WE have a lot more to be proud of besides the power of the former empire.

We have strewn across the world our governmental skills, law and language, but also a lot of science and technology.

British names are on five of the SI units. The two thirds of the world and more who live in China, India Latin America and elsewhere can easily live without Shakespeare or HMG, but engineers of all sorts everywhere have to know Newton, Watt, Joule, Kelvin and Farad.

Our language, our creativity and exports of TV formats and film, pop music, and pharmaceuticals are bonus about which we are strangely quiet?

Our ladies are not rushing back to doing everything by hand over open fires ­— cottages are only romantic in paintings and poems.

The world will thank Britain for leading the industrial age which has eventually given us all the servants of electric power. Each time we plug in even at home, never mind at work, it is usually to work a machine of kilowatt capacity, so one-and-a-third horsepower.

A horsepower equals 10 male servants or 13 maidservants. Even small hatchbacks equal to 30 horsepower. Any squire with 30 horses would have been well up the county pecking order.

As for the green puritans, bury the ban transport lobby. Killjoy is anti-voters for political consent.

We live in a world of more than 600 million petrol cars, but we have the skills to turn that capital workforce and machinery into a world of wind and solar energy and run our cars on batteries or compressed air in adapted two-stroke diesels.

The wind and sun might not co-operate all the time, but conversely, when it is us who does not need them, put their power to compressing ­— even liquefying ­— air into bottles to spin turbines when we need the power.

Here is to solving global warming and air pollution in the next decade.

We have the men; we have the tools; we have the money, too.

Frank Adam

Hartley Avenue

Prestwich