Essay by Eric Worrall
Imagine being so poor you have to send your kids to school wearing dirty clothes. Because this is happening right now in Britain.
Teachers forced to wash school students’ uniform and install washing machines in schools due to ‘hygiene poverty’
16 November 2024, 11:59 | Updated: 16 November 2024, 14:05
By Shannon Cook
Teachers in some parts of the UK have been left to personally wash students’ school uniforms and install washing machines to combat students’ poor hygiene.
The findings were laid out in a survey by smol – a cleaning brand – and the Hygiene Bank charity.
The teachers believe that students’ poor hygiene can lead to increased bullying or isolation from peers.
40% of teachers who responded to the survey confirmed that they had washed a school student’s uniform themselves, meanwhile nearly 90% of teachers said they had assisted students with hygiene products.
…
Lisa Cropper, a family support practitioner at St Cuthbert’s Academy in Blackpool, told Sky News that parents had confided in her that they felt they had to make a “choice” between washing and the electricity.
…
Read more: https://news.sky.com/story/teachers-washing-students-school-uniforms-amid-hygiene-poverty-worries-13254639
Much of Britain tends to have cold, dripping wet winters, so It can be difficult to dry clothes without a fireplace or an electric clothes dryer (or an oil heater). Poor people are unlikely to have more than one or two school uniforms, so the inability to dry clothes likely means kids have to wear the same uniform for the entire week, perhaps longer in inclement weather.
Using an electric heater to dry clothes, even if they can afford the electricity, can result in a dripping wet home, especially in older buildings. It is a truly horrible sight watching a slug or snail appear behind your baby basket, crawling up a glistening wet wall near where your baby is sleeping.
People can live with wearing smelly, unwashed clothes and bad hygiene – our ancestors lived this way for centuries. But you cannot live without adequate warmth.
Thanks to Net Zero’s skyrocketing energy prices, Britain appears to be well on the way to establishing Victorian England levels of poverty in some communities. The poorest people in Britain have been forced to make a choice, between the humiliation of sending their kids to school in unwashed clothes, or risking their health in even worse ways by providing inadequate food and warmth.
In some ways it is worse today than it was in the late 1800s during Queen Victoria’s reign. At least the Victorian poor were allowed to burn scrap wood for warmth. Most homes in Victorian times had some kind of fireplace or hearth where people could burn wood or whatever else they could get their hands on to stay warm.
In today’s Britain, even if you have a fireplace, only expensive low sulphur smokeless fuel is permitted since a 2020 crackdown on burning firewood in urban areas. In any case, people who can barely afford electricity are unlikely to be living in a home with a safe fireplace. Lightning a fire in a hovel with a cracked and crumbling fireplace and chimney is unlikely to end well for anyone concerned.
Blackpool, which was quoted in the article above, has a thriving prostitution industry. While Blackpool tries to portray itself as a family friendly holiday destination, and a lot of families do visit and enjoy the seaside amenities of Blackpool, if you leave your hotel at night, you may find the streets filled with a very different crowd. It is not difficult to understand why people in impossible circumstances sell themselves to try to give their kids at least some of the necessities of life, or stop borderline criminal debt collectors from battering their door, trying to collect on the desperate high interest payday loans which have consumed their income. But with family home heating bills exceeding £3000 / year (US $3700 / year) for a one bedroom flat in some of the poorest quality properties, and all the competition from other desperate Britons, along with economic refugees from Germany’s train wreck economy and other financially stricken parts of Europe, that occasional Saturday night some mums and dads spend turning tricks to boost the family income likely just covers the heating bills and other basic necessities.
The saddest part of this for me is it is all so unnecessary. Blackpool is in Lancashire, which has one of Britain’s largest reserves of frackable gas. Test wells have been drilled which prove the viability of the reserve. But nobody is allowed to extract the gas, because Britain is committed to Nut Zero.
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Just making excuses for bad parenting.
The form of absolute poverty described is extremely rare given that the benefit system is
generous enough to discourage working for many.
I believe the description.
I used to work with someone who was involved in charity outreach for children of families whose last job was the Welsh coal mines, the poverty she described was horrific.
Britain seems a place where people often live very separate lives. If you are affluent and live in an affluent area, it’s easy to think everywhere is like this.
