THE LOUT’S LEAVINGS

 

Crossing the threshold into the street, The Lout casts his leavings about him, notably a potent, toxic package set to blight the future: a pledge of £700 million to the French nationalised energy company EDF. The post-Brexit irony of this pledge is completely lost on The Lout. Nothing trips him up, as he bowls along the street to the benches at the back of The Big House. 

In the face of the current greed crisis, which precipitated an energy crisis, The Lout kicks the can down the road for the overwhelming of future generations. The can, one of very many, contains the leavings of a nuclear facility which are so toxic as to be the stuff of horror stories. 

The names terrify: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, Zaporizhzhia.

The Lout revels in squeezing people. He promises to stop squeezing if they’ll swallow this rancid pill. All the hard work by people to turn away from burning black rocks and piping gas from underground is now tossed onto the nuclear midden named Sizewell. 

Size matters to The Lout. He says “go nuclear, go large”, on the south-east coast of England, in the county of Suffolk. Underground facilities, located in rock layers 500 metres below the bottom of the sea, will contain the leavings forever (sic!). The Lout will not be taking to a coastal retreat in the area between Ipswich and Norwich. Residents of the region around The Hague and Rotterdam, across a narrow sea, fit domestic geiger counters to their windows and hope for the best.

The Lout’s honey is unlikely to be enough to attract private investor bees to add to the midden and secure the full budget cost. The Lout cares nothing about that. He has a loose working definition of ‘getting things done’. 

If the great Indian writer Arundhati Roy had been born in England her prescient remarks about dams would transfer to nuclear power stations.

Dams (nuclear power stations) are the temples of secular India (England) and almost worshipped. They are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds.

The Lout leaves. The Louse arrives. The Lout lock-fastens The Louse into the pledge. She has made a career of sucking capital into herself from across the spectrum of ideologies in The Big House. She will not back down. She, too, is committed to

Big. Great. Done.

The Lout turns the corner of the street, a radioactive glow emanating from his back, the leavings of a toxic time and a poisoned future.

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