A week after a ship was wrecked off Portland Bill, masses of timber were washed ashore on the Sussex coast. In Brighton, people were building structures like this on the beach.
Strict warnings were given against taking the timber away, even though it was battered and soaked with seawater. A week later a clean-up team arrived in Brighton. They began by clearing away the structures that people had made. They have some huge machines to collect the timber, consuming huge quantities of diesel.
This morning, because the swimmers can't use their arch because the lock has been glued up for the fifth time since the new year, we made up a fire below high water mark, using odd scraps, and the clearance people with their big machines promptly turned up even though there is a mile of beach they are working on, which looks as if they were trying to intimidate. But they didn't, and we had a nice swim and a warm-up afterwards in front of the blaze.
Apparently the wood is just going to be shredded. There is a mean-spirited way in which the whole thing has been dealt with.
I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
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