The Morpeth Herald feels it's its job to fuel our passion for cars. Which is strange, considering. The automotive industry isn't short of a bob or two and can perhaps afford its own advertising. Anyway, the editor didn't like this:
Sir
You report (Jan 3rd) that activity levels of children in Northumberland fall well below the CMO's minimum recommendations, with damaging implications for their future health and well-being.
That motorised traffic in the places where we live suppresses levels of walking and cycling is undisputed. In 1970, 80% of 7 and 8 year olds made their own way to school unaccompanied, which figure had fallen to 9% by 1990, parents justifiably loathe to expose their children to the danger brought to our streets by rising traffic densities. Car use by adults effects a 'generational cleansing' of the street scene, for which service Morpeth rewards the car user with free parking worth - steering by figures that appeared on your pages - circa £650 per space per year.
Given the negative health consequences of car use on children - reduced independent mobility and activity levels being just one - what should we make of the Herald's decision, in the same Jan 3rd edition, to fluff its coverage of matters automotive with a picture of a laughing child ecstatically hosing down a car?
Is this cheeky editorial sass, or disingenuous cheer-leading for car-hegemony by a sclerotic local paper? Or are you implying that children might achieve the required levels of activity by being set to work energetically scrubbing and valeting our cars?
Mind, she seems cheerful enough, unperturbed by the existential challenges to her generation posed by climate change, legacy of her forebears' feckless fossil-fuel frenzy. Perhaps she knows something we don't..
Faithfully
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