tribute 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.
