The Chartists are coming & so is Storm Ciaran
Hurrah for old England and liberty sweet,
The land that we live in and plenty to eat;
We shall ever remember this wonderful day,
The Chartists are coming, get out of the way.
The Chartists are Coming, Ballad, 1848
According to the weather forecast Storm Ciaran is due to hit much of the UK over the next couple of days. The forecasts are made by professional weather forecasters, often trade union members of the professional’s union Prospect, they both deserve to be taken seriously and are highly likely to be accurate.
Such storms are causing significant damage and disruption, partly due to climate change and partly because of a failure to invest in infrastructure
That said you don’t need a weatherman to tell you that in recent times there have been an increasing number of ‘weather events’
The inability to cope with the impact of storms is not a natural but a political phenomena, causing by a failure to act on climate change and a failure to address the impact of a changing climate
The expectation of a storm is a significant factor of social life and interaction now. People peer anxiously out of windows for signs of rain and wind and search for reports of it approaching (these days much easier to find with social media). In the mid-nineteenth century London, 170 years ago, it was the Chartists who got people looking out of windows, checking for any sign of impending trouble.
Suffice to say that in the revolutionary year of 1848 the Chartists did indeed come, on April 10th 1848, but actually they were rumoured to be coming far more often than they actually arrived.
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