Why I fear Government may soon get trigger happy with mobile emergency alerts: David Behrens

Nor did the protest succeed in stopping play for very long. The green baize was cleaned up with the efficiency of a parent wiping food from the face of a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.

What it did do was cement the notion among viewers and holders of expensive match tickets that activists for what should be a serious cause are in fact a bunch of sanctimonious morons who thrive on inconveniencing and irritating everyone else.

Chief among these is Edred Whittingham, a 25-year-old politics student who was previously photographed glueing his hand to a Turner painting at Manchester Art Gallery. As glue is made from fossil fuels, this was not only futile but environmentally unfriendly.

Some of his comrades, meanwhile, were convicted of running onto the track during last year’s British Grand Prix – where even more oil than usual was spilled as a result of the drivers braking to avoid them.

And last autumn, the group staged 32 days of blockades on the M25, resulting in 10,000 extra police shifts.

But for what? Were the inconvenienced travellers, art lovers or out-of-pocket snooker spectators galvanised to immediately stop handing out oil and gas licences, as Just Stop Oil wants? Obviously not; it’s not within their gift. Only a government can do that, and the weight of public opinion will have only a marginal effect on its actions. Right now, all that most of us would opine is that twits like Edred Whittingham be kept away from the rest of us.

But he wasn’t the only person this week to misjudge the public mood. In Wales, the Brecon Beacons National Park arbitrarily changed its name on the grounds that beacons were cauldrons of fire and therefore damaging to the environment.

The logic for the decision barely rose above Stone Age levels of articulation. “Fire bad, sun good.” If the pseudo-science of marketing could be summed up in one sentence, that would be it.

The Brecon Beacons contains no actual beacons, so there was no environmental damage being done; it was just the name that was judged to be “off message”. On that basis, other national parks will also have to be renamed. The New Forest is not new at all, so it must be in breach of the Trades Description Act. And don’t even mention the Norfolk Broads.

And if beacons are now to be deprecated, what will we set alight on Coronation night next month?

The fact is that there is still some benefit to traditional forms of communication like fires and noises that can be seen or heard from far away. Without doubt the latter system was more effective during the Second World War than its successor is likely to prove this weekend.

It is 30 years since the network of air raid sirens was decommissioned and it has taken until now to find a replacement, in the form of a loud screech that can be sent simultaneously to all our mobile phones. But tomorrow’s test won’t work as intended because not every handset will be turned on or within range of a signal. Back in 1940, no-one ever missed an air raid warning because the technology was too selective.

Besides, what does the government think we need to be warned about? An international incident – or just notification that the M25 is blocked again? It won’t be long before someone gets trigger happy and our phones start screeching at every yellow alert from the Met Office. Not long either before the system is hijacked by fraudsters.

In Hebden Bridge three years ago the low-tech siren that rang out across the valley was efficient enough to warn the locals that the River Calder had burst its banks again. It was certainly more effective than the flood defences, which will not be made better by an expensive new sound that you can only hear when it’s too late to do anything.

Weather events – like beacons and green baize – are what define this quaint country of ours. We’ve just enjoyed a few dry days, and we all know what that means: a hosepipe ban in August. We might have ignored it last year, but how will we go on this time if our phones screech every time we turn on a tap?