Letters - Thursday, February 17, 2022

Too small a country to have fracking
Fracking siteFracking site
Fracking site

Many people will have recently read about the call from Lord Frost, the former Brexit Minister, and 29 MPs for Boris Johnson to resume fracking in the UK to help tackle the cost of living crisis.

Lord Frost has suggested that extracting domestic shale gas would give the UK a competitive and reliable source of energy.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

International Environment Minister Zac Goldsmith said to even replace half of UK imports would require 6,000 fracking wells.

It is hard to imagine what our countryside and communities would have to tolerate with all the infrastructure that would bring, including heavy industrial equipment, endless HGV movements delivering toxic chemicals and wastewater to and from sites.

Some make the argument our own produced gas would be cheaper. The fracked gas would have to be sold at international prices; it would have no impact on UK bills.

We are too small a country to have fracking.

Communities would be living in close proximity to wells with all the health hazards and disruption that would bring.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

If Lord Goldsmith and the 29 MPs are keen on the resumption of fracking, perhaps they would like to live next to a fracking site, which I doubt very much would happen.

Anne Nightingale

via email

RAILWAYS

Use KISS principle

When British Rail introduced its new logo in the very familiar shape of two parallel lines (to represent a railway line), along with opposite face arrowheads on each line, The Double Arrow became instantly recognisable.

Mind you, some did give it the nickname of the Arrow of Indecision.

ScotRail then used its own symbol of the Saltire to adorn its trains. Again this was a design of a white cross on its blue coloured trains.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Simple and again immediately recognisable to the rail-travelling public.

Then someone in the design department of Great British Railways threw the ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ principle out of the window to come up with a variation of the Union Jack in the shape of the classic British Rail logo.

Initially, I thought that the new design was eye-catching.

However, the more I looked at it, the more eye-wateringly painful it became to look at. I then became very irritated by someone mashing up the Union Jack. It’s almost as if our proud flag has been mutilated, which I thought was illegal.

Given that, on public buildings, one is almost duty bound to display the Union Jack and countries of the UK to also display their own national flags (no problem with that, except in England we do not seem to show the same enthusiasm compared to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), are we going to find this garish logo displayed on a flag pole of each and every railways station in Great Britain and on each and every train?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

I reckon that ScotRail and Transport for Wales would have something to say about that, not to mention which foreign train companies own our trains and also not forgetting where they are built, such as Japan and Spain.

Soon we’ll have each and every nations’ flags displayed on our trains, for they may have also made a contribution to their production.

My somewhat cynical logo would be to have the lines to the left of the arrows red (to represent all the rusty, unused rails that pervade our rail system or the colour of autumn leaves on the line) and then white to the right of the arrows (to represent shiny rails in use with no leaves on the lines), all on a blue background. Well, anything is better than that abhorrent logo that GBR have come up with. Talking of ‘coming up with’; looking at it is making me reach for a bucket!

NS via email

POLITICS

Liz Truss in the picture

With the Prime Minister’s star firmly in decline, we get a glimpse (or several glimpses) of what a post-Johnson premiership might look like.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The government’s official account on Flickr shows that Liz Truss has posted over 700 pictures of her ‘doing the job’ of Foreign Secretary in the five months since she was appointed – using a taxpayer funded photographer.

So – in my opinion – we appear to have the prospect of yet another Conservative leader more interested in personal ambition than serving the British public.

No real change then?

Noel Cullinane

via email

CRUELTY

On all fours

I’ve just watched West Ham players take the knee before the kick-off against Leicester as a symbol of unity against all forms of racism. May I suggest to West Ham that, until the end of the season, their players don’t go down on one knee, but on all fours, out of respect for innocent animals and a symbol of our unity against all forms of animal sadism?

Dai Woosnam Via email

Thanks for reading. If you value what we do and are able to support us, a digital subscription is just £1 for your first month. Try us today by clicking here