The British government is sanctioning new coal mining in Cumbria - in the year an already Brexit-diminished Britain hosts the international climate conference. Are you kidding me?
Thatcher closed them down without a plan to save decimated
working class communities – now this government wants to re-open a coal mine at
a time when literally every responsible government on the planet is trying to
reduce ecological devastation and the use of fossil fuels to save it.
The HS2 pre-redundant rail line blunders on, wrecking
ancient woodlands even though everyone agrees that the world post-covid dents
even the flimsy arguments used to justify the vandalism of that vanity project.
And I would point out – though maybe I already did in the last Tuesday post –
the privatised rail networks we have is not fit for purpose.
But more recently this government has given the green (no
pun intended) light to coal mining in Cumbria ref - The Guardian. It beggars belief.
Even after the ridiculous duffers at Northumberland council gave the go-ahead
to open cast mining at Druridge Bay, then Communities Minister Sajid Javid did one of the few
positive things I shall remember him for – apart from resigning from Boris Johnson’s
government of dim sycophants. Javid overturned that decision in 2018, saving an
area of scientific/ecological importance and natural beauty.
It is hard to imagine – other than the usual Tory raison
d’etre of shovelling money into the pockets of their cronies as they’ve done
throughout the pandemic – why anyone in their right minds would approve this.
And in the year when the UK hosts the international climate conference, surely
it just makes us more of an international bad joke. Yes, of course they are
desperate for ways to offset the catastrophic effects of Brexit – but causing
different kinds of damage?
Predictably, those giving the go-ahead to this monstrously hypocritical
project are chanting the usual un-examined chaff about local jobs. Yes, the
jobs that never really materialise in any substantial way for the local
populous. Interestingly, in my horrendous rail-networks-don’t-work journey of a
few days ago (see blog 380) I heard lots of interesting tales. I don’t usually
eves drop but 12 hours is a long time to get from Edinburgh to the W midlands.
Most – like me – were doing genuinely essential journeys. However at one cold
platform interlude, I was listening to an old guy talking to two young workmen
who had travelled from down south to Motherwell for one day’s work taking out
plumbing and electrical equipment from a recently closed shop. I’m fairly sure
there are plumbers and sparkies in Motherwell or at least other parts of
Scotland – but it was a large contractor who uses - as most do – their own labourers.
Even during a pandemic.
I lived and worked and was a city councillor in the NE of
England for many years and many many times planning decisions were based on
arguments made about the influx of jobs that would ‘naturally follow’ flowing
into the area like fairies on a magic stream. NO one challenged that assertion.
Few decent jobs ever came for local people and if they did they did not last
long. Or they came but in far fewer numbers than promised. Often companies came
into the area with their own work force – mopped up government subsidies and
then moved on leaving a ghost town of grey metal empty ugly buildings and a
newly unemployed local temporary work force. Remember Siemens briefly in
Tyneside in the 1990s anyone? I knew guys who not only worked there but men who
had uprooted their families to Tyneside for the short-term Siemens jobs.
Is Johnson’s government naturally this moronic or do they
have a secret stupidity mine they excavate secretly every day?
Anyhow – in the interests of saving the planet and my ever
more fried brain – I’m not going to bang on about this in blog blether – I have
an old lyrical piece of story-telling poetry that really covers it completely
and in detail and in a much more entertaining way. Because we have literally
been screaming into the void for decades on this topic…
click here - Casey & the Surfmen to listen to the full audio (I’ve been told that my reading helps folk get to sleep - not sure if that’s a compliment….)
Or
treat yourself to the e-book or paperback by clicking here My Books