Column, August 21,2007

WREXHAM Women for Peace, now there’s a name that fires the imagination.
I wonder if there are sister organisations like Wrexham Women for Apple Pie and Wrexham Women for Teddy Bears?
Also, do they have a nemesis organisation called something like Wrexham Women for War?
No doubt they would be manning, sorry, personning, the barricades along with the Women for Peace who have sent a detachment, well, at least one, down to Heathrow, there to fight the good fight against global warming.
Heathrow as you will have seen has become the latest battleground for an assortment of protesters, from the well-known like Greenpeace, to disparate others who turn up at any old protest like latter-day Wild Ones – Whaddaya protesting against Johnny? – Whaddaya got? Well, this week we’ve got global warming, which everyone has decided is a Very Bad Thing.
Well, if it melts the icecaps and submerges large sections of the coastline worldwide, then it undoubtedly would.
Down at Heathrow they are insistent that they’re a peaceful lot and they march about waving rather pompous banners declaring that they are: “Armed…with peer-reviewed science.”
Well, let’s consider that for a moment shall we?
What is probably true is that we are going through a period of global warming.
What is also true is that due to industrialisation we are producing lots of gases like carbon dioxide as a by-product of things like electricity generation and travel, including by jets.
What ahs not been shown conclusively, yet, is that the carbon dioxide produced by man is causing the global warming.
You see the great big fat problem that the eco-protesters somehow skirt around is that the world has gone through phases of global warming and cooling before, many, many years before the industrial revolution. We had no big power stations, no factories. Henry Ford and Orville and Wilbur Wright were mere twinkles in the forefathers’ forefathers’ eyes, so there were no cars or planes, and yet there was global warming.
So what was causing it then?
Furthermore, since the industrial revolution started, we have also gone through phases of global cooling, though carbon dioxide levels were rising.
Now, I’m not saying that the eco-warriors having their summer camp are wrong, but what I am saying is that haven’t proved that they are right.
They do their cause a disservice by stating things as fact when they have yet to be proved. It is almost like a religion to some of them, and it fits perfectly with their anti-Establishment viewpoint, because being against climate change means you can have a go at big business like airports.
That’s not to say the police haven’t over-reacted somewhat to the legions of the unwashed who surrounded Heathrow like the tidemark on a bath – 1,800 officers to tackle 2,000 protesters does seem a remarkably personal policing service to me.
You also have to take into account that a substantial minority of the protesters will have been undercover newspaper hacks who rather than protesting will have sat cowering screaming “Not the face, not the face” the moment a burly constable flashed his warrant card at them.
Still, it will all fizzle out this week and I’m sure many of those who have so bravely taken on the police will be off on their gap years to various points across the globe. Of course it will take them a while to get to wherever they are going to teach bemused indigenous people how to knit an operating theatre out of raffia, because being anti-flying they’ll have to bike and row their way there.
Still hats off to what a British education has done for these young people, all of whom will have biked or walked to school, and definitely, definitely not been dropped off by mum driving a Chelsea tractor on the school run eh?
And I’m sure none of the middle-class Jonquils and Jocastas ever enjoyed a holiday in the sun with mummy and daddy and went there by jet did they? Odd that they would deny people the luxury of cheap travel when they’ve probably indulged in it to the full themselves during their lifetime.
I’m no fan of air travel, I think it is hellish and avoid it for the simple reason that I don’t like being treated like cattle and fleeced like a sheep.
But for many people air travel broadens horizons and gives them an idea that there’s a world out there other than their own back yard.
You shouldn’t give up that freedom based on the quasi-religious beliefs of protesters who for all their claims have yet to prove their prophecies of doom have a shred of truth to them.

YOU will no doubt by now be cowering in your home, having barricaded the doors, convinced that we are all under siege from anti-social behooded hoodlums.
It seems that we are living in a state of anarchy and the police have yielded control of our streets to gangs of yobs.
That is, if you believe the national newspapers in August. As a rule of thumb I find it best to discount every third story as the fevered invention of a hack with an empty diary.
We have had a few attacks, some murders, some public unrest, and it would seem that editors have decided the nation has gone to hell in a handcart.
All that was missing was asylum seekers as the instigators of the violence, but apparently they had an alibi this time, so the nationals seized upon the next best thing – drunken youths.
This feral lawlessness will come as something of a surprise to many of us who had, until now, been enjoying a peaceful, if rather wet, summer.
But rest assured, the unrest is happening, you’re just not looking hard enough.
So that bunch of kids playing footy in the park? Clearly a cunning cover for drug dealing. The gaggle of girls playing with their dolls – a razor gang waiting to pounce. And why else would kids ride round on bikes other than to run down innocent pensioners?
For those of you who might be persuaded that we are the mercy of criminal youths I would just remind you of the case this week which demonstrates quite how inept these hoodlums are.
This was the case, reported by the Daily Post, of the youth who hatched the cunning plan of disposing of his electronic tag, by attaching it to a sheep.
A plan, stupid in so many ways it’s hard to know where to start. Firstly there’s the question of why the tagging monitors were supposed to believe he was spending day and night grazing in a field.
But secondly it was his belief that he could entice a sheep to him and persuade it to be tagged that marks him out as not the most gifted of master criminals.
If anti-social youth are all as thick as that, I think we can sleep safe in our beds a while longer.