Since the year dot, it’s got rather warm in southern England at some stage most summers. Not scorching. In recent years, it’s usually reached around 30-ish. Sometimes higher. A bit cooler than the sort of weather millions tolerate when they go to the Med on their hols.
So, do we really need to be subjected to yet more panicky government heat alerts? The UK Health Security Agency, set up by Matt Hancock in 2021, has warned that ‘significant impacts are likely’, including death, among people aged 65 and over. As if entering a teaching your granny to suck eggs contest, the agency then informs us that ‘using fans, wearing loose clothing, or drawing curtains to keep rooms cool, can help to keep temperatures at safer levels.’
Must we pay the government to tell us that fans keep us cool?
My goodness, must we pay the government to tell us that fans keep us cool? Why bother thinking for ourselves at all? We’re in a downward spiral: the more the state does, the more we outsource to it, the more helpless we become, and we end up having to be lectured about how to stay warm in January and hydrated in June.
No wonder we see summer as some kind of appalling threat. A friend from Texas brought his family to live in Kent a few years ago and was left bemused by his son’s school’s response to hottish weather in the run-up to sports day. ‘We’re monitoring the situation’ the school announced breathlessly. ‘We know it’s causing alarm. Rest assured, we’ll be taking no risks.’ The temperature? A balmy 32. ’For God’s sake’, said my friend, for whom 32 was about as threatening as light drizzle in April. ‘All you need is water and sunscreen.’
We really are a laughingstock. I have it on good authority from a Bordeaux-based contact that the French, not averse to a dose of big statism themselves, don’t start worrying until the mercury nears 40. Okay, there’s more of a culture of air conditioning in public buildings down there, and homes all have shutters on windows. But people still venture outdoors, and find it perfectly survivable. Go further south, and folk have lived in temperatures approaching 50 for donkey’s years.
Perhaps it’s a net zero conspiracy. The more we scare people about normal weather, the easier we’ll get them to buy heat pumps and electric cars. Maybe the Met Office will start naming heatwaves just like winter storms.
But the bigger issue is surely this awful addiction to the state, aided and abetted by the health and safety industry, which specialises in infantilising us all. It makes you wonder what on earth comes next. The Health Secretary reminding us to use a brolly in the rain? To wrap up if it snows? To drink when thirsty? To change our underwear?
I’m sure there will, eventually, be a turning point. Nanny will one day go too far, and we’ll get the jolt we desperately need. But don’t hold your breath. After all, it was a Tory prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who suggested a lifetime smoking ban for those born in 2009 or later. And Labour, of course, are putting booster rockets under the whole thing. I had to check, but government teeth-cleaning classes for children are not a joke. We’re gripping the apron strings tighter than ever.
So, we must accept more years of paying vast taxes to fund government agencies to tell us to put on sun cream in summer, to eat less sugar, to drink less booze and wash our hands after using the loo. In other words, more years of being treated like toddlers and therefore behaving like toddlers. With weather, food and drink, we’re the wait-to-be-told generation.
Well, at least the sun’s shining and Wimbledon’s starting. Let’s get out and enjoy it. That’s if they’ll still let us.
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