In Great Missenden we were affixing the last details to our Friday Effigy when the alert came. It’s a new tradition us villagers have started – weekly, ritualistic burnings of the Guilty Men of ‘High Speed Rail 2’, the groundwork for which has recently started blighting our pretty green hills. This Friday, a big dolly of former transport secretary Andrew Adonis was going to be torched. We’ve done Andrew a few times, and he always pulls a crowd. His resemblance would be staked over a bonfire in Buryfields Park. There would be fireworks and food served al fresco to the mobbers, cooked on disposable barbecues which we would frequently leave unattended.
The ‘Severe Alert’ killed our plans. ‘Residents, landowners and visitors should not undertake any activity that could start a fire,’ read the notice, ‘including disposable barbecues, firepits, garden incinerators or fireworks.’ Huh. I hadn’t noticed the lack of rain. Fair enough. We packed up dutifully: Mr Adonis was dropped outside the local C of E primary school – he will become a support animal in their ‘wiggle room’ for demented children – and the rest I fly-tipped off the B485 next to Annie Bailey’s, a once nice local pub which is now derelict.
The ‘Severe Alert’ itself was a warning that the government has incorrect priorities
Ah, Annie Bailey’s. Like many spots near me, it was served a Compulsory Purchase Order by the government in the 2010s so HS2 could plough through it. The site would be demolished, we were told, when the jamboree of railway workers finally arrived in a decade or so. But it never was torn down. Staff left Annie Bailey’s because they didn’t want to work somewhere teetering on closure, and its owners reasonably saw no point in pumping more money into the place. Then HS2’s route was redrawn away from the pub. Annie Bailey’s was allowed to remain, but the business was already dead. It couldn’t be resuscitated. These days its vacant carcass is used as a ‘bando’ by youths from a nearby town who, when they get bored (not this week, I hope), set it on fire.
Yes, the blackened frame of Annie Bailey’s has become its own kind of severe alert, a screaming notice to the village that the government doesn’t care, that HS2 is a dud and that kids can be tools. In fact, all over the country there are such omens and cautions, signs that things are going wrong: the referendum in Piddington, Oxfordshire, to secede from the UK over plans to house asylum seekers in the Bicester military barracks; the bottled water stations at Tunbridge Wells Rugby Football Club, erected not because of drought but because of an ‘instrument failure’ at a South East Water treatment plant; homeless drug addicts in Victoria, London, a two-minute walk from parliament. In a meta kind of way, the ‘Severe Alert’ itself was a warning that the government has incorrect priorities.
Of course, I don’t actually fly-tip. And I don’t light disposable barbecues at all, especially not on grass that looks like kindling. Neither do I burn effigies of idiot politicians. I let Whitehall cock-ups wash over me, and try to keep living like a normal person. You see, I’m not the problem. Neither are you. We don’t need a ‘Severe Alert’. It is very grating for the government to say ‘Excuse me, don’t do that!’ about something I wasn’t doing, while it commits a stadium collapse of errors.
This isn’t wholly Andy Burnham’s fault. He didn’t come up with this daft technology. In fact, Friday’s alert was probably the best-case use of it. When else should it be deployed? When the nuclear exchange comes, I will not need to know about it from the government, and don’t much fancy the beep of my phone being the last thing I hear, or Burnham’s words being the last thing I read. I know the story from here. In a couple of election cycles the system will be privatised. The government will charge a few million pounds for companies to reach the nation with their slogans and promotional offers – to help clear the national debt – and then a future Burnham will run on a manifesto to renationalise it. Remember the good old days, he’ll say, when we only used to get notifications for wildfires. And HS2 still won’t be finished.
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