I lived in affluent areas. But I also spent time in less affluent areas. In one of those less affluent places I had some very poor neighbours, who lived swaddled in blankets, and only put the heating on when they had guests, or when they were ill. And this was before the Russian gas crisis price hikes.
There is no poverty in the UK care of the benefits system, you are left with relative poverty, which perversely can be reduced by reducing the income of the highest earners. What you are left with is uncared for children where the benefits are spent on drugs or booze instead of the household and the parents are not doing any parenting. As benefits are untaxed it pays to be on benefits rather than going out to work.
I spent the summer of 1972 in Belfast in a “good” area – only 50% of men were unemployed. It was cold and damp in the squat housing a group supposed to be dealing with “war trauma”. It was obvious the problem was old fashioned poverty. And yes, too much money was spent on booze. It was the only entertainment, apart from a weekly trip to the baths.
Yes. Its a lot more common than people would like to believe.
Eric, unfortunately looked the other way for 14 years of Conservative rule and now after 6 months of a middle of the road labour government the glass suddenly becomes completely empty.
its the reverse of left wing wokeism and just as devoid of common sense and real world understanding
I think you’re right Mr Worrall. I live in an affluent area, but one of the churches has a ‘food bank collection box’ for people to donate food (be it tins or even fresh stuff) to take once a week to food banks. That says that there is plenty of poverty in London too.
I’ve lived around the UK and I’ve seen plenty of really terrible run-down housing. Our housing stock was often built during the era of cheap coal, with little thought to making the buildings heat efficient. I can still remember my grandparents receiving a sack of coal and using it to heat the house.
To be fair to both biggest political parties, that issue has been steadily addressed the past 15-20 years by government grants becoming available to make older properties more heat efficient. My cousin’s son has a house in the East End of London and he got a grant to clad the building externally with polystyrene covered with external render. He has said that this made an enormous difference. Other grants will cover insulating lofts. The difficulty is that the very poorest won’t have a few thousand to chip in themselves, which is what is required to access the government support.
New builds are now also subject to quite stringent energy efficiency regulations, which means that it shouldn’t be a problem so much moving forward. But there is 150 years worth of less well designed housing stock that needs to be insulated better and that will take time, money and expert tradesfolk.
Well at least you’re doing your best to make it colder outside over there. (rolls eyes)
According to Official figures the UK has 4,776,000 houses built before 1919 and 3,513,000 houses built 1919 -1944.
Terraced housing numbers 13,246,000, roughly 47% of the housing stock
The Government wants the owners of all these properties to install heat pumps!!
External “render“ appears to be a British term with a similar meaning to “siding” in the USA.
I had lap-siding (cement/fiber) placed on our house along with a false-stone that looks like sandstone. The impetus was to make the place fire resistant rather than more energy efficient (a bonus). Stone is on the lower 4 feet, Hardie® Plank above that.
If I’m not mistaken, leaning on my childhood knowledge here, render is a cement like mix that is applied like plaster, siding is cladding. You can make the render look better by painting it or by flinging pea gravel at it to get pebble dash. A finish preferred by small boys who could pick out the pebbles for their catapults.
Thanks. Here we call it Stucco.
My niece has worked in pre-school child-care and, first year intake in schools. She says many children arrive – up to age 4 and 5 – who are not toilet trained, wearing nappies. Often they arrive with soiled nappies (diapers) and no change provided by parents. Many do not know how to use a knife and fork, she says.
These are not just from poor – relative or otherwise – families. In Britain 75 years of womb-to-tomb welfare statism has instilled the belief that “others” must provide as required at everyone else’s expense.
There are too many single parent families, too many who lack wider family where parenting skills could be taught.
Personal hygiene is no longer taught or practiced by many. Even in hospitals medical and nursing staff no longer wash hands regularly. Hand sanitiser has been introduced in hospitals – better than nothing, but unlike hand washing it does not remove bacteria from the skin and any it doesn’t kill will propagate.
We are discouraged from hand-washing in running water because it’s a scarce resource which we are using up.
We are moving into a new Dark Age of ignorance, dogma, and authoritarianism.
