Kelly’s Eye

SO DID the Earth move for you with Eunice? We escaped lightly compared to one friend who lost a chimney pot, and another a section of garden fence. It was certainly lively out there, and paid to take a few sensible precautions.

Yet, even though the South got hit a bit more severely than usual and the O2 Arena had part of its roof blown off, did it really require officialdom telling everyone to stay at home? The rail companies – which rarely require an excuse to cancel services – wasted no time in suspending much of the network. Meanwhile, as far as I could make out,Wales closed down completely.

I know there were fatalities, and that some areas suffered greater flood and storm damage than others.The “climate emergency” fanatics will insist it’s further evidence of their doomsday diagnosis – despite the Met Office’s most recent State of the Climate Report concluding that there are: “no compelling trends in maximum gust speeds recorded by the UK wind network in the last five decades”.

But after two years spent largely at home (not least among those sections of the public sector that still show little inclination to return to the office), isn’t it about time we started rediscovering the outside world, the occasional storm allowing?

Here is the entirely predictable consequence of the governmentsanctioned scaremongering that ordered everyone to stay indoors on the repeatedly disproven, spurious basis that we were all equally at risk from Covid.After institutionalising the population for so long, many in authority have noted with satisfaction how compliant and easy to manage people can be.

The default setting to the cult of safety-ism – which has already caused such damage to our economy and public health – will be very hard to shift, as Boris Johnson, with his belated relaxing of Covid restrictions, might be about to discover.