John: Who shall we blame next for the snow chaos?

Jan 14 2010 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

The Mailbag filled up overnight with missives from people who wanted to thank the binmen for turning up, the posties for delivering the mail, the kind man from down the street who gave their car a push.

The men on the road clearing machines were miraculously transformed into our heroes.

Most of them were getting up before they went to bed and, armed with Dig For Britain shovels and a bag of True Grit, were working 25½ hours a day, eight days a week, to keep our glorious country free of snow and ice.

The bogeymen now were councils (incompetent) the Government (incompetent, two-faced) and scientists (global warming? They must be joking. Does this look like global warming to you? Are they idiots, or do they think we are?)

And so we enter the third, and some would say inevitable, phase of recriminations and blame-laying.

It is the People who are responsible.

Where is the British Bulldog spirit that got us through the Blitz?

Why didn’t we grit our teeth and the roads?

Why, when I was a nipper, we sat out in a 20ft-high snowdrift in Arctic winds of a thousand miles an hour in just our bare bottoms for eight hours at a stretch and never complained until Mum told us to come in and thaw an icicle for supper.

I’m keen to see if there will be a fourth phase to all this: blaming God, perhaps?

I wonder how this blame culture has come about. The concept that the individual is always innocent and that someone else is responsible for everything that goes wrong is all-pervasive.

The Prophet Maggie (Thatcher) was quite right, it appears: there is no longer any such thing as society.

You might as well pray for an end to this miserable weather before all the Disgusteds of Upper Buggins run out of green ink.