The climate emergency has been dealt with in Hull. Temperatures have returned to normal and I firmly believe we have Ed Miliband to thank. It was bad for a few days, but can you imagine how bad it would have been without all those wind farms and solar panels? Incidentally, that does not include the type of solar panels that can blow your roof off, as happened to a family in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.
Further steps to keep things cool in the face of global warming are being considered – and not for the first time – in and around Hull. One of our local Labour MPs, Emma Hardy, has been heading up discussions to ‘re-energise’ the Humber. The proposal, which comes in at the bargain price of £500 million is for a ‘coordinated hydrogen network linking key sites across the Humber’, which will ‘lead to high-quality jobs and strengthen local industry in Hull and East Yorkshire’.
We have been here before and probably in these pages. A hydrogen network involved having somewhere to store the hydrogen. Lots of it, near the coast. If you have ever visited the coast along the Humber, it is very unstable. What could possibly go wrong? Prepare to see a sizeable chunk of the coastlines of Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire being blown to smithereens. Have we learned nothing from the R101? That was full of hydrogen and went up like a Roman candle when it hit the ground, killing nearly all the occupants of the airship on its maiden journey.
And the talk about ‘high-quality jobs’ is just that; talk. Since I arrived here in 1999 there have been endless expensive ‘inward investments’ in the region all claiming to create jobs. But unemployment in Hull remains about two percent higher than the national average. Then, there is the usual guff about ‘unlocking new opportunities’ and one of these opportunities is the development of ‘sustainable aviation fuel’.
The only sustaining I want an aviation fuel to do is to sustain my position 50,000 feet above the surface of the earth. Can you imagine? ‘Welcome on board ladies and gentlemen, today we have a very full flight so please place extra bags under the seat in front. And – great news ladies and gentlemen – today we are flying with sustainable aviation fuel’. Scream… exodus of passengers.
The religion of peace
In Switzerland, a country so boring that it is hard to remember the last time a news item emanated from the land of yodelling and cowbells, a knifeman shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ stabbed three people in a railway station. That is hardly news these days. And neither was the news that Swiss police say, ‘the motive remains unclear’. Erm, I am no expert in crime detection, but I think I may be able to help the Swiss plod regarding the motive.
In other news from the Caliphate, the stupidest Muslim in the world – Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, of course – has been on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca (pronounced ‘Makkah’ so you sound, like, down with the Mohammedans). No doubt he’ll come back filled with Islamic fervour, ready to make the lives of ordinary Londoners more miserable than they already are.
Already he is proposing to add 200 more streets to the London list of 800 from which cars are banned. I was in London recently and the roads are very crowded, that’s for sure. But how much of that is to do with streets from which cars are already banned, and how much worse is it likely to get if he bans them from even more?
In still more news from the Caliphate, in a blatant attempt to chase the Muslim vote, the Labour Party has announced a competition worth £1 million to design a Muslim war memorial. Initially I thought this was to commemorate the many Muslims who have blown themselves up (no specific objections to that) alongside hundreds of innocent people (that’s the objectionable bit) in trying to establish Islam as the preferred religion within these shores.
But no, this is to commemorate the many Muslims who died on our behalf fighting off our enemies in the World Wars and other skirmishes over the years. Very grateful we are to them all, I am sure, but they are already celebrated in the existing war memorials. That is the point of a war memorial: it is to remember the dead whoever they were and in whatever way they died, provided it was in the service of their country. Death does not discriminate – positively or negatively – and neither should we.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He 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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