The received wisdom about the tragedy in London in December 1952 is that four thousand Londoners poisoned themselves, their home coal fires the main villain in fouling the air.

David Monaghan's film KILLER FOG reveals that the true number of casualties was not four thousand, but twelve thousand. The government of the day applied an arbitrary limit on lingering deaths, to reduce the massive casualty.

Maps of the sulphur dioxide content of the air in central London during the Great Fog showed concentric rings of pollution radiating from Battersea and Bank Power stations in Central London, and the Tate Sugar Mill in East London.

What has been erased from London's history of that enormous tragedy, is the role played by permissive zoning of central London factories. This cover-up continues today.

The power station was built despite warnings that it would contribute to toxic smogs. The protests had first swirled around the building of the Battersea power station in 1922.

Parliament had ignored the environmental protests, and allowed the smoke stack industry to colonise the most densely populated city in Europe with chimneys. On December 4, 1952, those industrial chimneys turned London into a killing zone. Twice as many died from a weekend of smog as in six months of V-weapons attacks by the Nazis. There is no plaque to these dead.

The real cause of the 1952 deaths has been twisted to make the victims appear to be their own executioners from their household coal fires. This tactic turned Westminster politicians who brought in the Clean Air Act into heroes, rather than revealing them to be the corrupt villains they were for sponsoring the industrialisation of London in the first place.

Those who claim it is getting better, need only look to the Paris Smog Massacre of 2003 to see that is a lie. The 15,000 death toll shows that the threat is far greater from global air pollution than global terrorism.

It is an Al Queda of the mind to pretend that we can breathe easy.