School’s out

Aslef members walked out on strike again this week, 18 months after this round of rail strikes began. But the unions still have a long way to catch up with Britain’s longest-ever strike, which lasted 25 years in the unlikely setting of the village of Burston, Norfolk. It began on 1 April 1914 when husband and wife teachers Kitty and Tom Higdon were dismissed from the village school over a fire Kitty had lit to dry out the clothes of children who had walked three miles in the rain. Many of the children, led by Violet Potter – the Greta Thunberg of her day – walked out in sympathy. The Higdons went on to set up their own school, firstly in a marquee, then in a blacksmith’s shop, before putting up their own building. Most parents refused to send their children to the official village school, run by the Norfolk Education Committee. The strike continued until 1939 when Tom died and Kitty retired.

United Arab Emissions

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is hosting the COP28 climate change conference. How does its per capita carbon emissions compare with the rest of the world?

– In 2021, the UAE measured in at 21.8 tons of carbon emissions per capita. This includes territorial emissions from fossil fuels and industry only, and excludes agricultural emissions as well as other greenhouse gases.

– By contrast the global average is 4.7 tons per capita. The UK comes in at 5.2 tons and the US at 14.9 tons. However, it does make the UAE a bit cleaner than some of its Gulf neighbours. Qatar notched up 35.6 tons per capita, Bahrain 26.7 tons and Kuwait 25 tons.
– Brunei (23.5 tons) and Trinidad and Tobago (23.7 tons) also had higher per capita emissions than the UAE.

– The countries with the lowest emissions were the Central African Republic, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, each with less than 0.1 tons per capita.

Source: ourworldindata.org

Natural deprivation

The number of people visiting the countryside or nature reserves has fallen since the pandemic. Of the English residents who hadn’t visited such places in the previous 14 days (on 1 March this year), what reasons did they give?

Bad weather                                         51.3%

Too busy at work                                20.3%

Too busy at home                               19.3%

Poor physical health                          18.8%

To help prevent Covid spreading      4.8%

(‘Didn’t want to’ doesn’t seem to have been offered as a choice.)

Source: Natural England/>