Labour has been accused of being “drunk on power” by Shadow Housing Secretary Sir James Cleverly after Britons were sent an emergency alert warning about the risk of wildfires.
Speaking to GB News, the former Home Secretary said the system was meant for “very, very rare, serious, life-threatening and immediate emergencies”, not for providing public information about a situation that had developed over weeks.
“This is another example of a Labour Government drunk on power, abusing its position, abusing the mechanisms of the state to try and get ahead of the news cycle,” he said.
Sir James warned that repeated use of the system could undermine its effectiveness by making people less likely to pay attention to future alerts.
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“If people get into the habit of not looking at these alerts when they come through, if they think, ‘Oh, it’s another pain in the backside nonsense announcement from government’, they will stop looking at the emergency alert,” he said.
“The whole point of this is that it is rarely used, and that people pay attention when it is used. When you abuse a system like this, it devalues it massively.”
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