YOU would be forgiven for not knowing, but yesterday was UK Clean Air Day!
As ever with such days, the lobbyists come out of the woodwork demanding ‘action’.
But perhaps, seeing as how they mention ‘improving public understanding’, they might care to remind the public that our air in the UK is the cleanest for decades, and probably much longer:
As a country, we have every right to be proud of the way we have cleaned up our air over the years. To pretend that tens of thousands are still dying because of air pollution is an insult to our ancestors who had to live in real real pollution.
A Factoryscape in the Potteries (1938)
History also records that most of our towns were stinking hellholes long before the Industrial Revolution.
The campaign reels out the usual lie that air pollution causes 36,000 deaths a year in the UK. There is no evidence for this whatsoever, merely modelled projections which conclude some people may die a few days earlier than they would have otherwise if they had not lived in polluted cities. But even this does not distinguish between current pollution and the real pollution these people would have been subjected to in the past.
This whole campaign is no more than a smokescreen (pardon the pun!) designed to take away yet more of our freedoms and subject our lives to ever increasing regulation.
This article first appeared in Not A Lot Of People Know That on June 17, 2021, and is republished by kind permission
