The closure of Heathrow Airport for about 24 hours this week has been treated as a national disaster.
To view the media, you would think that the world had always come to an end because a modest number of people could not make it into and out of the UK, even though all its other airports were open and fully functioning.
Without exception, every national media outlet appeared to think that this was a matter of enormous concern to us all.
The reality is that 50% of people in the UK never fly. In addition, the vast majority of flights into and out of the UK are undertaken by people in the top 10% of income earners in the world, which group broadly aligns with the top 10% of income learners in the UK. And, as a matter of fact, around 90% of flights are for leisure purposes and not for business.
In that case, and to interpret this data in an appropriate fashion (whilst bearing in mind that the proportion of business travel through Heathrow might be above average), what really happened over that 24-hour period was that a relatively small number of the people in the UK‘s top-earning elite were mildly inconvenienced, mostly with regard to their plans to go on holiday. The fact that this was so widely reported is simply an indication of how out of touch our media are with the lives of most people and is not an indication of the fact that a serious national event occurred.
There were serious national events that occurred over the same 24 hours.
People died in corridors in hospitals.
Large amounts of untreated human waste were poured into the UK rivers and onto its beaches.
Climate change advanced.
The stock of nuclear waste that we have no idea how to treat increased.
People in need were profoundly distressed by their inability to make ends meet and the fact that Labour plans to make their lives very much worse.
Vast numbers of young, unemployed people got rejection letters from the jobs that they had applied for or were simply ignored and never heard anything further again about the applications that they had made.
The UK's local authorities sunk deeper into debt without anyone having an answer as to how the services that they supply will be delivered in future.
Very little appears to have happened in resolving the issues that Comic Relief was set up to address.
All of these are crises. What happened at Heathrow was not. When will we talk about the things that matter?
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Thank you for these informative, always relevant, valid comparisons!
Might “our” main stream media be a principal propaganda arm of the single transferable party/deep state?
Yes
But paranoia is setting in at least among certain sectors in the UK.
There was reports that it could be a terrorist incident rather than a transformer spontaneously disassembling because it was long past its best.
Ref the population & paranoia perhaps they have watching too much:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qanF-91aJo
The transformer (tx) that went up was one of three at a 275kV/132kv sub. The sub is fed as a spur off the 275kV ring that runs around London (this is all public knowledge). Apart from the on-load tapchanger – there is not much that goes wrong with txs – change the oil from time to time – erm that’s it. The thing is a built like bloody battleships – ditto most 1960s & 1970s vintage metalclad switch gear and other txs.
My business partner & I had an exchange of views on the subject which converged. & that is as much as I’m going to say. We have a fair idea of what happened (& why). Keep in mind I have worked on “big stuff” (no not 275kV txs – but the next level down – which ain’t so different).
Readers are invited to visit the sub on google earth/street view. Why was it not better protected, big fences etc? Go in one of those subs, & not know what you are doing – you WILL die. (One guy died uncoupling an earth – think about it). That’s the bad news. Goods news – you won’t need a funeral – cos there won’t be anything to bury. Most terrifying sub I worked in was Connors Quay in the days of air-blast circuit breakers – ear defenders de-rigeur cos if one of the breakers trips and you are near = no ear drums, & so on ad nauseum.
Thanks Mike.
The National Grid are now on record as saying that full power was available through two other transformers all the time, so there was the live one that went down and two alternates. That should be plenty and explains why the airport was back up one day later.
It seems the shutdown was caused by there being insufficient uninterruptible power to keep all of the airport’s systems operational after a sudden power cut. Lots of systems went down without warning and needed to be reset and rebooted. That always takes time.
I have to ask, has Heathrow never had a power cut before? Never during live operation? Presumably they switch transformers from time to time for maintenance. What happens then? I can’t believe that this is not one of the risk scenarios they have modelled.
Thix is all very weird and puts the blame firmly on Heathrow.
They should have learned from Downham Market, where I used to live, where power cuts were a routine part of life.
Yes an excellent post. There are and were other more important problems to worry about yesterday. The media was obsessed with the story partly because journalists are part of the group who travel a lot. Personally with the ongoing climate breakdown I think closing airports down would be a sensible approach.
Or at the very least charge vat on aero fuel which polutes umpteen times more than the dirtiest diesels.
