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Where’s Cameron’s Big Society when we need it?
Hundreds are stranded by the snow and yet there’s no sign of David Cameron or his big idea
Perhaps the thousands of people stranded at Heathrow should count themselves lucky. At least they're inside and out of the cold. They're not having to stand outside for hours in sub-zero temperatures, like the unhappy travellers hoping to catch a Eurostar train from St Pancras yesterday.
Shivering queues at one stage stretched for hundreds of yards outside the main terminal and along the Euston Road, past the British Library. With Eurostar already running a reduced service, the pressure was only increased by the large number of refugees from the airlines as Heathrow cancelled all short-haul flights to Europe.
For many of them, the outlook was bleak: a freezing night in the cavernous, unheated halls of St Pancras, or a scramble to find somewhere anywhere in London's overbooked and overpriced hotels.
How could it all go so wrong?
Such scenes put us to shame. It's the same up and down the country. As Neil Clark wrote here yesterday, the private sector can't get its act together hence the transport chaos - while the government washes its hands.
Prime Minister David Cameron, normally to be found some distance behind the shit deflector that is Nick Clegg, is nowhere to be seen. London's Mayor Boris Johnson, never at a loss for a pointless phrase in Latin, has nothing to say.
Is this what the Tories meant by the Big Society? Did they intend the state to have no responsibility in crises like this? That people - families, the elderly, businessmen and women, tourists - should be stranded in Arctic conditions and left to fend for themselves?
"I don't know," said a policeman at St Pancras when I asked him whether anyone was going to look after the poor unfortunates queueing for a train to Paris. "It's beyond my remit." He had a dog. Perhaps this kind of indifference is part of the government's anti-immigration policy.
Here's a suggestion. We've got a national emergency on our hands, and no way to mobilise support. If David Cameron wants the Big Society to take over, he should give us some tools to help.
Angry students mobilise in their thousands using Twitter. They come together, swiftly and effectively, with only a few minutes' notice, at times of crisis. Why not learn something from them?
Anyone with a spare bed in north London could offer a refuge to those poor travellers at St Pancras. It's true that they might not want to lose their place in the interminable queue. That could be easily solved: let Eurostar give them numbers so they can return in the morning, after a good night's sleep.
More to the point, they might be wary of taking help from strangers. So let the government set up a trusted site where we can register to offer assistance in such a crisis. Bring the Blitz spirit into the 21st century.
Surely that's the sort of slogan the Tories would love to see attached to their Big Society idea?
But they shouldn't expect us to do it all on our own when they've let us down as badly as this. ·
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The Met Office were consulted by the UK Department for Transport in a report out in October concerning preparedness of the transport infrastructure for winter. In October they were projecting a warmer than average winter with around 70% confidence. The Met Office advised that there was a 1-in-20 chance of a severe winter this year, or any year. In 2008, then, there was thus a 1-in-8000 chance that we would have three consecutive severe winters. The Met Office complain that the general public don't understand risk and statistics, but I have to say that I don't favour 1-in-8000 odds, i.e. the likelihood of three severe winters in a row only likely to occur once every 8000 years. I'm afraid these are actual Met Office statistics. If THEY understand statistics and risk, they should be repenting in dust and ashes by now because those odds are just way too long. Something is driving the weather/climate that they have absolutely no idea about. Now, we know that the models that the Met Office use for climate change projections are the very same models as they use for weather forecasting - you might think they'd be different, but they categorically claim that they are the same.
With odds of 8000:1 I'm prone to question whether there is some bias or tomfoolery going on, and with the Met Office that's a dead certainty. They are headed up by an eco-fanatic and are part of the UK Ministry of Defence.
Here are some extracts from the DfT report 'The Resilience of England's Transport Systems in Winter' (July and October 2010):
"We have discussed these issues in some depth with the Met Office and their climate research team at the Met Office Hadley Centre...we are advised to assume that the chance of a severe winter in 2010-11 is no greater (or less) than the current general probability of 1 in 20...The probability of the next winter being severe is virtually unrelated to the fact of just having experienced two severe winters, and is still about 1 in 20. The effect of climate change is to gradually but steadily reduce the probability of severe winters in the UK...we need to understand and accept that the chance of a severe winter is still relatively small...the probability of next winter being severe continues to be relatively small."
Remember - based on the Met Office models (on which the whole climate change scam is based), three severe winters in a row has a probability of 1-in-8000, or 0.0125%. Or, put it the other way, in 2008 the Met Office would have been 99.9875% certain that we would not have three severe winters on the trot. Start looking at these probabilities stacking up and understand that the global warming mantra is a scam.
We are always being reminded that weather is not climate. Fine. But when once-in-8000 year 'weather' events turn up you really do have to start asking questions. When the Met Office in their UKCP08 report were projecting much warmer summer and winter temperatures in UK to 70% and 90% confidence, that same year they would have put 99.9875% confidence on there not being three extreme winters on the trot.
I live in North London and have been trying to find a website or Facebook group where I can offer up my sofa to those stranded but I haven't been able to find anything. If someone facilitated this then I'm sure a lot of people would help.