LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Failing future generations

The main reason for its unpopularity with airlines, that landing charges were too high, was always in the remit of Peel Group, and, apart from the period of Covid travel restrictions, the number of flights and passengers per annum were never less than the minimum requirements quoted by Peel Group’s boss during the original negotiations.

As it is, South Yorkshire has lost a valuable trading asset, and Britain has lost the greenest airport in England and the longest and heaviest runway in Britain and the western nations of Europe.

In the meanwhile, our new home secretary, Suella Braverman, in anticipation of a new wave of refugees from the climate hit lands of Asia and Africa, has announced that she will be spending almost £400 million on refurbishing two abandoned concentration camps in Hampshire and Oxfordshire. We don’t know yet which of the cabinet sponsored contractors will be doing the work, but we hope his profit margins will enable him to make at least habitable accommodation for the unfortunates incarcerated there, unlike the late lamented Napier Barracks, described by our government as “accommodation fit for our heroes being complained of by ungrateful immigrants”, but revealed to be a derelict ex-army camp abandoned ten years earlier with only one barrack hut roof intact and totally inadequate facilities.

In his Parliamentary debate two weeks ago, business and energy secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg insisted that fracking was necessary to avoid dependency on Russian gas, but despite the fact that we have continued to import gas from Russia in defiance of the embargo, we have never been dependant on it. Also that it has been proved that the amount of gas from fracking will be miniscule, and in any case the gas extracted will belong not to Britain, but to the drilling company who will be free to market it where and at whatever price they choose. And since the majority are owned by foreign or offshore organisations, the chances of the ordinary British public benefitting from either fuel or funds from them are equally miniscule.

But by far the most alarming news this week is a combination of two announcements at total odds with the welfare of the ordinary British people. The first is the government’s total abrogation of our responsibility towards world climate change by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s announcement of the government’s intention to restart fracking and to grant over 100 new licences for fossil fuel extraction in the North Sea, cementing their allegiance to the fossil fuel cartels and once more labelling the British public the liars of the western world.

The second is their intention to sign the modernised Energy Charter Treaty. This revised treaty is nothing more than a toxic ISDS contract which will condemn us irretrievably to a fossil future for the next ten years, whatever government is in power and whatever the environmental or financial outcome. No change to cleaner and cheaper renewable energy and escape from the present energy suppliers’ rapacious jaws, no upgrade of building standards, no green hydrogen to fuel the next generation trains, planes and road transport, and any retraction from the requirements of the treaty will mean a kangaroo court of three adjudicators chosen by the ECT and bankrupting penalties payable to the ECT by the government at the time.

Thanks to Conservative voters, unless we can persuade our present government to change its suicidal path, there is nothing we can do to stop it.

Once again we have failed in our responsibility to the lives of our future generations, and maybe to the future of Britain itself.

But maybe that’s what they wanted all the time

Charles David Foulstone, Rotherham Green Party