Here’s some nasty journalistic furystirring from the Daily Mail under the headline Councils to stockpile bodies to cut the costs of cremation
Bodies will be stockpiled for cremation under new rules to cut costs and carbon emissions.
Rather than being cremated straight after a funeral, corpses will be stored for days in coffins or body bags in local authority buildings so they can be incinerated in one go.
Council bosses claim the decision to use cremators during one period rather than after every service will cut down on energy bills and reduce their carbon footprint.
This is a reference to the practice of holding over, discussed in this blog in September. The Mail wails on:
The policy will leave families having to return up to a week later to the crematorium to collect the ashes, causing unnecessary additional stress … It is not the first time that councils have been accused of trying to profit from funeral services.
You get the picture? Stockpiles of corpses, like at Buchenwald. In back rooms at the town hall. Held there for a week.
A Conservative MP called Philip Davies has obliged with a ludicrous quote: ‘Councils have lost sight of what they were set up to do in the first place – serve the people and not obsess about climate change.’
A serious subject turned into horror fodder. Read the whole story here. Read as many of the comments you can bear.
sorry Charles – not even for you can I get far into the Daily Wail and its commentators. But I like the idea that Mr Philip Davies MP (Cons., Shipley)can’t appreciate that taking action about climate change might just be serving the people….this is the same Philip Davies who, according to Wikipedia, wants us to leave the EU and to scrap the minimum wage, is opposed to reforming parliament, voted against the Equality Bill (sexual orientation 2007) and who the (NB Conservative!) Speaker of the House once described as a “troglodyte.”
Mr Davies used to be a bookie, it seems, and does not want to be a minister. I don’t know what odds he’d have given, in the good old days before he got into public life, on anyone ever offering him the chance of a Ministry. Or even a tiny bit of one.
By the by – all the ire about storing bodies for longer than before because of the new proposals – but surely most bodies have already been stored for up to a week before a funeral, so…?
Philip DaviMail is rite, it’s dissgusting makeing bereeved familys camp outside the crematoriam for a weak with the smell of rotting corpsies in bodie-bags pervayding the flower terris just to get a killergram of somewuns mixed bernt bones and think of the affect on others using the cremmertorium coming to pay there respex, im voting nashonal front whats the world comming to when we carn’t even trust the mean goverment who proffit from our ded and that’s’ anuther thing why cant (cont p 94)
I think this is a great opportunity to thank Charles for providing a balanced perspective and forum for sensible discussion around these issues. ‘Nasty’ was a fairly polite description of the journalist in this case!
I assume the ICCM tested the acceptability of holding over. Did they? I’ll see if I can find out.
If people don’t like the idea of holding over there’s the alternative of some crems decommissioning their cremating equipment and sending their dead bodies over to a central facility – one serving one or more ex-crems (now just ceremony spaces). Population density’s the deciding factor, isn’t it?
Tim Morris at the ICCM tells me that the policy of holding over was adopted after public consultation.