Why I hate companies like Octopus​

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First of all, let's be clear - I hate woke companies, anyway.  I will not give my money to a major diy store who sees fit to place a multicoloured flag on its website once a year.  What people do in their sex life has got zero to do with selling paint.  I'm well aware that 'these people' have had a pretty rotten past.  What happened to Alan Turing shames Britain.  And it must be depressing to be 'against the norm' and everyone know it.  However, we cannot be proud of what we are, because that is just how we are!  We can only be proud of what we have achieved.  It lessens the word 'pride' when it is applied to anyone simply because of what they are.  You can be glad of what you are - good for you, damn the haters.  But don't celebrate it in the streets, as those of us who are the opposite of that don't go round telling everyone we're 'normal'.  I'm certainly not 'normal'.

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After the death of George Floyd and the riots in the US, some companies and actors(!) took it upon themselves to almost burst into song with regard to the perceived plight of black people everywhere.  How awful it is in the US (the US is actually less racist now than it has ever been in its history)?  This is what Octopus Energy said about the issue of BLM and what they perceive as racism:

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"We stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, with our Black colleagues and customers, and with the entire Black community.  We stand against racism. [who doesn't?]  The Black Lives Matter movement has sparked some crucial conversations within Octopus Energy about what we can do to affect meaningful change, both within our business and beyond. Some of these conversations should’ve been had a long time ago, and this movement has provided a crucial opportunity to self reflect – something we think is more important and more beneficial than just a simple post of support for the movement on social media.  We strongly encourage other companies to do the same work internally.  We haven't donated to any specific BLM organisations – rather, we've started an internal fund to combat inequality and racism in energy.  The brutal killing of George Floyd has triggered hurt across the world. The footage was sickening. This act has become a potent symbol of the racism that continues to take a painful toll on the Black community. Although I cannot begin to understand the hurt and anguish many are feeling right now I want to be clear: we stand with the Black community and we stand with our Black colleagues.  This oppression must end.  Our team have told me that they think Octopus should say something (and I could not agree more), but I did not want it to be a token. So many voices speak up at these times, but fade without lasting effect.  We’ve listened really hard - to the comments in our internal #BlackLivesMatter Slack channel but also to many other people who have approached me and many others directly with thoughts. And let’s be clear - it has been hard maintaining my own silence publicly so I could hear what people think, without crowding out views with my own. But I am white and I needed to hear your voices.  As a company, our DNA is that we do things that will actually enable and drive meaningful change. We invest in what we believe in, and where the topic is so critically important, we need to be more confident than ever in sticking to that DNA even when our lack of statement starts to be painful.  So thank you for sharing your views, experience, ideas and priorities. We have listened, and this is what we are going to do. Today, we announce an internal Octopus Energy Black Lives Matter fund – with over £100,000 initial funding.  Rather than donating to any specific Black Lives Matter organisations externally, we’ll be starting an internal fund to support our team and oppose racism, which the £100,000 initial funding will go towards. They will bring their own talent and training to bear in a truly meaningful way, and will also have access to Octopus skills and resources to drive change and share learnings back with Octopus.  Team members can nominate themselves or others to be the secondee(s) or to help oversee the fund.

• As well as the initial funding, any employee can donate or raise money and the company will match every pound raised or donated

• To kickstart the fund, I’ve donated £54,486 (this is all of the interest I received from loans I made to the company in the early days – I’d intended to use this for good, and I can’t think of anything more important). The company is matching that so the fund starts at £108,972

• If all employers did the same - on a pro-rata basis - the UK would generate a fund of around £3bn. We want to lead corporations in not paying lip service to such an endemic issue, but enabling real change.