My son is an infants/primary (4-11 years old) teacher and he says that not insignificant numbers of children are still in nappies when they first start. Schools are graded depending on how many children are eligible for free school dinners, the school where my son teaches has a high proportion of children on free school dinners, this guarantees they get at least one hot meal a day. This is in a large city in Yorkshire, and is probably replicated across the country.
With regards to the use of hand sanitiser in hospitals, they do work against bacteria but are inadequate against viruses and totally ineffective against norovirus. When I trained as a nurse in 2003-2006 we were told to use soap and water only if our hands were visibly dirty, otherwise use alcohol gel.
However, there’s one major issue with alcohol gel that became apparent on the wards, those patients with alcohol problems were adding orange juice to cups of alcohol gel and drinking it.
I think this led to a change in formulation.
Yes, once you go beyond basket-to-casket your are dealing with increasingly slippery situations. Are we already beyond womb-to-tomb?
That was decades ago. Probably pre WW2.
Not relevant today.
When the price of an essential is artificially high then much besides it becomes intangible and seemingly unfair. Britain has huge amounts of potential energy untouched through political nonsense while we import from neighboring countries just to kid the world how conscientious we are about carbon dioxide emissions. The MSM may kid themselves that the British understand the need for high prices to limit emissions.
There were days when the peasants would have revolted just to get a fairer share for the poorer people but these days fewer people are prepared to be at odds with “the agenda” and increasingly putting themselves at risk of cancellation. The problem may be that many of our citizens haven’t had to revolt to get stuff in the manner my family and my ancestors sometimes had to. Britain often bubbles but seldom boils but just lately even the bubbling seems taboo.
Our politicians are largely mainstream hypocrites from the mainstream Lib, Lab and Tory fields of sheep. There is little difference between them. Very few of them actually dig beneath the facade that clearly divides the classes financially to offer serious change for the better in places of long term decline. Our political system and structure is archaic but never seems to be a subject for serious reform once MP’s are elected and bedded in. As long as you are not impoverished and in proper work everything seems worth preserving largely as it is.
We may retouch the surface of our islands from time to time but seldom do we dare to say we need to start again and do stuff properly from the beginning again. Our ‘poverty’ spread to academia quite a long time ago and a restart there could be a fine thing. We might even get some proper politicians who can think upon the subject of how much is too much or how many is too many.. We might even have politicians who understand the importance of baseload.when discussing energy provision.
“Our politicians are largely mainstream hypocrites from the mainstream Lib, Lab and Tory fields of sheep. There is little difference between them.”
Nail on head !!
Only there to look after themselves.
… and the interests of the global club of vested interests.
“Britain often bubbles but seldom boils …”
Rebels today probably don’t want to finish up like Wat Tyler.
(“Wikipedia”, “Wat Tyler”, in the left hand column “Death”
It’s not absolute poverty but relative poverty. You can determine the relative poverty of an area by the number of children eligible for free school meals. Note the increase for all ethnicities over the past 10 years from 23.1% to 38.4%.
note how many Roma/travellers are entitled to free school meals, the school where my son teaches has a large number of these children.
https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/school-pupils-and-their-characteristics
manchester https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/manchester-children-free-school-meals-25007438
Just seen an advert on TV from a mobile phone company advising that many people live in “data poverty” i.e. they can’t afford enough data for their requirements. Definitely a first world problem.
We have built a society that fewer can afford to live in.
Its as simple as that. And it ain’t going to get any better.
Do not look to your leaders to end this madness. They will not voluntarily abandon their cultish dreams. If you don’t put an end to it it won’t end.
Sorry, Eric, I think this article is BS.
It’s not your fault, you’re just stating what has been published in the woke press.
I grew up in a large, single-parent, poor family in the 60s, but we never went to school without clean clothes and polished shoes.
Today, everyone relies too much on state handouts. Sure they can’t afford electricity, but they prioritise the latest gadgets and toys over food and clothing.
I suspect the real reason why kids in Blackpool are going to school dirty is because of the drug issue. Blackpool is awash with addicts. Help the addicts get back on their feet and the lack of hygiene issue will solve itself.
There is absolutely no reason or excuse for sending kids to school in dirty clothing.
PS My one-bedroom flat is all electric and I pay £500 per annum.
