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I'm a low-income pensioner and I'm terrified of university cancel culture this winter

By Mary Fisher

I’M 72 years old. I live on the basic state pension. And I don’t know how I’m going to cope come the winter. I’ve never been so worried in all my life. But here we are. 

Cancel culture. No platforming. Campus speakers with traditional views on transgender and immigration shut out in the cold. Keeps me awake at night, it does.

The government say they’re taking action but I’m frightened that if Julie Bindel isn’t allowed to debate gender neutral toilets she might lose the will to live and just fade away into obscure political websites.

Yes, those with conservative views have got the Daily Telegraph, the Mail, Spectator and the Sun if people want to advocate sending Windrush migrants to Rwanda in leaky boats, but if they’re denied the platform of the University of East Anglia you’re literally cutting their tongues out.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. The thought of Kelvin Mackenzie not being allowed to address students at Sheffield Hallam University and make a joke about eating a hamster in case it offends the Save The Lesbian One-Legged Hamster League fills me with dread.

I don’t ask for much. Food and shelter, clothes, a hot bath now and again and the right to open my newspaper and learn that sports commentators are lesbians or traitors. And of course tell people ‘Hitler had the right idea about a lot of things’ without fear of being branded a Nazi.

Just the basics. But it seems that come the winter I’m going to be deprived even of those. I don’t think I’ll make it through the woker months, to be honest.

'Price cap' means f**k all, energy companies admit

ENERGY companies have admitted that the words ‘price’ and ‘cap’ are just meaningless sounds they like to say every now and then.

With energy bills set to go up in October and then again in January, gas and electricity companies have admitted that the term ‘price cap’ is just random words they have no intention of acting upon.

Shell Energy spokesperson Nathan Muir said: “‘Price cap’ has always been a ridiculous nonsense term we all laughed at in the office, like Lewis Carroll’s ‘snark’ or ‘boojum’, but we managed not to let the cat out of the bag for decades.

“We used to say it every few months because you all looked so happy when we did. It made you feel all fuzzy and secure and you’d celebrate by ordering a takeaway. We might as well have said ‘vogon jiggle trapezoid’ for all it mattered.

“But when we looked up the words in the dictionary we were mortified. They had no correlation to any of our pricing strategies or business plans. An upper limit on how much we can wring out of you? That’s the complete opposite of what we’ve got in store.

“Think of it more as a cap that you wear on your head. One that you can take off whenever you feel like it. In our case, we’re going to be taking it off again and again from now until the end of time.”

BP boss Bernard Looney said: “It’s a similar deal with triple-lock pensions. Why do you need to secure retirement payments that many times? Just use one decent metaphorical lock instead of three shitty ones.”

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