The latest issue of Private Eye (to which you should subscribe, or have a very kind mother-in-law who gets you a gift subscription) has a letter from, er, me.
Your excellent Sunny Jim (“Electric Avenues,” Eye 1679, p.16) begins his report by stating that “emissions have halved since 1990.” Would that it were so. It all depends what gets counted and what doesn’t. If Lord Gnome would allow me to quote from an August 2025 report by Owen et al “The UK’s hidden carbon footprint” for the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence.
“The consumption-based emissions account (CBA) was developed to fill gaps in emissions reporting. It includes aviation, shipping and UK-registered businesses located overseas, adds emissions associated with imports and removes emissions associated with exports. This helps to reveal whether the UK’s apparent progress is due to real change, or simply the result of shifting our production (and emissions) to other countries. The Climate Change Committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget recommends continuing to report these consumption-based figures.”
They have a handy graph that shows while UK emissions have gone down a bit (though – worryingly – climbing from a dip), it’s nowhere near half. It’s also nowhere near enough to be our fair share, given historical emissions.
I would get out more, but the weather is so damn hot, for reasons which entirely escape my understanding.
More power to your mighty organ
I remain etc etc
Dr Marc Hudson
And here’s a letter from 2024 they didn’t publish
Lord Gnome’s always astute correspondent Aphra may have missed a trick in her Eye Pod column (Eye, 1633). She ponders why the decade-long decline of stigma about mental health challenges is rarely acknowledged. She suggests that if it were then “we might have to acknowledge that the problem is … ‘money the health service doesn’t have’?”
Partly, yes. But beyond the dosh, perhaps keeping “oh the stigma” narratives helps us dodge a deeper reason: the world has always been objectively ‘crazy-making’ and is getting worse?
We are beset on all sides by evidence that the institutions and organisations we were taught to rely on were never that good or have been progressively hollowed out. There is a cumulative effect of reading about scandals such as, oh I don’t know – Horizon, NHS Blood, Grenfell, the VIP fast lane for PPE – passim ad nauseam – all covered so superficially and sporadically in your mighty organ.
And behind all those? The remorseless rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and those ‘1 in a 1000 year’ events which seem to be happening pretty much weekly now.
The problem might not be stigma, or sourcing heallth services but our “slow” societal suicide.
I remain your humble servant, who would get out more, but there are so many arslikhan letters to be written.