's doing with its other hand. I read through a communication from BT apparently bearing good news. Here's the first paragraph: "From the beginning of February our BT Together Option 1 customers will have Free UK Weekend calls, automatically. In addition, the cost of our BT Together Option 2 and BT Together Option 3 inclusive Calling Plans are being reduced from April, 2008."
Whoopee! But a paragraph lower down suggests that the gains might be offset by losses elsewhere. And an enclosed leaflet "Changes to BT's pricing and Terms & Conditions" spells them out.
For a start, the line rental is going up by 75p per month. That increase will be waived if you sign up for paper-free billing, paying by direct debit and checking your account online. However, if you aren't online (and not everyone is), tough!
And then, tucked away in the small print is the news that from April 1 the cost of daytime calls will go up from 3.25p per minute to 4p per minute. And the cost of most evening-rate calls to UK numbers for Option 1 customers?
That will "change" (as the leaflet puts it, deciding against the more accurate "rocket") "from 4.5p for calls up to an hour to 1.5p per minute and a 6p set-up fee will apply."
Just pause a moment to do the arithmetic. Isn't 1.5p per minute the equivalent of 90p an hour? Up from 4.5p?
This, I suspect, is a ploy to persuade more of us to trade up to the BT Unlimited Evening and Weekend Plan (formerly known as BT Together Option 2) and pay £2.70 a month (or £8.10 a quarter) for the privilege.
Here, Option 1 subscribers have to do the maths again. Are you likely to spend more than £2.70 a month on evening calls? Or can you keep them brief and save your chatting for the weekends?
Whichever way you decide, you're likely to end up paying more, one way or another. Meanwhile, you might have become so deeply confused by the various schemes offered and the ways of paying, and by the equally bewildering range of alternatives to BT, that you'll be considering forgetting about your land line entirely, buying a pay-as-you-go mobile and hardly bothering to ring anyone at all.
Modern life, with all its choices, is becoming more and more complicated. Its basics are also becoming more and more expensive, given the rise in charges for gas, electricity, water, council tax and food.
Only booze is becoming cheaper, but if I read the warning signs correctly that situation's not likely to last for much longer either.
Closure plan defeats me
The parents of children at Cavell House, the Council-run nursery for the youngsters of local-authority employees, are now about three weeks into the six weeks they were given to come up with a business plan to save it from closure in August.
It's beyond my understanding why this remarkable facility should be facing the chop. It was set up more than 20 years ago to provide quality childcare for Council workers' children so their parents could return to the jobs they'd been trained for. Does that need no longer exist? Of course it does.
And the quality is still there. Hasn't Ofsted recently declared the education provided at Clavell House to be "outstanding"? But that seems to mean very little to those deciding what the Council should spend our money on.
The problem has arisen since the authority took an axe to the nursery's subsidy. Subsequently it has failed to attract enough extra custom from outside the Council workforce to bridge the gap at the new, higher, market-rate prices it needs to charge.
But could it be that this apparent lack of demand has less to do with the prices than with the fact that fewer people now work in or near the city centre? Some companies (among them Empire Stores) have closed or are closing. Others have moved to the outskirts. So there are bound to be fewer non-Council children who need minding during the day close to the heart of Bradford.
I do hope, though, that despite that handicap the parents succeed in coming up with a workable business plan - or that the Council has a last-minute change of heart and restores the grant.
Cavell House is an asset to Bradford. My late sister, Liz, was proud to work there. She loved "her babies", as she called the children she cared for, and was very sorry to leave them when her cancer finally forced her into early retirement.
She would have been desperately sad to see it facing closure, and would have been fighting doggedly to keep it open. So in her memory, I'd like to add my name to the growing list of those who say that Cavell House is too good a thing to lose.
Panache in place of plausibility
As the Israel-Palestine conflict flared again this week and the death toll among civilians in Gaza grew, where was the much-vaunted "Peace Envoy", the man appointed jointly by the United States, United Nations, Russia and the European Union to keep the lid on that troubled part of the world?
Tony Blair, the man who wants to be "President of Europe", was on a lecture tour of the United States, above, where people think very highly of him thanks to him taking us into the illegal war in Iraq on the end of a heavy lead clutched tightly by his master, George W Bush.
It beats me why anyone has anything but contempt for this man. Yet there are many who regard him as one of the most significant world statesmen (or women) currently on the scene - largely, I suspect, because he acts the part with panache.
Doesn't say a lot for the rest of them, does it? But it does say something rather worrying about the gullibility of the public.