With Starmer flying more than previous PMs, I think neither measure will be past.
Another lesson from this debacle is the drive for “efficiency” in all things, which almost always means lower cost, but without due regard to resilience.
Who knew that the power supply to a facility that is considered to be part of our key national infrastructure (not just passengers coming and going, and changing planes, but air cargo too) was so fragile to damage at a single point of failure.
Sounds like the problem was a large oil cooled transformer that caught fire. A known failure mode. One hopes that regular maintenance would stop it happening. I wonder if Mike has observations.
To be fair, there is good reason to make sure that everyone affected by the closure knew about it. If large numbers of people had turned up there would have been a significant secondary problem.
Having said that, you do make an excellent point. Long-term issues do not sell newspapers. How does one change that deficiency in human brains?
Well said! Some sanity.
National disasters sell newspapers and advertising space, regardless of whether there was a national disaster.
It also distracts people from other conflicts in the world, for example, where up to 700 were killed, a third of them children.
I agree with your post.
Even though it is much less important than many other issues it does, it seems to me, highlight a number of important issues.
There has been much discussion about “resilience”, or the lack thereof. A lack of resilience seems to be a consequence of a neoliberal mindset. Why spend money on resilience if you don’t get an obvious return on investment? So dilapidated old equipment is pushed beyond its expected life. Infrastructure crumbles. Think of the same mindset in our water industry.
Then we have the relationship to “globalisation”. Which means we buy as cheaply as we can from wherever we can irrespective of the externalities. I heard it said that Heathrow imports 4000 tons of goods every day. Globalisation goes with “just in time” supply chains. These are efficient when they work, but lack resilience when something goes wrong, as we saw during the Covid pandemic.
And then I heard an interview about resilience. The interviewer asked, inevitably I suppose, “how will we pay for it” (I nearly choked). Apart from the obvious answer, that and outage of Heathrow is damned expensive (in purely monetary terms), which would probably pay for a lot of resilience. (I suppose it’s the same argument as “how can we afford insurance). But, more than that, it demonstrates that neoliberal thinking is utterly embedded. People clearly don’t realise that when you pay for something, a resilient power supply in this case, the money isn’t just burnt, it doesn’t just fall into a black hole. No, money is recycled in the economy, and the economy grows (subject to real resource constraints). So, very often, such expenditure pays for itself in the economy as a whole.
My point is that the failure at Heathrow is due to a lack of planning and expenditure on resilience. And this is what has been happening for so long in the wider economy.
Agreed
My partner and I were talking about this only this morning – quite true. You’d think there had been a national disaster.
If only the BBC sounded as indignant about the real issues before us as discussed ably here everyday it would be doing its job.
Saturation coverage on the London-centric TV news of course. Had it been Liverpool or Glasgow airport, the story would have been downgraded to competing with the crisp-stealing seagulls footage ahead of the weather forecast.
Another glaring example to confirm my view that the mainstream “news”, TV in particular but also the populist press (paper & online) is constructed as a soap opera. Importance and relevance are secondary to ongoing “gripping” story lines, next-episode-itis, and a cast of known characters with fixed and predictable roles.
I was listening to Any Answers this afternoon with Anita Arnand. One of the questions was about the Heathrow fire and a caller phoned in to make various points about resilience and the need for the nationalisation of core infrastructure, that the government should buy this back from the private sector. . Anita responded by saying that to do this would be too expensive and repeated all the stuff about unaffordability. (It was something along those lines – I was only half listening as I was cooking at the same time.) However my ears pricked up when said caller said, ‘of course the government could afford it, it wouldn’t cost anything’ (maybe he didn’t say it quite like this) BUT (and now I’m getting to the point) he then referred to your work and encouraged Anita to read Richard Murphy’s blog. And he repeated your name a number of times. Anita said she hadn’t heard of you. Maybe now is the time to send her a link to your work! And maybe we readers of your blog should be taking every opportunity we can to get your name out there.
I had better take a listen! Thank you.
What is of deep concern is the lack of resilience for infrastructures. France is preparing a 20 page booklet on how to prepare for an emergency; so has Sweden, Norway and New Zealand, but U.K. ?
Sit under the stairs…..
