Nobbut Laiking, by Ross Brewster
If it was only the schools, the air traffic delays, the NHS then the immigrants in small boats we had to worry about.
But from where I’m looking at it, the whole country is either crumbling or drowning.
It reminds me very much of the title of a famous poem by Stevie Smith — Not Waving, But Drowning. I don’t think the Government is even waving any more, and if it is then it’s waving for help that never seems to come.
It was the eleventh hour of the intended return to school when hundreds of parents found themselves in the middle of a crumbling concrete crisis leading to closures on safety grounds or emergency measures to find alternative classroom facilities for their kids.
More than 150 schools in England were identified as having a type of potentially dangerous concrete, meaning the necessity to close buildings and classrooms to make them safe.
Just one school was affected in Cumbria. Cockermouth re-opened a day late after RAAC was found in corridors. Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete is more Aero chocolate bar than our traditional view of concrete, and its use goes right back to the 1980s and 90s when it was given an optimistic shelf life of around 30 years.
The present Government can’t be blamed for that. But successive governments since that time have sat on their hands and hoped. And why did they wait until the last minute to inform parents of schools that faced closure? That seems positively neglectful.
The delay in publishing the list was, said the Government, to allow schools to inform parents. By the time they made that excuse it was all over the news, adding to the worry.
It now transpires that civil service whistleblowers told the Observer newspaper that ministers had been “dangerously complacent” about the crumbling state of many schools and public buildings for months.
A classic case of short-termism, which affects all governments. Here we’ve had decades of concerns while governments have prevaricated in Micawberish hope that something will turn up. And turn up it did, but not in the way they wanted.
It’s strange how, when something goes wrong, a failing government finds that events compound against them in every direction; the catastrophic waste of money on HS2, sewage pollution of our rivers, a record backlog of asylum claims, and now the school closures and failure of the air traffic computer system at the worst possible moment, in the midst of a Bank Holiday.
Questions need to be asked about the National Air Traffic Service (Nats), like how is it one incorrectly fed item of data into a computer can lead to hundreds of flights being cancelled or delayed? How many more key computers in this country are one carelessly placed fingertip away from meltdown? Perhaps best not to know, lest we’d never sleep at nights. The thing is, they just get all the stranded passengers back from far and near and continue as before.
Where Britain once led, we are now slipping down the leagues into third world standards in so many aspects of life.
We have indeed become a crumbling nation with little leadership at a time of international crisis as well as problems on the home front. That scares me. Not so much for myself, but for the next generation. Not yet broken Britain maybe, but a nation heading that way.
Rishi Sunak spent the Bank Holiday touring his local agricultural shows. For once he may have found people on his side. But as he studied Wensleydale’s finest livestock and sampled the cakes in the food tent, he might have been excused wondering in these calmer hours, what next? It was not long before he found out.
Only a fool would be a climate change denier
Even sleepy Joe Biden has woken up to climate change.
While many of us doubted the disruptive methods of the eco-zealots earlier this summer, only a fool would be a climate change denier.
While visiting storm ravaged parts of Florida the US president said that “no intelligent person” could doubt the impact of climate change.
Isn’t it ironic that, while extreme weather events have struck many parts of the world, here in Cumbria the weather has been “business as usual”. By that I mean a damp and rather dreary holiday season.
However we have television and the internet to tell us all is not well elsewhere in a world where climate change is having a dramatic impact.
There are still plenty of deniers across the pond, but seeing is believing and from his words at the weekend it’s clear that President Joe comprehends the threat posed by our warming planet and seas.
A world of difference
The times they certainly are a-changing in the world of sport.
Just ask sleazy Spanish FA boss Luis Rubialis, he of the unwelcome kiss on the lips of one of his nation’s World Cup winners.
Watching post-match chat from the Saturday game on Sky, inclusivity was key with a female presenter and a former women’s international outnumbering regular pundit Jamie Redknapp.
For two interviewed players respectful handshakes were the order of the day with the women. But for Jamie there were big man-hugs.
