The Met Office’s bizarre storm advice shows the UK’S new sickness

Another day, another dramatic weather warning. As Storm Isha segues into Storm Jocelyn and trains, planes and ferries are cancelled, the UK is battening down the hatches again. Power cuts and flooding are now the new and wholly unwelcome normal. And so too, are the Met Office Cassandras.

And this time they’re fussing over the safety of our bedroom windows and the remote possibility that our chimney breasts might fall down as one and bury the nation’s kitchen maids. “The safest place” to sleep, they said, “would be anywhere away from glass, such as windows and also rooms where there is no chimney stack above.”

It’s the sort of subvictorian catastrophisation gleefully skewered by Hilaire Belloc in his timeless satire à la “Always keep a-hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse”. It’s preposterous and it would be funny if it weren’t so disrespectful; do other nations need to be told to wear a warm sweater in winter, stay out of the sun in summer, and be careful not to slip on leaves in the autumn?

Last week, the NHS in Scotland recommended people walk “like penguins” so as to minimise the chance of slipping on snow and ice. Wow. At times like this it’s hard to understand how we’ve managed to survive as a species without the nanny state, making us feel disempowered, fearful and dependent.

I believe it’s what illusionists call “misdirection”. Here we are living in a country where our Government literally can’t make the trains run on time or provide a fit-for-purpose health service. Our roads are potholed, police don’t respond to emergency 999 calls and retailers are battling an unprecedented shoplifting spree.

But instead of any of our institutions undertaking anything substantive to fix broken Britain, we are infantilised. Anybody else remember how a Wessex Water bigwig told bathers at Bournemouth in 2022 they should “swim with their mouths shut” to avoid swallowing the sewage pumped into the sea?

I struggle to grasp why Met Office apparatchiks thought it a good idea to warn householders their homes could become death traps in high winds. Is there an alternative to sleeping in a room with a window? Below stairs in the servants’ quarters maybe? Out in the garden? Shouldn’t the Met Office be trying to put the risks into proportion, rather than seeking to actively terrify everyone?

There is something soul-crushing about a nanny state, which is weirdly counterintuitive – is there anyone out there who doesn’t genuinely believe Mary Poppins would run the country better than the current crop of politicians? Sure, Mrs Doubtfire was a bit more badass, but the kids’ homework got done every night – plus who among us doesn’t long to throw the TV remote control, Nintendo and PS4 into an aquarium? Uh-oh. What’s that? I can hear the health and safety klaxons sounding the alarm, just in case I plan to follow it through and electrocute the children’s cardinal tetras.

There’s a po-faced dimension to the culture of caution created by the doom-mongers. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist; it’s hard to escape the suspicion that manufactured micro-anxieties about chimney pots are a displacement activity from doing anything about the chill winds blowing through the fabric of society. These storms are dangerous, but the danger lies on the road, not in people’s homes.

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