Also today, although you wouldn’t know it from any MSM outlet, thousands of disabled people protested all in towns and cities all over the country against Labour’s proposed cuts to disability benefits.
They call themselves “Crips Against Cuts”.
People in wheelchairs; on crutches; with serious mental health problems; with white sticks; visible and invisible injuries. Some of those people had the courage to speak publicly about their disabilities. All of them now run the risk of being identified and their benefits stopped – because they will be deemed fit, simply for being able to attend a protest.
Has anybody seen this reported? Because I haven’t. I may have missed it, of course. A local Sheffield paper posted it on Facebook; the comments below the article were almost all vile and abusive. The word “mong” has resurfaced.
The previous benefit “clampdown” by Iain Duncan Smith directly led to at least 500 deaths, many by suicide. One figure puts the death toll closer to 100,000 because of the resulting homelessness, malnourishment, alcohol and drug abuse and poverty. The IFS calls these “deaths of despair”. The DWP has refused to release the results of their Internal Case Reviews.
I am utterly sickened by what passes for leadership in this country. I cannot find the words to describe the depths of my contempt.
I share your contempt.
Targeting the Disabled and poor OAP,the young and any group they feel haven’t voted for, should barely LINO from office for all time. They are perfectly aware these strikes at the most vulnerable will lead to deaths. They do not care. None of this is necessary, as Richard has pointed out on numerous occasions.
I think all we hope for is the luck of winning a competent government after an election. Trouble is that the power of the civil service in all its forms is measured by the size of its employed staff, which despite everyones’ best intentions keeps growing. I recall the many and varied reasons for the dismantling of the local authorities in the 1980s, largely down to bloated, centralised officialdom in the county able to plan the building of great gin palaces in which their yet-to-be exapanded workforce could be based. In Education, that’s what we saw, the introduction of local financial management in schools meant that LEAs could be largely shut down, what was not to like? LEAs did not invent the problems that they were required to deal with, but lacked the local wisdom to keep the solutions local and managed. Where I work, the now atomised state sector felt they could manage SEN, Careers advice etc, without buying-in these services, so those outsourced functions (to the private sector) are either now costing too much or bankrupt.
Imagine any good reason why the Cameron government decided to waste so much money and time carrying out a review on free movement? https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-launches-balance-of-competences-review-on-the-free-movement-of-persons
To summarise, the underlying objective was to control immigration from the EU and ensure that it served the UK’s national interest, primarily by attracting those who would contribute economically. There are countless other examples of Sir Humphrey ‘smoke/mirror’ approach to nothing useful – of course all destroyed by taking the country out of the EU to reduce waste and save money. As if that happened.
Clarity in decision making across the world seems to a common feature missing, and I can’t see it arriving anytime soon, yet reactive politicking is demonstrably how countries are being run these days – the antithesis of competence in action it seems to me.
The Heathrow power outage was quickly put right, within 24 hours. Today’s news is all about how privatising higher education and permitting anyone anywhere to apply for and win grant funding for degrees shows how ‘privatising student debt’ actually doesn’t take it off the nation’s balance sheet, but by making it invisible (so how could anyone watch), fraud on a beyond massive scale is taking place at the cost to the tax payer.
Tomorrow’s story will be about how we don’t have enough skilled workers in key areas to managed the technology behing energy transmission (I kid you not), giving rise to further calls upon the higher education sector to upskill incoming migrant labour…
If you think there is an argument in there p, I have missed it.
What ate you trying to say between the diatribes, cliches and borrowed jargon?
Richard, not quite certain why you want to be a tad rude when one of your regular readers makes a comment to broaden the discussion.
We need competent government and we have not seen the light of one shining for very, many years.
I have watched change after change in Education over 50 years of employment, often with good intentions but then taken over by those who work to ‘Parkinsons Law’. I use the detail of the Coalition enquiry to make the point – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIto5mwDLxo is one of many from those that sketch these ideas.
My final point is that the current govts ongoing pronouncements from its SPADs only highlgihts its complete incompetence in dealing with the longer term issues faced by a country that has been run on short term appeasement decision making.
I made my comment because I genuinely had no idea what you were trying to say – and just re-read your comment, and still do not.
I can see now you think goverment is inefficient – but what would you do about it? I am genuinely asking, how are you broadening the debate, because I do not know. Sorry.