As if the imminent threat of World War III kicking off in Ukraine wasn’t worrying enough, Britain’s national security now faces a far more serious danger closer to home…
Smart meters.
It turns out that these fancy gizmos allegedly designed to save electricity could also make us vulnerable to nuclear attack. Radio frequencies used by the meters have been discovered to interfere with early warning systems.
People living near RAF Fylingdales in Yorkshire have been refused permission to install them in case they prevent radar equipment detecting incoming Russian ballistic missiles.
Fylingdales was home to those famous giant ‘golf ball’ domes, which were demolished and replaced by pyramid structures at the end of the Cold War.
With Russian aggression once again on the march under Vladimir Putin, the base scours the skies for incoming missiles across a 3,000-mile radius. It is set up not just to defend Britain but to provide essential information to our Nato allies in Washington in the event of an impending first strike on America.
Unfortunately, the signals can get scrambled by the frequencies used by smart meters.
So in the time it takes Mrs Higginbottom to adjust the temperature in her sitting room, half a dozen Russian Tatyana 42-kiloton missiles could sneak under the radar and turn Harrogate into Hiroshima 1945.
Consequently, the installation of smart meters in homes within the North York Moors National Park area has been halted until the relevant technology can be brought up to speed.
Some householders are upset at the delay in getting their meters, which are supposed to help manage electricity consumption at a time when bills are going through the roof.
If you ask me, they’ve had a lucky escape. And not just from a nuclear holocaust. When we had a new gas boiler put in last year (buy now while stocks last), the engineer advised against getting a new smart meter.
More trouble than they’re worth, was his considered opinion.
They are reliant on a strong phone signal and a decent home wifi connection, neither of which is always available — something we discovered when our ‘upgraded’ burglar alarm, which uses similar technology, kept either going off when it wasn’t meant to or packed up completely.
On the one hand, it will mean your supplier can read the meter over the internet without having to come out to your house. But, on the other, these remote readings are often wildly inaccurate.
There’s absolutely no guarantee you’ll save a penny. They are designed to charge you more when demand peaks, so you’ll end up with higher bills, not lower as their protagonists pretend.
‘At last, people are waking up to the lunacy of successive governments’ capitulation to the hysterical green lobby’. Pictured: An Extinction Rebellion protest
Plus, it will also give them the ability to ration usage when the deranged Net Zero policy is about to plunge vast swathes of the country into darkness. So if they think you’re using ‘too much’ electricity, they can simply switch you off when it suits them.
At last, people are waking up to the lunacy of successive governments’ capitulation to the hysterical green lobby. Some of us saw it coming. Trawling through the cuttings yesterday, I discovered a column from 2015, in which I predicted ministers were taking us back to the Seventies era of constant power cuts.
That was when it was announced that to meet our carbon-zero commitments, we would have to get rid of all gas cookers, gas fires, gas boilers and gas-fired power stations by the mid-2030s.
Headline: ‘Tell Sid, we’re not cooking with gas any more!’
And how were we going to keep the lights on and the home fires burning? The answer, my friend, was blowin’ in the wind.
A report at the time said wind and solar would produce a ‘new model of energy use in which households are offered tariffs that vary with the weather, to encourage them to use renewable energy when available’.
Ah yes, when available. That explains why they’re so keen on smart meters now. Far from putting you in control, as advertised, you will be at their mercy.
Frankly, I’m suspicious of anything labelled ‘smart’. Look at the so-called ‘smart’ motorways, which have caused countless unnecessary deaths.
With Russian aggression once again on the march under Vladimir Putin, the RAF base scours the skies for incoming missiles across a 3,000-mile radius. Pictured: Ukrainian forces practice manoeuvres as threat of invasion by Putin’s troops grows
Smartphones may have their uses, such as enabling men to send photos of their genitals to unsuspecting women on trains and buses. But they also give the authorities the power to pinpoint where you are every moment of the day and monitor your private calls and emails. And when you give anyone that kind of power, they will always, always abuse it.
Smart meters are a scam, the modern equivalent of those hideous storage heaters, which we were encouraged to install in the 1970s, the last time we had a serious energy crisis. These were designed to suck up off-peak electricity during the night, when demand was lowest, and release heat slowly during the day.
Apart from the fact that they were the size of coal bunkers and packed with asbestos, they never worked properly. Most of the heat seeped out overnight and you still woke up to a freezing home.
Smart meters will inevitably make things worse, especially when we are forced to junk gas boilers and use electricity-hungry heat pumps, as part of the concerted drive to make us all colder and poorer, in order to appease the likes of Greta Wossname and the kind of eco-lunatics who are planning to glue themselves to the M25 again this weekend.
Still, it seems as if Britain has always lurched from one crisis to another. I’m reminded of the former deputy Labour leader Nye Bevan’s quote about ministerial incompetence in 1945:
‘This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organisational genius could produce a shortage of both coal and fish at the same time.’
Today, our island is sitting on half a century’s reserves of shale gas and billions of barrels of untapped oil and natural gas in the North Sea. Yet our modern organisational geniuses have managed to produce a home-grown shortage of both gas and oil, purely out of short-sighted political vanity.
Relying on ‘renewables’ such as ghastly, bird-shredding, War Of The Worlds windmills, and failing to invest in clean gas and nuclear plants, means we are having to import expensive foreign fuel, the price of which is determined by gangsters like Putin and the same bunch of Middle Eastern despots who held us to ransom in the 1970s.
Back then, the energy crisis in Britain was caused by militant miners’ strikes cutting off coal supplies and rapacious sheikhs hiking the price of crude oil. Now gas and oil shortages are a direct result of deliberate Government policies.
In the Seventies, many homes still had coin-operated gas and electricity meters, which had to be fed by putting a shilling in the slot when the power ran out.
How long before they revive that idea and you have to tap your smartcard on your smart meter to boil a kettle and stop the electric being cut off halfway through Strictly? At this rate, it’ll be back to taking tin baths in lukewarm water by candle light, in front of an asthmatic storage heater coughing up asbestos during yet another blackout.
Mind you, power cuts could be the least of our worries. If we don’t all freeze to death, we’ll probably find ourselves burned to a crisp by a Russian nuclear missile crashing through the ceiling as a result of a Chernobyl-style malfunction in our spanking new smart meter…