We will work hard to recruit, at all levels, people from BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) backgrounds and to ensure we’re the workplace we should be for everyone.  We’ll do this Octopus style - no tokenism or targets but by working relentlessly to do what is right and what is solid.  At a recent “new joiners” training session, two people of colour in the group remarked that this was the first time they’d got a job where they were sure it was because of how great they were – not to tick a box. They were right, and it must always stay that way. So we need to make sure our recruitment reaches into all communities and works for all great candidates.  Our senior operations managers have been leading on ways to deliver this, including unconscious bias training, moving away from CVs and a whole load of other measures. We’ll work fast to expand what works across functions, locations and levels quickly – and to take it beyond recruitment to ensure that as a company we have greater understanding of language and unconscious bias.  We recently started to sponsor Generating Genius to help BAME talent into STEM roles, and had recommendations from the team for other organisations we should look at working with. Anyone reading this – if you’ve had personal experience of any others (or run one yourself!) please contact us.  For perspective, 13% of our middle and senior leaders identify as BAME versus 14% of the population. But our diversity is not evenly distributed across the business and locations and we’ll ensure that we take steps to close gaps.  We pride ourselves on our progressive nature – on building a company that is better for the world, that champions social justice and creates better careers and internal community. But I hugely welcome the voices which tell me where we’ve got things wrong. Thank you to those who’ve shone a light on these things.  I was embarrassed that we inadvertently planned a big party to clash with Ramadan, for example. We can clearly do more to help team members deal with things like customers who use racist language and we’ll fix this. And too many people in the company didn’t know that one of the Senior Leadership Team is a woman who identifies as black.  It’s no coincidence that we chose office locations in Soho, Brighton and Leicester – each of them a watchword for diversity – because we’ve wanted to build a rainbow business (and I’m delighted that Warwick also taps into diverse pools). Our determination that all permanent employees have equity means that we’re already able to share the benefits of ownership with our team. By being based in diverse areas, and investing in growing in those communities, we are putting back where others extract.  Thank you for being an incredible team – those who shared difficult and personal views, who debated when we don’t all agree with each other, who’ve shown kindness and understanding to those who seek to learn more, and for increasingly offering support and recognition.  There’s still so much more to say, and do, but I hope that what we are announcing today will make meaningful change, and is the basis for really positive discussions and actions going forward."

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They then went on to suggest that you educate yourself with the following list of books (yes, really)

So You Want to Talk About Race – Ijeoma Oluo

How To Be An Antiracist – Ibra X. Kendi

Conversations in Black – Ed Gordon

Brown Girl Dreaming – Jacqueline Woodman

Natives – Akala

Taking Up Space – Chelsea Kwakye & Ore Ogunbiyi

Why I’m No Longer Speaking to White People about Race – Reni Eddo-Lodge

Don’t Touch My Hair – Emma Dabiri

Me and White Supremacy – Layla F Saad

I Am Not Your Baby Mother – Candice Brathwaite

Black Feminist Thought – Patricia Hill Collins

Ain’t I A Woman – bell hooks

The New Black Vanguard – Antwaun Sargent

Decolonising the Camera – Mark Sealy

Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to Present – Deborah Willis

Robin DiAngelo - White Fragility

Back to Black – Kehinde Andrews

Women, Race, Class – Angela Davis

The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin

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There's not much we need to say about the above drivel.  Of course racism is real.  However, there is certain racism against whites from blacks, as well - it really does cut both ways, and it's pernicious and wicked - either way.  But we don't get to change society by talking down to people and by failing to see bigger pictures.  If George Floyd had lived his life in a 'better' way, then he would still be alive today - he would never have run into a power-crazed police officer.  This imbecile put a loaded gun against the stomach of a pregnant woman.  He lived his entire adult life in a moronic fashion - stealing, threatening, taking illegal drugs.  He was one of life's supreme idiots without any doubt.  That's nothing to do with race - there are supreme idiots who are white!

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What a lot of people like to do is to turn anything into a race issue.  If a US police officer pulls someone over on the road, and it turns out to be a black driver, you know the way the conversation can go.  This is primarily the actions of black people, though there are a few whites who will happily describe everything as racist.  Even maths is 'racist' now.  I have no idea if the police officer who arrested George Floyd is a racist.  It seems pretty clear that very many people tried to find out if he is, but no matter - let's say it was racist, anyway - let's blame racism for a police officer who wasn't liked, trying to arrest a man who was drugged up to his eyeballs and uncooperative.  George Floyd's state of health had nothing to do with his death, then?

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So, armed with that, let's balloon that out.  A white officer has 'killed' a black man.  So let's march through the streets, burning and looting, to show how wrong that is.  But wait, let's get some energy company involved which is thousands of miles away and has absolutely nothing to do with it.  Let that energy company stand up against racism.  Remember, not the actual incident - not describe that what went on was wrong and without due care, but ascribe it to racism, and to infer that racism was at the heart of it.  If it was, then such people (actual racists) must be educated and necessarily punished.  But when you read the insipid and pathetic words of Octopus' 'Greg' above, you get a sense of the crass, inane and comedy gold conversations which would have gone on before they added it to their website...

"...too many people in the company didn’t know that one of the Senior Leadership Team is a woman who identifies as black."

Yep.  Says a lot, doesn't it?  How sad, pathetic and puerile?

