As many of you will be aware, Britain (and Europe generally) has been hit with a large (for us) amount of snow coupled with rather low temperatures in the last week. This has resulted in the closure and then tight flight restriction of Heathrow Airport, the cancellation of a number of Eurostar services, and a great amount of disruption on the East Coast Main Line from London to Scotland. On the roads and the sidewalks (pavements), clearing of snow and ice has only taken place on the main roads, while most pavements are still mired in ice and are skating rinks for the unwary.
For the last three years, Britain has lumbered under severe snowfalls at least once each year. This was not the case in the previous 14 years I have lived here—snow was rare and mostly consisted of flurries which did not stick, and temperatures stayed above 0° C most of the time. Every year for the last three, after the snow has fallen and the country is faced with paralysis, the scream goes up from the citizenry: “Why?”
Well, I’ll tell you why. The United Kingdom does not believe that buying snowplows, antifreeze, sand, and salt in the amounts necessary to cope with the kind of winters we’ve had lately is economical. This is belied by the pictures on the evening news of acres of hopeful passengers camping out at Heathrow Airport waiting to get on an airplane, and the queue to get on a Eurostar train, which queue stretches out the doors of St. Pancras International Railway Station down the Euston Road, ending somewhere in front of the British Library.
Heads will, of course, roll. Probably not the Transport Secretary’s; the government has no appetite for sacking yet another Cabinet minister (see below). Something may be done with the people at the airports and the railways responsible for deicing runways and running rails and overhead catenary wires. But sacking the personnel involved will not help the situation unless the country is willing to bite the bullet and plan out exactly what will take place when a snowfall occurs here.
Airports like that of Stockholm are still running; the only services curtailed are those to Heathrow and Frankfurt. Why doesn’t BAA (the owners of Heathrow) tempt Stockholm-Arlanda’s Director of Preparedness (or whatever they call the post) with a huge salary to come here and sort this out for us? If something like this does not happen, then next year, or the year after, when a paralysing snowfall dumps itself on the United Kingdom, I do not want to hear ANYone complaining about it. Either we decide to take our lumps and wait until the weather and the snow clears, or we plan for this occurrence and commit the money required to keep transport running through it.
In political news, we were greeted this morning with the news that the Business Secretary, Vince Cable MP (a Liberal Democrat), had been caught speaking indiscreetly to two people who he thought were constituents but who were actually reporters for the Daily Telegraph, which is the main Tory broadsheet newspaper here in the United Kingdom. Among the tidbits were:
- Being in the coalition government is like being at war.
- However, if the Tories push him too far, there is always the nuclear option of resigning.
- He compared the Coalition Government’s policies and reforms to ‘a kind of Maoist revolution’ and thought that the Liberal Democrats should be a kind of brake on them.
- He “declared war” on Rupert Murdoch (owner of News International, Sky, and lots of other stuff here, in the US, and in Australia) and thought that he himself would win.
Now the first three should not be news to anyone who follows British politics. However, the last one is one nuclear option that perhaps Mr. Cable wanted to avoid. His department is considering whether Murdoch should be able to buy the portion of BSkyB that he does not now own. For the Cabinet minister who would make the decision as to whether this purchase should go ahead to express such bold anti-Murdoch sentiments to people whom he did not know is unwise, to say the least. While many were calling for Cable’s head, the news has just broken that he will continue as a Cabinet minister while losing control over the BSkyB sale to Jeremy Hunt, the Culture, Media, and Sport Secretary. For the Liberal Democrats to lose two Cabinet ministers (David Laws being the first to resign from his post as Chief Secretary to the Treasury because he fiddled his expenses to conceal the fact that his landlord was actually his same-sex partner.) would be extremely unfortunate. (Declaration of interest: I am a registered Liberal Democrat.)
An additional bumble is this: the Daily Telegraph did not break the news about Cable’s attitude toward Murdoch. A leaker within the Daily Telegraph passed that information to Robert Peston, the famously hesitant-voiced economics editor of BBC News. The reason that the Telegraph chose not to publish these remarks is probably because it agrees with them and did not want to expose Cable’s indiscretion on this subject to public view. Sauce, goose; sauce, gander!
The third bumble was committed on the Radio 4 breakfast news and comment show, Today. I listen every day and get my main daily diet of news from it. Last week, one of the subjects of discussion was the aforementioned Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. In announcing the segment, James Naughtie, one of the main presenters, said that he was going to be interviewing “Jeremy C*nt”. He followed this with a long interval of coughing and sputtering. This mistake captured the smiles of millions at their breakfast tables. While that particular word is considered fairly taboo here, it is not absolutely proscribed in print or on TV or radio. Any usage of it has to be justified. In the US, of course, anyone who made that particular mistake would be banned from the airwaves and the station or channel that carried it would be fined. Naughtie apologised later on during the show, and disappeared for a few days while the country was digesting the news that he’d slipped up. Later on another BBC presenter, in reporting Naughtie’s mistake, made the exact same mistake. Another apology. The nation chortled.
Thus, I live in a country where gaffes are made almost continuously. I love the frisson of danger this adds to listening to, watching, or reading the news. Others think that the country is going to the dogs. If it is, then I say, “Woof!”