Slow Government Response To Ash Cloud But The Navy Is Here

The defining memory of the Brown government is likely to be delay and lack of action until the Daily Mail starts to complain about things. There never seems to be much preparedness for problems or emergencies.

The Icelandic ash cloud led to a complete shutdown of UK airspace on Thursday lunchtime and it has been closed ever since. It wasn’t as though nobody knew about it or noticed the result of this action since it was all over the news and there were interviews and yet more interviews with UK citizens who were stuck in airports hoping to get home as soon as possible.

I accept that there was not a lot the government could do to make the cloud go away and for flights to begin again but all those Britons scattered around the world were steadily becoming more desperate as they ran out of money after spending days living at airports around the world.

Finally we are now seeing some government action. The British government’s emergency planning committee, Cobra has finally met after 5 days. It’s a good job the fire brigade and police don’t wait for 5 days to decide if something is an emergency.

As a result of meetings the Navy is to send ships to unspecified French ports and one ship is en-route to Spain to collect army personnel stuck on their way home from Afghanistan. Spain to help find a way to get some of these people home.  I’m just puzzled that it has taken so long for this to happen.

Weather forecasters have been suggesting the weather conditions were such that the current situation could last for some time over the last few days and so it has proved to be. It could be that the weather will change and the cloud of ash will be blown away sooner rather than later but it would have done no harm for Cobra to have met last week instead of this and to make some contingency plans for dealing with the trapped passengers at the airports.