Saturday 26 January 2013

Snow Joke

I had planned to travel to Manchester yesterday but I knew that snow would fall. I postponed my decision till the last moment when snow fell in Morecambe. If it snows here then it snows heavily elsewhere. The decision was the right one as Heavy snowfall left motorists stranded for hours in their cars on motorways in the north of England. 

The M6 motorway was particular bad near Wigan and vehicles were stationary If I had no choice and had to travel in this kind of weather then I would make sure that I was not running low on fuel, had a blanket and warm clothing in the car and a thermos flask. The advice from the police was to stay in the car so it is strange that our Conservative MP, David Morris said "It's a surreal scene to be had. We've even been having snowball fights on the M6." The trouble is that a similar risk assessment for a school would have closed it. We don't want injury and illness caused by bad advice. I heard of one person who was stranded for seven hours. What about the risks of hypothermia and dehydration? What about those with existing medical conditions that would be exacerbated simply by a delay in their journey?

I should have thought that an MP would be more concerned with giving out good advice than commenting on surreal scenes. Moreover David Morris should have known that it was dangerous for people to get out of their cars, and it was irresponsible for him to appear to endorse such behaviour,  He may not have thrown any snowballs but his use of the collective pronoun means that he has some collective responsibility for those actions. In his position he must bear more of that collective responsibility.

David also said "It was such an anomaly .. it took everybody by surprise.  don't think the services really could have prepared for it." - which is just completely wrong, as it was well advertised in advance. Let's hope the information that the Morecambe MPs receives is better when it comes to voting in the House of Commons.

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1 comment:

  1. There is a company called Crucial PR who have the rather long tagline, 'over the past ten years we have helped a wide range of companies and organisations to get their message across loud and clear'. So loudly and clearly David Morris has retweeted 'MP David Morris was among those poor folk now-stuck on the M6 near Wigan for 3 hours last night, and he joined the impromptu snowball fight.

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