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A Waste Of Hot Air

by | 7th, November 2005

‘IF all the hot air expended at Westminster was channelled into a Millennium Dome-sized sail, Britain could be blown loose of her moorings and sailed off to the coast of America.

Prescott – a renewable source of hot air and natural gas

But the politicians’ thermals go nowhere, not to blow a single trumpet, let alone to enable UK Plc to become the first off-shore kingdom to float.

According to a report by Norman Baker, LibDem MP for Lewes, the amount of energy used up by the Parliamentary estate since 1997 has risen by 45 per cent.

The Telegraph has seen the report submitted to the authorities and notes that the Commons alone consumes enough energy to supply a town of 5,000 households with electricity for an entire year.

Baker says that lights are left on all night and at weekends, when it is “highly improbably anyone is working”. TV monitors are used as clocks and remain on. Escalators keep going up and round down when no-one is there.

Baker says such waste is “appalling”. This “shameful waste of energy is endemic through failure to implement simple, low-cost measures”.

Might it be that these politicians are not practising what they preach? Whatever next? News that MPs don’t use their official phones, official offices and official cars purely for official business? That they serve their children turkey twizzlers? That they smoke!?

And then there’s the water bill. The amount of water consumed at Westminster has risen by 50 per cent since 1997. This is, as the Telegraph explains, enough water to fill 28 Olympic-size swimming pools.”

Since few of us know what an Olympic–size swimming pool looks like (there is only one of these oversized puddles in the whole of London), this might well be a meaningless statistic. And given the power used to write the words, drive the printing machines and then to deliver the paper to the reader, the Telegraph may regret mentioning it.

And it’s not as if the great and good are using all this water to drink, or swim in. The Commons used up 25,000 bottles of water last year, at a cost of £11,505. Tap water would have cost just £25.

But the facts do need some explaining. It was only back in June that London mayor Ken Livingstone was urging Londoners to “not flush the toilet after they had a wee. And Westminster is in London.

And taking the pee is what MPs do so very well…’



Posted: 7th, November 2005 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink