WINTER 1947, when Britain could have used some global warming
After the Second World War Britain was bombed out, bankrupt, exhausted and desperately short of fuel. The winter of 1947 sank the country to a level of deprivation unknown even during the war. A catalogue of weather calamities precipitated a national crisis and changed Britain and the rest of Europe for decades afterwards.
The winter began deceptively, with just a brief cold snap before Christmas 1946. Snow lay thick on the ground when, in mid-January, temperatures soared so high that it felt as if spring had arrived early. The snow thawed so rapidly that it set off floods - just as hurricane-force winds brought down roofs, trees and even houses and a railway bridge in Birmingham. But real winter arrived soon afterwards as the country was gripped in an Arctic freeze that lasted for two months, with snow whipped into monstrous drifts that buried roads and railways. The temperature fell to -21C at Woburn, Buckinghamshire.
On February 20 the Dover to Ostend ferry service was suspended because of pack-ice off the Belgian coast. It became the coldest February ever recorded - and there was virtually no sunshine for almost the whole month.
The freeze paralysed coalmines, with coal stocks often stuck at the collieries by railways and roads buried in snow. Even carrying coal by sea was hazardous, with storms, fog and iced-over harbours.
A week after the freeze began, the Minister of Fuel and Power, Emmanuel Shinwell, ordered electricity supplies to be cut to industry, and domestic electricity supplies to be turned off for five hours each day, to conserve coal stocks. Whitehall and Buckingham Palace were reduced to working by candlelight. Television was closed down, radio output reduced, newspapers cut in size and magazines ordered to stop publishing. The emergency package hardly made a difference to power supplies but was a crushing blow to public morale.
Food supplies shrank alarmingly and rations were cut even lower than they had been during the war. Farms were frozen or snowed under, and vegetables were in such short supply that pneumatic drills were used to dig up parsnips from frozen fields. For the first time, potatoes were rationed after some 70,000 tons of them were destroyed by the cold.
The Government tried a deeply unpopular campaign to encourage everyone to eat a cheap South African fish called snoek, millions of tins of which had been imported - but it tasted disgusting and was used eventually as cat food.
Those delivering food supplies were battling to get through blizzards and snowdrifts, and The Attlee Government was seriously worried that the country could slide into famine.
March turned out even worse than February. March 5 brought the worst blizzard of the 20th century. Supplies of food shrank so low that in some places the police asked for authority to break open stranded lorries carrying food cargoes. On March 6 The Times reported: "The blizzard has virtually cut England in two. It is almost impossible to get from South to North."
Eventually, on March 10, a sustained thaw set in - and triggered another spectacular disaster. After weeks of deep frost, the ground was so hard that the melting snow ran off into raging torrents of floodwater and, to make things worse, a huge storm dropped heavy rain. Indeed, it was the wettest March on record in England and Wales. The winds whipped up floodwater into waves that breached dykes in the Fens, flooding 100 square miles of rich farmland, and houses collapsed. Canada sent food parcels to stricken villages in Suffolk, and the prime minister of Ontario even offered to help to dish them out.
It is difficult to imagine a worse run of weather, although the Government was blamed for the food and fuel crises. Elected in the summer of 1945 with a landslide majority, the Labour administration had embarked on a radical programme of nationalisation, including the health service, coalmining, electricity supply and railways. But it was caught unprepared when people began to buy electric fires and immersion heaters, and power stations could not meet the rising demand for energy.
Yet despite the collapsing economy and threat of starvation, the Government carried on behaving as if it were in control of a world superpower. Military expenditure was 15 per cent of GDP - far higher than before the war - and included the development of Britain's own nuclear bomb, as well as forces stationed in Europe and across the Empire. With a hugely ambitious programme of free healthcare and reconstruction, it was simply unsustainable. The winter of 1947 led to savage cuts in public spending at home and contributed to the humiliating devaluation of sterling from $4 to $2.80 the next year.
Less than two years after winning the war, the nation was left freezing cold, plunged into darkness and on the brink of starvation - and for many people it showed that national planning and socialism did not work. Labour was turned out of office in a landslide defeat at the next general election.
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Oxford 'is not a social security office'
Chancellor of university rejects government plan to attract more state pupils
Oxford University should not be treated by the Government as "a social security office" to widen participation in higher education among disadvantaged pupils from state schools, its chancellor said yesterday. Oxford had "no chance" of increasing state school admissions to meet targets so long as the gap in exam performance existed, Lord Patten of Barnes told the annual meeting of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC).