“There is absolutely no reason or excuse for sending kids to school in dirty clothing.”
There is no reason to send kids to a failed government school–with or without clean clothes.
There, I fixed it for you.
It’s utter tosh.
schoolchildren being investigated for possible ‘hate crimes’. These included a nine-year-old who’d called a classmate a ‘retard’ and two girls at a secondary school who’d told another pupil she smelt ‘like fish’. The police, having decided that these episodes did not meet the threshold for criminal prosecution, dutifully recorded them as ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs).
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/16/the-horror-of-turning-children-into-thoughtcriminals/
A lot of teachers look pretty unkempt
schoolchildren being investigated for possible ‘hate crimes’.
Apparently UK police have been going around in a truck/van with a sign saying “Being offensive is an offense”.
My older 2br house where I lived for a time cost £500 to heat for the month of February, and that was a long time ago, with assistance from cheap greenwood and briquettes. Not everywhere is as cosy as your flat.
During the one year I spent living in Liverpool central, I was paying near 500 per month during winter for the privilege of not entirely freezing. I’ll never willingly live in an all-electric flat ever again.
My (UK) one bedroom flat – purpose built 12 years ago, well insulated – is all electric with night time off peak for hut water and storage radiator – and my bills (single occupant) are about £1 200 to £1 400 a year.
If I were to sit in the cold and dark, not cook, for most of the time, and not use my washing machine and dryer, I could probably get my bill down to £500 or less, I suppose.
I cook fresh every day (efficient oven), have hot water, storage radiators which I only use when necessary, an electric shower, and a fridge/freezer. We have a communal laundry room.
I’m not sitting in the cold and dark, although I wear a sweater when it’s cold.
My monthly electric bill is £42.
I was going to post my electric usage but the “add picture” icon is missing (Brave browser)
The findings were laid out in a survey by smol – a cleaning brand
…and can therefore be safely ignored. Absolutely no conflict of interest whatsoever.
What conflict?
Would you expect a survey on hygeine by a cleaning brand to say ‘Everything is fine, nothing to see here’?
It’s pure puffery for their brand.
The reporters made an effort to obtain corroborating evidence.
Installing washing machines in schools?
Yeah right
This is what perplexity.ai says. With references.
Based on the search results, here’s a comprehensive overview of the hygiene poverty situation in British schools:Hygiene Poverty in UK SchoolsTeachers’ Financial Support
What Teachers are Purchasing
Extent of the Problem
Regarding Washing Machines
While the search results do not explicitly state that schools are installing washing machines, there is a mention that some teachers have gone as far as buying washing machines for families in need 2
. Period Products
The search results do not specifically detail teachers buying period products. However, Ruth Brock from The Hygiene Bank noted that some families are facing impossible choices, such as “mums choosing between nappies for their child and period products for themselves” 1
. Government Response
The situation highlights a growing crisis of hygiene poverty in British schools, with teachers increasingly stepping in to support students facing economic hardship.
So I think there is a problem. There also seems to be a problem about food, I have also read that schools in some areas have felt it necessary to provide breakfasts.
Of course one of the problems is that the renewable subsidies in the UK are substantially (though not entirely) paid out of charges on electricity use. So there really is such a thing a fuel poverty, there really are people who hesitate to boil a kettle for tea or for a hot water bottle because they are worried about the cost. Although more and more of the electricity bills now are due to the standing charge, so there is a limit to how much economizing on use helps.
Another source of poverty in the UK is the TV license. Its a tax on watching live TV, paid by everyone who has a TV set capable of doing that. Its currently £169.50 a year. Not paying it leads to prosecution, and 75% of prosecutions are of women – reportedly, mainly sole parents, so poverty is a factor. Guardian readers typically defend this by saying that its only a latte a week. True, but what is a latte a weak to a Guardianista is chicken once a week to a single mother.
Both the energy and the TV taxes are regressive – they are on basic necessities of life, and they take a much larger proportion of disposable income from the poor than from the better off.
I used to live next door to a teacher. When we moved house I gave her numerous amounts of stationery, pens, pencils etc that we had accumulated over the years whilst our two sons had been growing up. She was very grateful because she and other teachers had been buying such items out of their own pocket because the school budget was so tight.
