Littlejohn, Bacofoil & Exploding Manhole Covers – You Could Not Make It Up!
By Paul Homewood
Littlejohn on top form!
So far, so typical. Last week spectators at Wimbledon were being treated for sunstroke as temperatures soared into the 80s.
On Saturday the heavens opened, as they usually do after a heatwave, soaking the motor racing at Silverstone and Henley Regatta.
By the end of this week, the Met Office is predicting it will be Phew, What A Scorcher! time again. It’s called the British summer.
Not according to the Government, it isn’t. Officially, we don’t have weather any more.
We have ‘climate change’, a catch-all excuse for everything from raising taxes and refusing to empty the bins to exploding manhole covers.
That’s right, exploding manhole covers. The Health and Safety Executive has warned pedestrians to be on the alert after a series of manhole cover explosions in London’s West End.
There have been 64 such incidents already this year, compared with just nine in 2011. ‘Experts’ blame the ‘wettest winter on record’ for rainwater damaging underground electric cables.
The heavy rainfall, which brought flooding to many parts of the country, is naturally attributed to ‘climate change’, which is also allegedly responsible for last week’s hot weather and the subsequent deluge at the weekend.
Self-appointed ‘experts’ refuse to acknowledge that we had extreme weather before ‘man-made global warming’ was invented.
You don’t have to go as far back as the 17th century, when ice fairs were held on the frozen River Thames and vineyards flourished across the South of England.
Within living memory, we had the famous floods of 1953, the big freeze ten years later, and the unusually dry summers of 1976 and 1977.
Even then, the Government thought it had to do something. Denis Howell, a former football referee turned MP, was appointed Minister of Drought.
Within three days of him taking the job, it started to rain heavily and he was made Minister of Floods. During the harsh winter of 1978/9, his job description changed again and he became Minister for Snow.
You couldn’t make it up.
I seem to remember Denis importing an American Indian medicine man to perform a rain dance, which at least kept us all entertained.
Today’s political class thinks the answer to unpredictable weather is to close perfectly serviceable coal-fired power stations, litter the landscape with useless windmills and jack up the cost of fuel to meet ‘green’ energy targets.
They also assume the right to lecture us about our behaviour. An outfit called ‘Public Health England’ has taken it upon itself to draw up a ‘Heatwave Plan 2014’ to be distributed to all homes.
I only became aware of this patronising drivel when Mail reader Tony Singleton sent me a copy of a leaflet which had been pushed through his letter box by Devon County Council’s ‘Emergency Management’ team.
It begins: ‘Although many of us enjoy the sunshine, as a result of climate change we are increasingly likely to experience summer temperatures that may be harmful to health.’
We are instructed to obey a shopping list of precautions to keep us safe. For instance: ‘Keep out of the sun between 11am and 3pm. If you have to go out in the heat, walk in the shade, apply sunscreen and wear a hat and light scarf.
‘Eat cold foods, particularly salads. Take a cool shower, bath or body wash. Sprinkle water over the skin or clothing or keep a damp cloth on the back of your neck.’ (I never leave home without one.)
As if this isn’t sufficiently insulting to our intelligence, we are also told how to act in our own homes.
‘Close curtains that receive morning and afternoon sun. However, care should be taken with metal blinds and dark curtains, as these can absorb heat. Consider replacing or putting reflective material in between them and the window space.’
What? Covering your windows with Bacofoil is normally associated with lunatics who are convinced they are being targeted by invisible death rays from alien space ships. It’s the kind of thing which gets people sectioned.
Now, though, it appears to be official Government policy. After reading this rubbish, I presumed it couldn’t be confined only to Devon.
I was right. The Heatwave Plan 2014 has been adopted by councils and NHS Trusts all over Britain as part of a national action plan.
I’ve stumbled across websites called ‘Norfolk Prepared’ and ‘Staffordshire Prepared’ giving identical advice.
The author of this extraordinary 45-page document is Professor Sally C. Davies, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Officer at the Department of Health.
She has drawn on the expertise of a wide range of healthcare ‘professionals’ from across the public sector. It even contains advice to Muslims on how to avoid becoming dehydrated in the event of a heat wave coinciding with fasting during Ramadan.
They think of everything, don’t they? It was only a matter of time before the ‘climate change’ and ‘diversity’ agendas collided. Goodness knows how much all this madness is costing us.
Meanwhile, in other news, the BBC has decided to stop giving airtime to ‘unqualified climate change deniers’ and the EU is issuing new recycling rules and demanding higher petrol taxes to ‘combat climate change’.
American ‘climate change experts’ have been exposed for fiddling temperature records to make it appear the past was colder than it actually was. Oh, and, far from melting, as the warmist computer models predicted, Antarctic sea ice has hit record levels.
Still, that won’t stop us being lectured like naughty children on the need to wear a hat and cover our windows with Bacofoil.
Curiously, the Heatwave Plan 2014 has nothing to offer about coping with exploding manhole covers.
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