With quiet, sinister inevitability, the health and safety edifice has been marching through the festive season, capturing new terrain. Arguably the most powerful cultural force in Britain today, a new target has been seized: the weather. Suddenly, the warnings issued by the Met Office – whose weather forecasting service rarely seems reliable – are taken as gospel. Predictions of snow and ice during the cold snap of the next few days have been seized upon with a similar enthusiasm to the fears that arose during the pandemic: we’re being urged to stay in and stay put.
Don’t go out because it’s cold in January? Apparently so
Winter, even the soft British variety, where temperatures rarely get close to a threshold most Americans would regard as even mildly discomfiting, always comes with a few cold snaps and gentle advice for the elderly and vulnerable. Slipping on ice is a real fear, and the risk should be managed. But something has changed. Gone is the gentle advice for people to be sensible and take responsibility for themselves. Instead, the nanny state has taken over.
The UK Health Agency has upgraded its weather warning from yellow to amber. In the West Midlands, the NHS Black Country integrated care board has offered some advice about what to do in the cold snap.
‘Avoid going out early in the morning when frost is thick or late at night when it’s dark,’ the board advises, urging people to wear shoes with good grip and ‘keep your hands free to stabilise yourself’. Really? Don’t go out because it’s a bit cold in January? Apparently so.
Do these people think we have never seen or heard of winter? Perhaps they view us as helpless imbeciles who need to be told to wear shoes with good grip. But the nannying doesn’t stop there.
“Make sure you have sufficient food and medicine and take measures to reduce draughts in your home,” said the Wye Valley NHS Trust in Herefordshire. Elsewhere, we were instructed to keep active inside and wear lots of thin layers. Thanks for that.
It’s as if we are living in the dark ages before the advent of electricity or gas, and, of course, the welfare state, huddled by scanty fires and dependent on poor bits of cloth to stay alive. Hardly the picture of the world’s sixth-largest economy. Welcome to Britain in 2025.
Once ignored as part of the general background of pointless attempts at crowd control for the NHS, weather warnings are now taken as the word of God. And a noisy God at that, constantly spewing out alerts and elaborate warnings. This weekend, most of England and Scotland are clobbered with dire predictions of snow and ice causing possible havoc, ranging from school closures to the cutting off of rural communities, to the risk of slips on roads and cycle paths. This is to say nothing of road and train delays.
I first noticed the rise of the weather warning problem when the Hampstead Heath ladies’ pond, famously open come rain or shine, began sending out messages to regulars saying that the pond would be closed several days hence due to a warning forecast of high winds. This in a country where the weather is famously hard to predict with accuracy. Even if those high winds did materialise, what was the danger feared? Some of the low-hanging trees were chopped down a few years ago; I mourned the end of a particularly beautiful willow that formed a whimsical umbrella for swimmers paddling under it. The number of swimming ladies hit by a falling branch in high winds remains…zero.
By New Year’s Eve, the obsession with wind warnings, even in heavily built-up metropolitan areas that rarely feel the full fury of the elements, reached fever pitch. Headlines told of the likelihood of abandoned fireworks (in London, they went ahead) and other dire consequences of that apparently newly shocking combination of wind and rain.
Naturally, swimmers in Hampstead were alerted days in advance that the ponds would be closed until at least 12.30pm on New Year’s Day, as if such precision in weather forecasting was simply par for the course.
It isn’t. But the frenzy of safetyism in Britain is, and it reflects a profound reconfiguration of sensibilities. At the state level, it is clear that more and more of Whitehall imagines it can save the citizenry from itself – and the heavens – through bans and warnings, while leaving the fundamental problems raging. So while ponds are pre-emptively shut to save people from the dangers of our weather, and New Year’s Eve fireworks called off, as they were in Edinburgh, the government is busy ditching North Sea oil and blocking a national inquiry into grooming gangs, stifling the conversation about immigration and failed multiculturalism we desperately need. It is typical Britain in 2025 under Starmer: save people from the heavens while doing nothing to stop hell.
Comments