By Trev Coleman

There are times, when the stars align, fate intersects and blatantly obvious answers reveal themselves in a blinding flash of inspiration that sets the universe right.

Then, there are times when all of that happens and you end up wanting to bang your head against the wall because of the utter lack of vision! The past seven days have been one of those times.

Jeremy Corbyn was in Sunderland recently talking about building a high-skilled, high-tech, low-carbon economy which has the potential to unlock 100,000 extra secure jobs across the North East with which to build a Bank of the North so that no community in the North of England is left behind.

A few days later, Redcar MP Anna Turley was at Drax power station that has converted 3 of its 6 boilers from coal to sustainable biomass, powered on wooden pellets produced from waste material from the American timber industry and sustainably managed forests, as she learned about moving away from coal.

The new MGT Power Plant at Teesport is also a biomass plant.

And then, of course, Teesside Cannabis Club, within spitting distance of all of this, have also been all over the news.

The stars aligned, the fates came together, fate was intersecting, and … nowt!!

I often sit here thinking, ‘am I the only one?’. So here’s my take!

Teesside have lost Tata Steel in recent years, with no end of scandals connected to it as former workers get shafted left right and centre, but have Applied Graphene materials, one of the leading labs for developing the technology that the Northern Powerhouse was supposed to be built on. Thomas Swan also has a presence in Durham, less than 40 miles away. Teesside also got screwed out of £1 billion worth of carbon capture investment around the same time.

So, hemp, an energy crop four times as productive as trees per acre, (£750,000 per hectare with an economic multiplier of 1.7) and cannabis (£20 million per hectare with an economic multiplier of 2.4), the current number one global growth industry which sequesters 325kg of atmospheric carbon for every ton cultivated, that produces graphene from the sticks and stems, essentially a waste product if you’re farming the good stuff, at $500 per ton rather than $1.8 billion from coal/graphite, would seem a novel approach to building a true northern powerhouse, and a highly valuable foundation resource to build a Bank of the North on, so as to support former fishing, mining and shipbuilding communities, across some of the most deprived regions of northern Europe, that have spent decades being smashed by the $elf-$ervatives.

Or we can all be guinea pigs for the dirty frackers as pretty much every other industry and outlet we have goes in to administration, destroying high streets across the country thanks to an industrial strategy that has more in common with the economic eugenics of Nazi Germany than a civilised 21st-century society.

Did you know that air pollution, that claims 40,000 lives per year in the UK and 7 million globally, can drop IQs? How will we be able to tell the difference if those tasked with guarding their sites are affected seeing as they’re doing so for a pay cut while maintaining Tupperware Mugabe’s share and pension prices? Will we have enough money to pay anyone with enough education and ability to do the testing as we hurtle headlong in to becoming a failed, terrorist state?

For a nation that built a global empire on foundations of weed, that lauds its moral and intellectual superiority across the world, we do an utterly shite job of proving it on a daily basis!!

I need a joint!!