Emergencies are like buses… 

Emergencies are like buses, nothing for ages then several come along at once.

First it was Covid-19 which decimated the population, followed rapidly by monkeypox which laid us all low with itchy genitalia, and now it is the climate emergency which will, surely, finish us all off. Of course, I am skipping over the emergency in Ukraine which will see the unleashing of nuclear weapons in our direction, and we must not forget the emergency at ITV where a bloke devoid of personality used to sit next to a blonde woman devoid of talent; one of whom is no longer sitting there. How bad can it possibly get?

Thankfully, we have our solicitudinous leaders whose main concern is our welfare. In their wisdom they have decided that as precious few of us are paying a blind bit of notice to any of this tosh, we should be made to, whether we like it or not.

First we had the great mobile phone alert fiasco of 23 March 2023 whereby an alert that nobody knew they had, was sounded for a reason which nobody could understand. This was a test, they said, but the government were remarkably, in fact completely, vague about what any such alert would be sounded for and what, if any, action any of us could take. The alert achieved very little except scaring the bejeebers out of a few good folk who had no idea it was taking place. Others got the alert well before the allotted time, some got it well after. Others never got it at all and others still, like yours truly, worked out how to disable the function on their phones and spent a blissful and undisturbed Sunday afternoon. I think we can put the emergency alert system down as another of the great failures of the present government. I’m sure there must be others.

And there it should end, you might think. But no. The above-mentioned climate emergency is one that they just refuse, against all the evidence, to let go of. And you guessed it, they have an alert system for that too. Our ever-vigilant government have just announced that they are introducing a health alert system which ‘aims to cut heatwave deaths.’ Go on, pinch yourself; this is not a hoax.

Not content with the usual clues that it is getting hot such as a thermometer or the time-honoured alerts such as: “Hot, isn’t it?”; “Are you hot too?”; and “Sweltering!”, they have developed a Heat Health Alert system to which people can sign up. The system will work all year round, just in case Christmas is unusually tropical, but will have a ‘core alerting season’ from 1 June to end September. I am writing this on 1 June, so I am now in that core alerting season. Happily I am in Italy where it is definitely ‘sweltering’. Remarkably, there seems to be little panic around me.

I’m not finished yet. According to the BBC the alert system will have four alert colours, with green indicating no risk to health:

• yellow means the heat could affect the particularly vulnerable – over-65s and those with an underlying health condition
• amber means the impact could affect the wider population and is likely to be felt across the whole health service
• red means a significant risk to life even for healthy people and a severe impact across all sectors would be expected

According to that, at my age, I’m done for at yellow.

This nonsense is predicated on the fact that our lords and masters think we are all thick as mince and just watch the great fireball rise in the sky while continuing to run about with duffel coats and woolly hats in the middle of summer. When it gets hot we sense it and we take appropriate action, like we have been doing since we lived in caves. We remove clothing, we stay under shelter, we drink beer and we do less physical activity. We don’t and never have needed anyone to tell us this.

The Met Office are predicting that 2023 will be even hotter than 2022 (of course they are) and this will see the new system kick in through a series of Health-Alert Action Cards. It’s not clear what a ‘card’ actually is, but I am sure that those in the know are well up on the jargon. The cards get waved according to the colour of the alert and instructions are that:

“… organisations including the NHS, local authorities, Local Health Resilience Partnerships (LHRPs) and Local Resilience Forums (LRFs) should ensure that local plans are developed and in place for the coming summer as part of wider preparedness and response to extreme heat events.’

Yes, you did read ‘Local Health Resilience Partnerships’ and ‘Local Resilience Forums.’ These were new to me and, I am sure, to most readers. Can you just imagine the kind of semi-retired, middle-class, ex-professional busybodies who will clamber to join their local LHRP or LRF?

So, here is my prediction for summer 2023: it’s going to be a scorcher. Turn off all alerts, get the beers in and enjoy it.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

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