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All such talk is pure tokenism, pure mascoting (of black people).  They don't really want to look at the underlying issues and come to some sensible and coherent understanding of ALL the issues, they just want to blare out a siren, saying, 'Look how good we are'.  It actually has a name, it is called virtue signalling.  Companies like this have TV adverts which feature all black people.  How is that harmonisation in a country like the UK which is 96% non-black?  It's not, it's mascoting black people, pure and simple - using them.  It's unfortunate that black people themselves cannot see this - what is being done in order to 'help them'.  Nothing good ever comes out of it, so we know it's true.  What good came from this Octopus fund?  Oh, I know...some good advertising.  If you're that keen to do it and mean it, do it with no description attached!  Sure, set up a fund if you want to, but why tell the world?

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And what became of BLM?  Well, we all know about their leaders buying houses, that's for sure - they did very nicely, thank you.  Black people are PERPETUATED to be victims by schemes such as this, not alleviated from it or by it.  Very basically, it stinks, Octopus stinks.  No, I don't have the answers...but neither does Octopus.  And I'm not the one who suggested that people read a book entitled 'Why I’m No Longer Speaking to White People about Race'.  'Greg' did!

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The genuine plight of black people throughout the world will only get addressed when people are brave enough to ask themselves why things are the way they are.  Why is it that other races are not subjected to the same type of racism?  Why is it that some countries who have no white people do so well, while at the same time there doesn't exist a successful 'black' nation?  It's clearly nothing to do with colour.  The subject is unpalatable to almost everyone.  Those who have raised the issue have been ostricised and punished.  But we can only ever be honest if we want to tackle the issue in a sensible way.  I see no honesty.

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There are a LOT of black people who just want to get on with their lives.  They don't see themselves as victims, of oppression by a white-dominated world (which it is).  They don't see racism everywhere.  They aren't looking to get jobs at the BBC, or to write books which have no artistic merit, and exist only to add to the sea of victimhood for the return of some money.  They don't want to concoct false histories (like the BBC's Horrible Histories), or to make out that black people invented things which we know they did not, or who were what they weren't ​

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Again, then, why do people act in this way - some black people, but mainly whites?  It is merely to pity black people, to mascot them, to victimise them.  It's distasteful in the extreme.  And companies like Octopus need to be called out for it.  Let's stop the sickly and vile slavering and drooling, the obsequiousness and fake-fawning.  It has a lot to do with black slavery and the lies that have come from that.  Yet who knows that three times as many white slaves suffered at the hands of the Barbary Coast Pirates than black slaves who were taken to the US.  Yes, really...and you won't hear that on the BBC.  So which was the larger enslavement again, whites by North Africans, or Africans to the US - as we just said, it's whites by THREE TIMES as many.

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Let's pop back to a statement made early in the above garbage:

"We will work hard to recruit, at all levels, people from BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) backgrounds"

Really?

Octopus has 15 people on its 'Energy Group Leadership Team', so five years on from their proclamations, how many do you think are black?

Correct.

The £100,000 would have been better spent on help lifting 40% of Africans out of poverty, or doing something about the fact that INDOOR air pollution kills around 1 million Africans a year...because they are using wood and dung to heat their food.  But no, Greg, let's put it into a 'fund' for BLM crap.

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Let's instead fill the world with cheap energy, you know, fossil fuels.  Or, like Octopus, we could continue to promote schemes which do NOTHING to alleviate poverty, anywhere, and are merely to add to the subterfuge that is 'green energy' - making people pay more for their energy while telling them that they will pay less.  If you want to pay less - GO GAS.  Heat pumps cannot compete with gas - not in any way in the UK in general circumstances.  We should be coercing Africa to adopt the massive use of fossil fuels to bring its people up to a decent level of existence - and beyond.  There's no reason Namibya couldn't be exactly like any Western country.  Only their use of energy inhibits it.  ALL the successful countries of the world owe their success to a single thing - plentiful fossil fuel energy.

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Sure, in the future, they might be weaned off a source of energy which will run out, but they can be helped towards schemes like deep geothermal (hot water underground) by using the fossil fuels today.  As it stands, by the time the world gets around to truly helping Africa, and not just sending Irish singers for video stints, all the fossil fuels will have been used.  Deep geothermal isn't cheap, and we've already said that nuclear power plants might not be a great idea, so we need to get Africa to use fossil fuels to fund the infrastructure for their FUTURE energy needs.

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Oh, so what did become of Octopus' £100,000 BLM fund?  Well, I asked them, guess what?  They wouldn't tell me.

Octopus has a proven liar and all-round arse, Al Gore, proudly on its website as a supporter.

I think that says everything, Greg.

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