LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Not surprised by defib incompetence

The article talks of an online list, but I would imagine most people in an emergency situation would do as I would and head straight for the local one you know is there, and to read that in half of such cases the person doing so would find they were wasting their time would be devastating to them and probably deadly to the person waiting for their help. What is more deadly is that half the people reading the article are probably not the slightest bit surprised — this sort of lackadaisical incompetence is so common nowadays that more people would be surprised that the authority concerned had done something right.

Another bit of local news is that the Kiveton tip fire has been mentioned in Parliament by Alexander Stafford MP, who in a grandstanding speech called on the Environmental Authority for assistance. What he must have known is that the many years old site, despite the owner’s two fines and a prison sentence for accepting illegal waste, and eventual bankruptcy, has been left to pollute by both the local authority and the EA, and that, after decades of cuts in their budgets by the Conservative government of which he is a member, the cash strapped LA and fire services no longer have the manpower, equipment or finance to deal with the present holocaust, and that the equally stripped down EA no longer have the equipment or financial ability to help. Still, no doubt his speech looks good in Hansard.

A further bit of news is that our new PM is attending COP27 in Egypt after all. Blist’s cartoon seems to think I would have been devastated by his absence, can’t think why. For those who didn’t read his speech, he is going “to continue our success at the Glasgow conference last year”. Our late Queen’s presence was I believe a success, but our Conservative government’s contribution was a rousing speech by PM Boris Johnson about the dire necessity of reducing CO2 pollution, after which he immediately abandoned the conference early to fly back to London as the sole passenger in a private jet to attend a banquet laid on by the London press. Then spent the ensuing year issuing sufficient licences to the fossil fuel cartels that are responsible for our on-going fuel cost crisis that our emissions actually increased by almost five per cent. If that is the sort of success that PM Sunak is going to continue, then the ordinary British public would be better served if he stayed away and didn’t embarrass us internationally any further.

The world is at this moment being assailed by four life threatening man-made plagues; climate change, with its attendant global warming, floods, drought and weather change, population explosion, and increased pressure on scarce resources, loss of biodiversity, the results of which we are only just beginning to realise, and plastic pollution. Only by eliminating these four threats before they eliminate us will our future descendants that inherit the world we leave them be able to continue life in any form we recognise today.

Finally, a word to fellow subscriber, Alan Hudson. Clive Phillips doesn’t make mistakes or get his facts wrong, he lies. He lies continually about the party I am a member of, and often about me. Of his other facts, his intention, as with the other fake information issuers of the fossil fuel organisations he supports, is to confuse. He mixes half truths, innuendos, and total lies in a formula designed to create distrust and confusion, and in a form that makes research and correction of his statements extremely time consuming and wasteful. I published in an earlier letter an extract from the minutes of a large fake news organisation created by an oil cartel, “Victory will be won if we can create doubt in the minds of people” — in other words, you don’t have to prove who’s right or wrong, you’ve merely to create a doubt. Get the picture?

Charles David Foulstone, Rotherham Green Party