On the night of 5 January, the temperature fell dramatically and kept on falling. On 10 January, Derham logged -12 °C, the lowest temperature he had ever measured. In France, the temperature dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 °C on 14 January and stayed there for 11 days. After a brief thaw at the end of that month the cold returned with a vengeance and stayed until mid-March.
[…]
Fish froze in the rivers, game lay down in the fields and died, and small birds perished by the million. The loss of tender herbs and exotic fruit trees was no surprise, but even hardy native oaks and ash trees succumbed. The loss of the wheat crop was “a general calamity”. England’s troubles were trifling, however, compared to the suffering across the English Channel.
[…]
There was worse to come. Everywhere, fruit, nut and olive trees died. The winter wheat crop was destroyed. When spring finally arrived, the cold was replaced by worsening food shortages. In Paris, many survived only because the authorities, fearing an uprising, forced the rich to provide soup kitchens. With no grain to make bread, some country people made “flour” by grinding ferns, bulking out their loaves with nettles and thistles. By the summer, there were reports of starving people in the fields “eating grass like sheep”. Before the year was out more than a million had died from cold or starvation.
Reluctant as I am to agree with the Loathsome Hoon on anything at all, I do think those delicate flowers who’re complaining because they have to get out and dig their own driveways need to get a bit of gumption, a shovel, and start digging.
On the other hand, I do understand that the snow and the days of enforced idleness (not to mention the childcare chaos caused by stoppages and closures) are yet more burdens to be borne by a population weighed down by worry about their jobs and whether they can afford to pay the heating bill or the mortgage. People are understandably boilingly angry at the government for any number of malfeasances and disasters, but feel powerless to do anything about it. They need a target for rage.
Hence the recent massive increase in BBC complaints, the kerfuffle over Carol Thatcher and now the whinging about the weather. All that anxiety and anger has to blow off at something or it’ll explode.
Howver it’s been barely a week of cold and snow; nobody’s starving, as yet, no significant numbers have died from cold, most people have heating, lighting, food and power. Given those advantages I’m sure we can cope with a bit of snow. They did in 1709, and they had none of those things.
A dog jobby of elephantine proportions was on the path outside my house. I covered it with snow.Back inside I watched in disbelief then hysteria as the local smart ass school kid picked up the snow to throw it at his pal then just walked away looking at his hands.
When unswerving loyalty to the Labour party line, blank-faced botoxed arrogance and breathtaking cynicism is desperately required, who can an embattled PM call? Hazel Blears, obviously:
We need people standing for office, not carping on the sidelines These playground taunts and placard-waving add to the cynicism surrounding politics, says Hazel Blears
Perhaps public opinion is finally getting through to No 10 and the penny is beginning to drop that people aren’t exactly what you’d call happy.
“…he turns his fire on consultations (which he claims are rigged) and citizens’ juries (which he says “are used to lend a sheen of retrospective legitimacy to decisions already taken”). Rigged consultations and faked citizens’ juries? Surely this would be the stuff of front-page exclusives, if only there was any evidence to back it up. But in the absence of evidence, we must assume this is simply prejudice dressed up as assertion. Imagine if cabinet ministers voiced their opinions without any evidence base.”
Oh my. “Imagine if cabinet ministers voiced their opinions without any evidence base.” Where to start with that one? Iraq? The dodgy dossier? ID cards?
I’ve always felt a certain sick fascination for the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, and it’s not just our physical resemblance; those who know me will also know that I could so easily have become her, which is a horrible thing to have to face about oneself.
There’re some women I’ve met in life that I automatically felt like taking a running punch at; usually they’ve been minor civil servants -‘computer says no’ – or bossy jobsworth admin droids; not that I’ve ever actually punched anyone, but the urge is there, as it is every time I see or hear Blears.
(Turns out Blears was yet another a local authority solicitor before being in government. There’s a surprise.)
Blears is robotically loyal, rigidly self-righteous, endlessly on message, teeth-clenchingly perky and, most of all, smug; an overpromoted local functionary, but with posher handbags, a damned sight more power and even more self regard than your usual local authority Queen Bee. But a democrat she is not, for all her carefully demotic YouTube videos and vlogs.
‘Labour is about winning elections’ says Blears. Here she is grinning away at the Fabian Society while laying out her plan for achieving New Labour’s thousand year reich, which is to throw money at southern marginal seats like South Thanet and Hove and allow a few thousand voters in unrepresentative areas decide who runs the government, entirely in order that she and her party stay in power, as she says in the video, ‘for years to come’:
Sounds pretty damned cynical to me, not to mention profoundly undemocratic .
First seeing that video and then reading Blears’ article again the depth of denial and mendacity and the sheer political corruption expressed by Blears in her attack on Monbiot leaves me almost speechless.
The paper’s commenters are well up to the task of responding though so I’ll let one do it for me:
chekhov
simonw
06 Feb 09, 1:12am (about 9 hours ago)
The reality is that people don’t get elected unless they sell their soul to a political party. Toadying to the loathsome and swallowing your principles only comes easily to the chosen few. For every Morris or Short or Cook, there’s a Mandelson, and we all now know which ones survive. Guts are not principles.
True, the ends may justify the means, but look what ends they are. The Iraq War, the 10p tax band, the routine fingerprinting of children, RIPA, collusion with torturers, the BAe scandal, ‘loans’ for peerages, the greedy, irresponsible madness of PFI (viz. Metronet), the Civil Contingencies Act, and the Met’s shoot-to-kill policy. And they’re just the highlights. Twelve years in power and just a few more foxes to show for it.
I can, oddly enough, imagine what happens if cabinet ministers voiced their opinions without any evidence base. I was in Hyde Park to demonstrate against the consequences of the dodgy dossier, along with a million or so others. We peacefully reminded you that war was wrong. You ignored us. And responded with the smokescreen of collective cabinet responsibility and the tenuous approval of your legal advisers. All very convenient. Monbiot, on the other hand, has no such smokescreen, and still people seem to want to read what he writes.
You want practical ideas? How about a reformed House of Lords? How about funding for after-school activities? How about 3 million new houses? How about progressive taxation (and, while we’re at it, not advising town halls to rack up council tax by three times the rate of inflation while pensioners’ incomes are falling)? How about a strategic transport plan that doesn’t change when an airline chief sneezes? How about an ethical foreign policy that doesn’t involve selling weapons to bad people? How about an education system that doesn’t force children to choose their careers when they’re 12? How about a joined-up government that doesn’t both open pubs all day and try to abolish happy hour? How about running the country instead of outsourcing it to tax-haven multinationals?
I may be sceptical, but I’m not a cynic. Or not enough of a cynic to suggest the even more practical idea of buying a sack of cement and making yourself an overcoat. I’m no trade unionist, either. I don’t rely for power on a political party that relies on me for money. But I vote, I engage and I’m angry. Like millions of other voters. Who are continually told they are wrong and irrelevant and cynical.
Shame on you, Blears.!
Quite, and let’s not forget the complicity in and the condoning of torture while we’re at it.
I shudder even to consider I might’ve become like that odious woman had I stayed in the law and in the Labour party.
