Who knows where Scunthorpe is? I didn’t. No idea. Just looked it up and its up by the Humber Estuary, just south west of Hull, in North Lincolnshire. Now ya know. Though it all gets a bit vague when you travel up past Luton, I know, just a vast northern wilderness of strange accents, stranger people, disused factories, rugby league, flat caps and a few cows farting into my ozone layer.

Scunthorpe is an industrial town. Ain’t they all. The difference is that there is actually still some industry there. Like, working, producing, employing. Hard to believe but this place could be Corbyn Central. Working people. With dirt on their hands. As opposed to lawyers or bankers slaving away for 18 hours a day, 6 days a week. They are not ‘working men’ (and women; don’t get shirty, its just an expression). They don’t even get ink on their hands any more. And in Scunthorpe they still have steel production. Which is great. Good, BRITISH steel, not like that (exceptionally cheap) Chinese rubbish. And they make the steel for the city’s other big industry, which is manufacturing wind turbines. So they can ship them on the Humber out to the North Sea to save the planet.

And now they’ve found oil. Not in ‘them thar hills’ but in Scunthorpe. Honest to goodness, there’s oil there. Lots. Gonna take them 15 years to pump it all out. It’ll create jobs, wealth, prosperity, local benefits, but… but its oil. The most unfashionable substance in the entire known universe. So the obviously more fashionable good folks of Scunthorpe are up in arms against the oil well being dug. It is, apparently, a tiny little thing in the middle of a particularly scrubby and ugly, privately-owned farm, in a place no-one goes. Even the council eventually dropped their objections to the oil dig because there is absolutely no good reason to prevent it. It’s not fracking. It doesn’t cause landslides or earth tremors, it don’t do nuffink. Except pour out liquid prosperity to the whole area. But ‘OIL=BAD’ and therefore everyone, not just Greta Thundberg, has a right, no, a DUTY, to resist anything fossil fuel as strongly as they can.

And here’s the absolute killer irony. The production of wind turbines is the most carbon emitting industry there is. So in order to save the planet we must indeed kill it first. Yet that counts for nothing in Scunthorpe. Oil is the devil’s work and thus NOT ON OUR WATCH!!!!

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx