Ian Liddell-Grainger

No lectures from anti-wood lobby The activities of ‘know nothing’ woodburner-hating urbanites are irritating the MP for Bridgwater and West Somerset

AFRIEND of mine recently returned from a few days away to a really cold house – having been conscious of energy costs, he had turned down his heating to the minimum setting before he left.

But a match was soon applied to the kindling in his woodburner and the logs soon began to crackle merrily. A pot of stew was retrieved from the freezer and placed on top and, once it was starting to heat up, he wrapped some potatoes in foil and placed them inside the stove to cook, meanwhile steaming some other vegetables using the water from a kettle he keeps on the stove permanently.

The result was that within a few hours of arriving home he was able to eat a wood-fired meal in a warm room while the heat from the stove circulated around the rest of the house. And these are the very devices the extremists insist should be banned from sale in order to save the planet.

Thérèse, I don’t mind being lectured at by people who have a reasonable grasp of what they are talking about. It is, after all, the lot of a working MP to be the target for lobbyists, pressure groups and all the rest with an issue to raise or a point to make.

What I will not accept is being preached at by those who have little or no idea of life’s realities. Or perhaps, in the case of woodburners, that should be the realities of life outside the urban areas where they wait sanctimoniously to grass up any neighbour they catch burning a bit of a dead tree.

No, the gas pipeline network doesn’t extend to rural areas (large parts of my own constituency, including many villages, are offgrid). No, even if it could be afforded, the air-source heat pump isn’t the answer – and also consumes electricity.

And outside urban areas the smell of wood smoke is all part of the rural aura (like the lowing of cattle and the throbbing of farm machinery motors) as it always has been – and I have seen no evidence to suggest there has been any mass annihilation of countryside dwellers as a result of inhaling particulates.

At the same time, wood is a sustainable, renewable energy source and however we choose to utilise it – given that we can’t stop it growing – it will eventually return the same volume of locked-in carbon to the atmosphere.

I have to say I find the activities of the anti-wood lobby irritating, particularly since they are guilty of attempting to apply urban lifestyle standards to rural regions about

‘Outside urban areas the smell of wood smoke is all part of the rural aura (like the lowing of cattle and the throbbing of farm machinery motors)’

which they know nothing.

I dare say if I gathered up a few of them and dumped them in the middle of my constituency they would immediately remark on the absence of red double-decker buses, tube stations, gymnasia and coffee shops selling beverages infused with foul vegan ‘milk’ – and start agitating for the provision of all four. Meanwhile, the message to Government from the hundreds of my constituents whose homes have been kept cosy during the recent cold spell by the power of wood is ‘hands off!’