It does not have to be paid if you don’t watch the BBC. Let the BBC try to prove that you do watch it if they want.
Generally I have no problem with the licence myself, because I’ve never paid it, because I’ve never owned a TV to watch TV. In other countries that I’ve lived in, I have been forced to pay for state broadcasting in taxes, even though I never watched it.
However, in the UK, if you watch the BBC, you must pay the same as every other viewer, not an amount proportional to your income. That is not at all fair IMO.
Apparently, you do get a small discount if you’re registered blind. An absolutely true story!
Let the BBC try to prove that you do watch it if they want.
The process is the punishment, and given how the police in UK are behaving lately, that seems a little risky.
Schools now have breakfast clubs because parents don’t feed their kids in the morning. If they don’t do this, it seems unlikely they would bother much about clean clothes.
Story tip Racist Geology…
A professor at Queen Mary University of London has claimed that geology is “riven by systemic racism” and linked to white supremacy in a new book.
Professor Kathryn Yusoff argues in her work ‘Geologic Life’ that the study of earth’s rocks and natural resources is fundamentally connected to colonial practices and racism.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/geology-racist-linked-white-supremacy-claims-university-professor
More nutters coming out from under stones…
Nothing to do with white supremacy, all to do with greed & control by the wealthy over the poor, all around the world for 1,000s of years.
Chris McGovan, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, dismissed the assertions entirely.
He said:
“Geology is no more racist than ‘fish ‘n chips’! It is an entirely neutral term. Those seeking to decolonise the curriculum are, in fact, building their own sinister empire of thought-control and intolerance.”
Although Geology can put you off sex …
Sand gets in some uncomfortable places, therefore is anti-sex. (don’t ask how I know !!! )
Oh no! I studied geology as part of my first year geography degree and was totally unaware of its colonial and racist biases 🙂
The geologists I know are gneiss.
Complete f***ing nonsense.
Sorry.
People are skeptical about this, but I think the evidence is that its correct, there is a real problem, and its to do with energy and poverty. I posted a long comment on it based on a search on perplexity.ai but it seems to have vanished somehow. It gave links in support of a conclusion that teachers really are washing clothes, buying hygiene products for kids, some schools are having breakfast clubs otherwise the children simply are not getting any.
Energy poverty in the UK is a fact, there are people not turning on the heat, even hestitating to boil a kettle.
Remember that in the UK some of the renewables subsidy comes from levies on electricity bills. Its real.
The teaching profession has been set up to supplant parents, who cannot be trusted to raise children according to imported critical theories – and to be afraid of the weather.
Yes, a lot of that is true. The teaching profession in the UK is highly woke – gender transition without telling parents, an emphasis on equality which sometimes seems to be tantamount to preventing the able from learning, or learning too fast, an inability to deal with disruption in class, and an overall sixties idealism about learning which does anything rather than demand effort and memorization from the children.
All that is true. But there is still a large issue with energy poverty in the UK. Among the old as well as among single parent families on welfare.
As I said in my vanished long post, 70% of TV license prosecutions are of single mothers. Not parents, mothers specifically. There is real poverty all right, and for once teachers may be reacting to it in a humane way despite the other defects of the profession.
They were not humane when they refused to open the schools, far from it.
I’m surprised at the skepticism. I saw convincing evidence of extreme poverty when I lived in the UK, and that was well before Covid. The UK is not a good place to be poor.
Hence Charles Dickens.
It’s not generally poverty by any traditional standards, but, for the want of better words, more a case of poverty by choice.
It’s parents who are lacking essential life skills, such as the ability to cook, to plan, to budget, who are spending the household income on takeaway meals, and what’s left on booze and fags, who then find they’ve not got the £1 or so it would cost to go down to the local laundrette, or for that matter give their children a bowl of cereal and some milk for breakfast.
Essentially, we’ve created a mad system where the educated and productive are limited (by tax and housing costs) to having 2 children at most, but at the same time the least educated and least productive are encouraged by the benefits system to have as many children as possible, thus what we have is a bizarre experiment in what happens when you reverse the rules of natural selection and ensure the survival of the least fit.
