A "small boat" crewed by "fighting age men" profiled against three wind turbines (echoing perhaps Blake's "dark satanic mills"). Enough to cause palpitations in the breast of Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe who patriotically posted the photo below and swore to use "every tool" at his disposal to secure the deportation of the "illegal migrants".
Except the boat turned out to be crewed by four rowers attempting to navigate from Lands End to John O'Groats for charity, who were understandably alarmed when a group of people with nothing better to do on a Thursday evening gathered on the beach and started shining torches in their faces.
Lowe, who made no apologies for "being vigilant for my constituents", nevertheless made a donation of £1,000 to the rowers' charity.
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Blake's Dark Satanic Mills were factories full of children working fifteen hour days in appallingly dangerous conditions. I think Blake might have approved of wind turbines as they free us from such dangerous drudgery.
@ninalanyon Actually, despite popular belief, what Blake really meant by "dark satanic mills" is still not clear. Some academics familiar with his work suggest he was criticising the very dogmatic universities of his time, not factories. This suggests the poet did not reveal what he meant; but also writers have likely always been victims of literary-critics assuming thinking for them, either at the time or years after their deaths.
I am puzzled how wind turbines relieve anyone of drudgery though. They simply generate the electricity the factories - and everyone else - needs. It's what the businesses use that have reduced drudgery, or have replaced one sort with another. That and businesses such as factories closing altogether.
While laws to protect factory employees, including children, started to be introduced in the late 19C, when people started to wake up to the serious safety and social problems that rapid industrialising had brought.
@ArishMell That phrase is beautifully evocative and I am happy for the meaning to remain ambiguous.
Continuing the industrial revolution theme, I would say that wind power has liberated people from the dangerous work of extracting coal and oil from the earth. Work that is romanticised by Trump and his supporters, but never by anyone who has ever laboured in a mine or on a rig.
@ArishMell Electricity is a multiplier, it makes a worker more productive, thus reducing drudgery. The average factory worker now produces considerably more than in Blake's time, in considerably less time per day, with less risk, and less physical effort.
Producing it with a wind turbine has the additional benefits of not adding to global warming and of producing less pollution per unit energy produced than fossil fuels and in a more convenient form than the water power that was available in the cotton mills of Arkwright's day.
@ninalanyon Well, yes though that is really two questions.
The first big development was making effective steam-engines as prime-movers for factory plant, but they came in a long time before people really started to take working conditions seriously.
Then along came electricity, but its effect on productivity and working conditions are separate from the matter of how it is generated.
The rise in productivity is now matched by considerable automation - not started by electricity but greatly advanced by it - which means more products in much less time by many fewer staff.
So we've progressed from employing hundred of people on very low pay in very poor conditions, to people working for (usually) reasonable pay in safe conditions - but needing employ only tens of them.
And this is, I think, one of the biggest long term problems for the developed countries of the world. We must in the long run work out how to provide a worthwhile life for people who do not need to work and prevent capital and income being ever more concentrated.
The other big problem is how to provide enough qualified and willing people to care for the increasing proportion of the population that is infirm. I originally wrote old and infirm but, at least in the UK, huge numbers of people are infirm without being old.
I think a partial fix would simply be to raise the pay of those in the care professions so that more people would be attracted to the work.
@ninalanyon That's all very well but how do we provide a "worthwhile" life for those not working?
I do not think the proportion of younger people who are infirm in the UK, is really any greater than in any other developed country; but we do seem to have a problem with defining "infirm" and its influence on whether the infirm individual can work or not. There are probably very few who genuinely could not work; but otherwise the difficulty is availability of suitable employment, and its physical accessibility including for commuting.
Carers are badly paid - most work for homes owned by mere money-traders so a sizeable chunk of the residents' fees disappears in profits.
I think we - in all "developed" countries not just the UK - need be careful not to create a double trap by assumption of many people not needing to work in future, and those who do needing merely a computer in a shared office or spare bedroom.
The nature of a lot of work will inevitably change and some forms of work might largely disappear, but despite the Sunday-supplement seers who don't do anything else, and do not understand real trades and professions anyway, by no means all work can be done by keyboard. Artificial Intelligence / Idiocy / Indolence notwithstanding.
I do not think the proportion of younger people who are infirm in the UK, is really any greater than in any other developed country;
I don't have any supporting statistics but my own observations of Norway and the UK suggest that a far larger fraction of the population in the UK, in all age ranges, is suffering from some degree of ill health than is the case in Norway.
When I struck old from my sentence I didn't mean to imply that it was the young who were especially infirm but had in mind those who would in times past have been regarded as of middle age, those in their forties and fifties.
Life expectancy in the two countries is quite similar (Norway 83.6, UK 81.6 [1]) but observation suggests that the UK has a larger proportion of people whose health and quality of life is poorer. Sadly the general fitness of the younger generations in Norway seems to be declining somewhat too; I see far more overweight young people in Norway now than I did forty years ago.
@ninalanyon Obesity seems to be a worsening problem in many countries.
It's allied I suppose to fewer people doing sufficient physical activities - generally not just gyms and Sunday football - to nutritionally poorer diets and to practices like smoking or excess drinking; but those can't be the only reasons and choices come into it, too.
Hard to define what would be a good quality life. Obviously the amount of money anyone has will affect it, as will standard of housing, type of work (or unemployment) but how many in a financially reasonable position have a low-quality life too?