Research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed the gap in performance between Britain's private and state schools was the widest in the Western world, he said, adding: "The sense that many universities have is that they are being asked to make up for the deficiencies of secondary education. If this were the aim, it would be a fool's mission."Latest figures show that 53 per cent of Oxford's student intake is from state schools. The target is to raise this to 62 per cent by the end of the decade.
Lord Patten's comments were coupled with a plea to charge middle-class parents more for a child's university tuition by lifting the current fees cap of 3,140 pounds per annum. "It is surely a mad world in which parents or grandparents are prepared to shell out tens of thousands to put their children through private schools to get them into universities and then to object to them paying a tuition fee of more than 3,000," he said. His long-term preference would be for no cap at all, which could lead to universities charging up to 20,000 for some courses.
The chancellor's remarks coincided with a study for the HMC, carried out by Buckingham University's Centre for Education and Employment, which showed that independent schools were concentrating on "hard" A-level subjects such as further maths, rather than "soft" ones like media studies and psychology - which are more popular in comprehensive schools. The study's authors said: "Independent schools have above-average A-level entries in further maths, physics, French, economics and classics, while comprehensives have above average entries in sports studies, media studies, law, psychology and sociology."
The Schools minister, Lord Adonis, also addressed the conference, insisting there was plenty of teaching of the "harder" subjects at state schools.
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British children are still being treated in adult psychiatric wards
Hundreds of mentally ill children and teenagers are being treated on adult psychiatric wards in defiance of a government promise to halt the practice. A report that lifts the lid on the desperate state of mental health services for young people says that only 15 per cent of health trusts have complied with the Government’s commitment that all young people would be treated in special units, not with adults, by this November.
The findings come from the charity Young Minds and the Children’s Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley-Green. He has, for the first time, used his powers to force primary care trusts (PCTs) to disclose what is going on in clinics and psychiatric hospitals. The report, entitled Out of the Shadows?, says that mental health services for children and teenagers are so stretched that 72 per cent of inpatient referrals are turned away, forcing young people to travel hundreds of miles from their home or, more commonly, to be sent to adult wards.
No national figures on admissions are collected by the NHS but research by the Royal College of Psychiatrists suggests that about a third of the 3,000 or so children and teenagers admitted for inpatient psychiatric treatment each year end up on adult wards. PCTs were told more than 18 months ago that this must stop. It will become illegal in 2010 for all but the most dire emergencies under the new Mental Health Act.
The Children’s Commissioner has singled out some basic standards that adult wards must meet when young people have to be treated there. These are based on government guidelines and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The standards are to ensure that young people feel safe from other patients, know why they are there, what drugs and other treatment they will receive, can maintain contact with their peers and continue with their education.
However, the report says that about half of all PCTs make no special provisions when children are admitted to adult wards. Fewer than one in four trusts allocates young people a key worker with any training in children’s mental health. The report says that is a serious concern. Less than half comply with guidance that young people must be given information on what medication they receive, for how long they will have it and possible side-effects. Only a third have facilities for education and only a quarter offer any daily activities for young people. This has been identified as a particular problem as it is very harmful to leave children and young people “watching the wall” for hours on end.
Independent advocacy, particularly important to young people who are sectioned under the Mental Health Act, is available in 75 per cent of wards and clinics but only 20 per cent advise patients of the service and only a handful have an advocate who has expertise with children. Professor Aynsley-Green said that while some of the findings were encouraging, some trusts clearly did not believe that young people’s mental health was a priority.
Lois Ward, 20, a representative from Young Minds, who helped to compile the report, said: “The young people entering mental health services have their lives ahead of them and it is essential that the environments in which they are placed are safe, supportive and serve to boost their potential in the future.”
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FOUR REPORTS BELOW ON THE SICK LEFTIST MENTALITY THAT NOW DOMINATES BRITAIN
Justice for the Gurkhas at last
It's a disgrace that the Gurkhas had to fight the leftist British government for this. Only reality-defying and military-hating Leftists could argue that the Gurkhas "did not have strong ties to the UK"
I remember once when I was in Britain, probably in 1977, seeing these small Asian men in green caps on guard at Buckingham palace. I expected tall men in red jackets and bearskin hats. It was very surprising to see until one realized that the guard that day were Gurkhas. It is only the great affection felt towards the Gurkhas by most British people that gave them the honour of standing guard at Britain's most important ceremonial post. The one thing that we can be grateful about in the disgraceful affair described below is that the Gurkhas saw very clearly that the British government was the problem, not the British people.
It is difficult to imagine a more racist policy in this day and age than the British government claim that it OK for Gurkhas to die for Britain but not OK for them to live in Britain
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