So what we have is many children born to parents who don’t particularly want them, and don’t have the skills to bring them up properly, but had them for income reasons anyway, and consequently give them about as much care and attention as they might give a dog.
It’s low level child neglect, that doesn’t quite warrant state intervention, but nonetheless, is very harmful to the child.
This can only end well.
“more a case of poverty by choice.”
what a nasty comment .
If you choose to spend the household’s income on alcohol, tobacco and drugs, what other words do you think I should use to describe you.
^^ This ^^
who then find they’ve not got the £1 or so it would cost to go down to the local laundrette
When was the last time you went to one? Not a £1 or so now.
Back in the 70’s we used to live West Arlington Vermont on the Battenkill river.Very rural and even now there are still a few people living in the hills in poverty conditions.
A neighbor who was a social worker once remarked that the only reason people were poor was that they wanted to be. They made amends with life and living.
Eric, I have to agree that this is something of a problem, although not the majority of it.
I predicted the problem, and indeed the ‘chav’ generation, when Single Mother, Multiple Children, Different Fathers families were growing in number. The accommodation and income they gained was almost directly proportional to the number of additional absent-father offspring they managed to produce.
They quite clearly had almost zero parenting skills, and passed on the state-handout method of living to their offspring.
Yes, some may say I’m prejudiced, but I did see it start, and we’ve seen the results that I predicted very accurately. Fortunately, I left the country as soon as I could.
There’s a lot of truth in what Idle Eric says I’m afraid.
Yes there are signs of poverty, but is that poverty due to lack of income (or opportunities for income) or is it due to drugs, online gambling or other poor lifestyle choices ? Another factor are the exploitative payday loans companies charging about 100% interest.
Also note that Blackpool climate is not as bad as often portrayed. It’s got the same annual sunshine hours as London and is also rather windy. Quite good for drying laundry outside much of the time. Admittedly you also get periods like we are experiencing currently, which is gloomy, dank and with little wind, but as a proportion of the year in Blackpool that weather condition is not common.
OTOH imagine if you have too many Chinese coal fired rooftop solar systems delivered by heavy fuel oil and diesel with more on the way?
Australia is awash with solar power. Like flooding rain, experts say we can’t store it all
I like the comments made here. All are based on a realistic attitude, to ‘benefits Britain’.
Being an old codger, born at the start of the 50s, I can well remember what life was like in the 50s.
A washing machine was the privilege of the wealthy. For the majority, it was a wash board, soap, and elbow grease. I also remember going, with my grandma (in her late 50s), to the wash-house. It was nearly a mile walk to it, and for a few pence, they could wash their clothes etc. It was also hard work for her, there were still a lot of manual tasks to be done.
I had my eyes opened to the ‘benefits world’, in the early 2000s, when made redundant, and had to find a part-time job with the local council (I preferred to work, than draw a benefit). I’ll never forget the look on the benefit adviser’s face when I walked in and proudly announced I’d got a job.
That job, exposed me to that other world, as I had to enter their domain. I saw it all. Parents using disabled children as a cash-cow, using the money for fancy cars, satellite TV etc. Young, fit, healthy adults with several kids, neither in work, but all had mobile phones, even the toddlers of a few years old.
Young parents, with a free disability (Motorbility) car parked outside, bringing their child to the council bus, in their pyjamas, then going back to bed!
And the government calls a pension (paid for with NICs) a benefit! Which, I suspect, they’ll be looking to means test before long.
Nothing to do with immigration? A bit as the children send to school without lunch.
You don’t have to go back much in time to see poverty. Pictures of 150 years ago with child labour, people malnutrition, cloths that would rub my nipples of, air pollution,… For someone not living in the UK it always seemed a country of extremes, very rich and very poor. You recognize it on their teeth. At least when the sovjet-union collapsed people had access to cheap energy.
(Europe & UK) Speaking of hygiene – “energy efficient”, “eco-friendly” washing machines use less water and low temperatures 30C, with “environmentally friendly” washing powders/liquids which (don’t) get stains out and get clothes clean “even” at low temperatures.
So why did our ancestors go from cold water washing – rivers and streams – to hot water washes even before washing machines were invented?
Supermarket shelves have an array of pre-wash stain removers, stain remover additives, laundry sanitisers – why? These have proliferated over the last decade or so.
