It’s reassuring to know the government has the ability to live-tweet the slow decline of Britain. We won’t go out with a whimper: we’ll crash out with a screaming phone alert.
If you’re reading from abroad, at 7 this evening, an emergency alert was sent out to the phones of everyone in England and Wales. I was on the tube, and jumped out of my seat as a horrific honk preceded the following:
You can just imagine the glee on the face of the Cabinet Office halfwit who got to press the big red button. It makes you feel sick.
Something has gone deeply wrong if we think sending an emergency message to the nation to tell them not to have a petrol-fuelled BBQ on a tinderbox field is a measured response.
Most fair-minded people signed up to the alert system in the knowledge, supposedly, that it would be used for genuine world-ending disasters, like, I don’t know, an asteroid? A nuke? Certainly not for this most obvious and patronising of nannying. And the net result? Millions of people could feasibly, and perhaps understandably, disable what could be a lifesaving feature going forward. Congratulations HMG.
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