Quote of the day 5th April 2021

"This boils down to a simple question: should we pay our own people to get their hands dirty or pay another country to do the work? Do we choose pragmatism or piety?

In Whitehaven, they don't want virtuous self-flagellation. They want jobs."

(Robert Hardman, conclusion of an excellent article which you can read in full here which nominates Whitehaven as "Britain's only NIMBY-free zone" and explains why the vast majority of people in the town not just support the West Cumbria Mining proposal but, on environmental grounds, are right to do so.) 

Comments

Gary Bullivant said…
The simple question this boils down to is "why has an unknown investor(s)sunk £14.7m into a coal mine speculation then more than doubled down on it to £36m?".

There is another one though. "Why did a writer known largely for covering Royal frippery and flumery travel to Whitehaven during the Covid crisis and write about the choice between pragmatism and piety in respect of an overseas investment sales pitch?".
2:47 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Why does any investor put money into anything? Presumably they think they have a good chance of getting a commercial return.

I neither know nor care why Robert Hardman wrote the article - perhaps he thought it would be interesting.

But I am glad he did because I thought his article made a lot of sense and he obviously put more effort into it and talked to more people in Whitehaven than some lazier national journalists who swallowed what environmental activists from Kendal are telling them about the situation in West Cumbria.
9:52 am
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