Low temperatures do not kill off bacteria, and using less water but longer wash times means clothes just go round and round in this bacterial soup, and then insufficient rinse water doesn’t remove the bugs, nor particularly fæcal material. Cold water doesn’t dissolve the oils from the skin which hold dirt and bugs and cling to fabrics, and washing agents aren’t aggressive enough to remove oils and dirt either.
Mould has become a problem in the drums of machines particularly around door seals through use of cold water.
Improvements in personal hygiene over the last 200 years has been the biggest contributor to fight against communicable disease – we are now going backwards.
Note to self. Great Britain is not Great and never ever ever consider living there.
A million immigrants (just one year) disagree with you !
Look up the meaning of ‘Great’ in this context to see how misinformed you are
Here in the US energy poverty is real, and teachers do spend quite a bit of their own money supporting their poor students; most notedly for school supplies but I wouldn’t be surprised at hygiene related too.
But if you think this will only affect the poor, think again! The fine print in the NetZero by 2050 & other Green New Deal-like manifestos include “Demand Management”.as a linchpin to control CO2 emissions. DM means the elites will control your electricity useage using smart meters & control of your electric heat or A/C by overriding your thermostat. Want to take a hot shower or charge your [mandated] EV? Big Brother will decide when its safe to do so.[maybe 2am – LOL]
I thought Germany was to be the crash test dummy nation showing the folly of NetZero but it appears the UK is now overtaking them. At least Germany restarted their [lignite!] coal plants to keep the lights on [but that won’t stop the ongoing de-industrialization].
So sad, and so, so unecessary!
I grew up in rural Perthshire in the 1950s and 1960s, I may have mentioned this before. We and many families did not have mains electricity, we were unusual in that we had know electricity whereas many neighbours had diesel generators surplus from WW2. On still winter nights we could hear them chugging away literally keeping the lights and TV on. We had an old Rayburn not as sleek as the new ones for heating, cooking and hot water on this we burnt wood, coal and peat. Others had ranges of older designs. Either of these could be used to dry clothes if necessary. Ironing by a flat iron heated on the Rayburn hotplate. Something banned in urban areas of Britain. The other thing we had was a hot water cistern with a header tank, almost every house in Britain had a hot water system with a copper hot water tank and a header tank in the loft, the cold water and drinking water was seperate. When water was cut off there was a limited supply of water if not the best quality. There was a pantry for food storage. During the 1970s Three Day Week my mother carried on as normal.
For many people all of these are long gone. Any return to the 1960s or earlier will leave people unable to cope. I bet most wouldn’t even be able to hand wash clothes.
I could survive another miners strike type winter but a Dunkelflaute like we’ve this month happening in a Net Zero January would be a different kettle of fish.
a Net Zero January would be a different kettle of fish.
It would indeed. If electricity goes out in the UK today the gas boilers which heat 80%+ of homes, and the radiators, stop working. Cooking on electric hobs and stoves stops. Electric kettles stop working. A lot of hot water is not stored but is heat on the flow, so-called combi boilers which are heat on demand.
If it happens in December through February, in a cold winter, lots of people will die. UK politicians seem to have forgotten that just as the UK has periodic long hot summers, so it sometimes, once a generation or so, has long hard winters with heavy snowfall lying on the ground for weeks.
Look up 1947, 1962,1982, even 2010. But its global warming, it won’t happen now…. You hope!
At the right of this map is the hamlet called Little Plumpton, on the Preston New Road. Just to the West is the Cuadrilla drillpad site – a rectangle oriented SW-NE with a track to the road. They drilled from there to almost the edge of town – the industrial estate by the roundabout just South of the motorway terminating junction and large roundabout. That’s how close the gas was to the town.
A reminder of the brutal reality of life when you don’t have the benefit of fossil fuels like we do-
Concerning problem stretching ‘for kilometres’ along Aussie coastline
You will have nothing, but you will be happy.
Coming to a neighborhood near you.
“People can live with wearing smelly, unwashed clothes and bad hygiene – our ancestors lived this way for centuries.”
For a while.
What was the death rate in the time you speak of?
Skin infections will occur, bad things like ecoli will be spread, …..